constant feeling of going astray, or of having advanced farther than any man into foreign lands, where the air itself had not a single element one could find in the air of one's native country, where one could only suffocate from the force of foreignness, yet without the power to do otherwise, in the midst of these absurd enticements, than to continue and go further astray.'
Here now, the sentence in the original German:
'Dort vergingen Stunden, Stunden gemeinsamen Atems, gemeinsamen Herzschlags, Stunden, in denen K. immerfort das Gefuhl hatte, er verirre sich oder er sei so weit in der Fremde, wie vor ihm noch kein Mensch, einer Fremde, in der selbst die Luft keinen Bestandteil der Heimatluft habe, in der man vor Fremdheit ersticken miisse und in deren unsinnigen Verlockungen man dock nichts tun konne als weiter gehen, weiter sich verirren.'
Of which this is an exact translation:
'There hours went by, hours of mutual breaths, of mutual heartbeats, hours in which K. continually had the feeling that he was going astray, or that he was farther inside the strange world than any person before him, in a strange world where the very air had in it no element of his native air, where one must suffocate from strangeness and where, in the midst of absurd enticements, one could do nothing but keep going, keep going astray.''
The entire sentence is one long metaphor. Nothing requires more exactness from a translator than the translation of a metaphor. That is where we glimpse the core of an authors poetic originality. Vialatte's first error occurs with the verb 's'enfoncer' ('thrust' or 'drive into'): 'il s'etait enfonce si loin' ('he had thrust in so far'). In Kafka, K. doesn't thrust, he 'is.' The word 's'enfoncer' deforms the metaphor: it ties it too visually to real action (a man who makes love does thrust or drive) and thus deprives the metaphor of its level of abstraction (the existential nature of Kafka's metaphor does not seek to evoke- physically or visually-the act of love). David, in correcting Vialatte, keeps the same verb: 's'enfon-cer.' And even Lortholary (the most faithful) avoids the verb 'to be,' replacing it with 's'avancer dans' ('advance into').
In Kafka, while making love K. is 'in der Fremde' ('in a strange place'); Kafka uses the word 'Fremde' twice and then a third time in its derivative 'Fremdheit' ('strangeness'): in the air of strange places, one suffocates from strangeness. All three translators are bothered by this threefold repetition: this is why Vialatte uses the word only once and instead of 'strangeness' uses another word: 'where one must suffocate from exile.' But Kafka never mentions exile. Exile and strangeness are different notions. While making love, K. is not driven away from some home of his, not banished (and so not to be pitied); he is where he is by his own will, he is there because he has dared to be there. The word 'exile' gives the metaphor an aura of martyrdom, of suffering-sentimentalizes and melodra-matizes it.
Vialatte and David translate the word 'gehen' ('aller'-'go') by the word 'marcher' ('walk'). When 'alter' becomes 'marcher,' the expressivity of the comparison is increased and the metaphor becomes slightly grotesque (a person making love becomes a 'walker'). This grotesque edge isn't bad in principle (I myself am very fond of grotesque metaphors and I am often obliged to defend them against my translators), but the grotesque is surely not what Kafka wanted here.
The word 'Fremde' is the only one in the sentence that cannot tolerate simple literal translation into French. Indeed, in German 'Fremde' means not only 'a foreign country' but also-more generally, more abstractly-everything that is strange, 'a strange reality, a strange world.' When 'in der Fremde' is translated as 'a l'etranger' it is as if Kafka had used the term 'Ausland' ('abroad'). The temptation to try for greater semantic exactness by translating the word 'Fremde' into a two-word French term thus seems to me understandable; but in each of the actual solutions (Vialatte: 'a Fetranger, dans un pays ou' ['abroad, in a country where']; David: 'dans un pays etranger' ['in a foreign country']; Lortholary: 'dans des contrees etrangeres' ['into foreign regions']), the metaphor again loses the element of abstraction it has in Kafka, and its 'touristic' quality is heightened rather than suppressed.
Metaphor as Phenomenological Definition
The idea that Kafka disliked metaphors should be corrected; he did dislike metaphors of a certain kind, but he is one of the great creators of the sort of metaphor I call existential or phenomenological. When Verlaine writes: 'Hope glimmers like a wisp of straw in the cowshed,' it is a superb lyrical flight of fancy. It is, however, unthinkable in Kafka s prose. For Kafka certainly disliked the lyricization of prose in novels.
Kafka's metaphorical imagination was no less rich than Verlaine s or Rilkes, but it was not lyrical: it was driven exclusively by the wish to decipher, to understand, to grasp the meaning of the characters' actions, the meaning of the situations in which they find themselves.
Let us recall another scene of coition, the one between Esch and Frau Hentjen in Brochs The Sleepwalkers: 'His seeking mouth had found hers, which was now pressed against his like the muzzle of an animal against a pane of glass, and Esch was enraged because she kept her soul imprisoned behind her set teeth, to prevent him from possessing it.'
The words 'muzzle of an animal' and 'pane of glass' are here not to evoke by comparison a visual image of the scene but to get at the existential situation of Esch, who even during the amorous embrace remains inexplicably separated (as by a pane of glass) from his mistress and unable to get hold of her soul (a prisoner behind set teeth). A situation difficult to catch-or, rather, uncatchable except by a metaphor.
At the beginning of Chapter Four of The Castle there is the second coition of K. and Frieda; it too is expressed in a single sentence (sentence-metaphor): 'She was seeking something and he was seeking something, maddened, grimacing, heads thrusting into each others chests as they sought, and their embraces and their tossing bodies did not make them forget but rather reminded them of the necessity to seek, as dogs desperately paw at the ground they pawed at each others bodies, and, irremediably disappointed, to catch one last pleasure, each would from time to time sweep his tongue broadly across the other's face.'
Just as the key words of the first coition's metaphor were ''strange' and 'strangeness,' here the key words are 'seek' and 'paw at.' These words do not express a visual image of what is happening but rather express an ineffable existential situation. When David, in his French translation, renders the passage above thus: 'as dogs desperately dig their claws into the ground, they dug their nails into each other's body,' he not only is being inaccurate (Kafka speaks neither of claws nor of nails that dig) but is also transferring the metaphor from the existential domain to the domain of visual description; by so doing, he places himself in a different aesthetic from Kafka's.
(This aesthetic discrepancy is still more evident in the last fragment of the sentence: Kafka says: 'each would from time to time sweep his tongue broadly across the other's face'; in David, this precise and neutral observation turns into an expressionist metaphor: 'each whipped the other's face with blows of the tongue.')
