r. Mark Harman, professor of English and German and professor of international studies, received a grant and residency from the Art Foundation of the German Federal Province of North-Rhine Westphalia for his translations and commentary of Franz Kafka’s modernist story, “The Transformation.”
North-Rhine Westphalia (NRW) is a populated state in northwest Germany, and the NRW Art Foundation, founded in 1989, is the agency that promotes literature, art and culture within the province. It also supports the work of foreign writers and translators. “The German state is far more supportive of literature and the other arts than the U.S. government. There are German arts agencies that award grants both on the provincial as well as at the federal level,” Harman said.
The foundation’s support of literary translation is quite significant, and it distributes some of the highest awards in German-speaking countries.
Harman was eligible for a grant from the Foundation because he had a valid book contract with a publisher. In July 2013, Harman also received a three-week residency to work on his translation at the European Translators Collegium, an artist colony for translators in the small town of Staelen in North-Rhine Westphalia, which is closely associated with the Art Foundation. The grant Harman received was a stipend to cover meals, as well as other costs foreign visitors acquire.
Harman worked on the translations and commentary for Franz Kafka for a little over a year. He started to go more in-depth with the research project when he went on sabbatical last year. Franz Kafka’s “The Transformation” is, “a classic of modern literature. It tells the story of a young man who wakes up one morning to discover that he has been transformed into some kind of bug. The Prague-born Kafka leaves it open to what kind of bug his hero, Gregor Samsa, has been transformed into so that readers can form their own image of what he looks like. As this brief outline may suggest, the story is not without humor, but to appreciate it, readers need to detach themselves from poor Gregor’s plight,” Harman said.
“I have been obsessed, that is not too strong a word, with the works of Franz Kafka since my undergraduate days at University College Dublin in Ireland, where I grew up,” Harman said. Harman also went on to study at the University of Munich, and then attended Yale University where he wrote his doctorate dissertation on the relationship between Kafka and Heinrich von Kleist, the eighteenth-century Prussian writer and playwright.
Harman has also translated other Kafka works in the past including “The Castle,” for which he received the Lois Roth Award of the Modern Language Association and “Amerika: The Missing Person.”
He also translated works by other German authors such as Hermann Hesse and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. “Although I have written introductions and notes for those volumes, I have never done an annotated book where the commentary is on the margins of the page, and I enjoy the challenge that kind of writing poses, especially in the case of an author so much written-about as is Kafka. It’s a little like trying to say a lot on the back of a postage stamp,” Harman said.
Harman is currently composing a volume for Harvard University Press, which will include other well-known stories of Kafka’s such as “In the Penal Colony,” “A Hunger Artist” and “Report to an Academy.” Harman is teaching an upper-level English course on Kafka this semester. One interesting aspect of this course is that one of their classes will be held at Franklin and Marshall College, where Harman has been invited to attend a class and discuss the differences between his new annotated translation of “The Transformation” and previous English versions of the story.
Next semester, Harman will offer an Honors course entitled, “Irony, Humor and Despair,” in which the class will read literature by Kafka, as well as books written by Irish writers James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Harman will also be performing the ape role for the Etown “Academy” at the Bowers Writers House next semester.
