Translation, like marriage, is the art of making things work; so it should be no surprise that some of the best translations in literary history were made by married couples.
Frequently this is a matter of convenience, or at least begins that way. One partner is fluent in one language; one is a better writer; one has more time. Talents assert themselves and sacrifices are made, until eventually the two sides work things out enough for the garbage to get taken out and the dog fed. The book gets done, in other words, which is another way of saying that the labor that produced it disappears behind a finish so perfect that it confuses pets and makes guests wish their own lives were so spotless.
For Willa and Edwin Muir, the Scottish couple whose translations of Franz Kafka, Hermann Broch and many others introduced English-language readers to some of the greatest German modernists, translation was a gift and a curse. On the one hand, it offered them money and a sense of accomplishment; on the other, it encroached on the writing that both of them, at different points in their lives, considered a true calling. But no matter how they thought about it, translation remained a means of survival for the couple: a lifeboat in which they bobbed, happily or at odds, through some of the most treacherous waters of the 20th century.
They came to it by accident—or “a miracle”, as Willa put it. By the spring of 1924, they’d been married for six years, the last three of which they had spent working and traveling, from Prague to the small progressive school in Austria where Willa taught English. It was a precarious existence, one made even more so when harassment from local authorities prompted the school to move to England. The Muirs were devastated; but then an offer from a New York publisher who admired Edwin’s literary criticism arrived, asking them if they would consider translating three of the German author Gerard Hauptmann’s plays into English. They telegraphed back two words, “all we could afford”: “Yes, Muir.”
It was the kind of opportunity that Willa had been waiting for. A talented linguist, she’d grown up in rural Scotland surrounded by a hodgepodge of distinct dialects. As an adult she’d studied Greek and Latin, and continued to pick up languages as she and Edwin traveled. By the time the Hauptmann offer arrived, she was eager to put her abilities to the test. “I was pleased because this was something I could do…The many years I had spent translating Greek and Latin into English gave me a sense of competence; I was well trained in accuracy, at least, and that was all to the good, for Edwin’s translations tended to be wild and gay.”
Edwin’s translations may have been “wild and gay”, but his attitude towards making them was morose—at least in comparison to Willa’s. An aspiring poet and already-successful essayist, he regarded translation as a distraction at best and a resource-sucking chore at worst. In the autobiography he published late in life, he referred to it as “time wasted”, and said that “The turning of German books, good and bad, into English, had become meaningless as a way of life, and more difficult to support because of its meaninglessness.” Though the sentence suggests that at one point translation had meaning, Edwin doesn’t elaborate on what that meaning was.
One possibility is that it gave him access to a world that he recognized—a world that, up to now, he’d been unable to explain. Raised on a small island off the coast of Scotland, Edwin had experienced a profound shock when his family moved to industrial Glasgow and was decimated by illness. While clerking at a rendering plant he described himself as having “A habitual bad conscience: a constant expectation of being accused.” The stench of cooking bone permeated his life even when he wasn’t working:
“…The corruption was diffused in the air which people breathed; it was everywhere, yet beyond attack. There was no getting away from the smell, and everyone in the town was ashamed of it; ashamed as they sat around the supper table with the whiff of it in his nostrils; ashamed that it came in through the windows as they were entertaining visitors.”
Reading this description, it is impossible not to think of the author that Edwin and Willa discovered in 1929, via a book titled Das Schloss, or, as the couple would translate it, The Castle. Like Kafka’s K, Edwin the clerk understood the world to be essentially a gigantic machine: a trap in which human beings moved from necessity to necessity. Such an idea was admittedly not uncommon among early 20th century writers; but what Edwin, like Kafka, added was the personal dimension: the stinging self-recrimination that he felt no matter where he was, as if the victim himself were somehow responsible for his own punishment.
Translating Kafka gave Edwin a key to understanding his own troubled history; at the same time, it served as a bridge between that history and the evolving horror of the 20th century. For Willa, on the other hand, the extraordinary thing about The Castle was less the philosophy that could be abstracted from it than the passageway it carved into her consciousness, or even further: to the grotto-like underworld of her dreams. Later in life, she tried to explain this difference between her and Edwin’s readings as a further example of his preference for “Whence,” over hers for “How”. “Edwin tried to divine and follow up the metaphysics of Kafka’s vision of the universe,” she wrote, “While I stayed lost in admiration of the sureness with which he embodied in concrete situations the emotional predicaments he wanted to convey, situations that seemed to me to come clean out of the unconscious, perhaps directly from actual dreams.”
The Kafka that Willa read wrote like a dream, which is to say that he wrote about fantastic events with conviction, but without ever giving any indication that those events were out of the ordinary. Translating him required more than Edwin’s philosophical roadmap; it required that the translator be able to sense the particular (and, to most readers, new) atmosphere that this prose created, via a subtle, often invisible accumulation of vision. Later critics would learn to label this atmosphere “Kafkaesque”, but for Willa herself, there were no shortcuts: there was only the language itself, which at times seemed banal and at others struck through the texture of everyday life to reveal the fable unspooling underneath it.
Luckily for Kafka, if there was one quality that set Willa Muir apart as a translator, it was her immense sensitivity to the invisible—that is, to the ways that writing can say things without stating them and show things without pointing directly at them. Later in life, this appreciation could lead her to criticize voices that other listeners found perfectly ordinary. In a letter to the BBC that she wrote but never sent, for example, she protested the tone of the station’s broadcasts, stating (in a pugnacious Scottish accent) that “It’s no’ the things that are said that I want to grumble about, but the way some of them are spoken.” The diction of the speakers on these broadcasts were not just painfully audible to Willa, but audibly painful: suffused with a “mechanical violence” that “hurts my ear and makes a hash o’ the meaning”. That nobody protested this violence hardly surprised her, given the fact that “these BBC laddies have grown up among wars.” Indeed, as Willa remarked bitterly, given the times, the warlike sound of the language was unfortunately appropriate: “Maybe they dinna notice the machine-gun rattle o their voices because they’ve been used to the rattle o machine guns.”
Willa’s ability to hear the violence hidden in even the most innocuous-sounding phrases was her own unique gift—a legacy, perhaps, of being a woman in a man’s world and a Scot writing in English. At the same time, it was something she shared with Kafka himself. A Czech Jew, who spoke Yiddish at home and Czech to his friends, he was necessarily both an inhabitant of literary German and a stranger to it. His stone-faced prose maintained a high level of finish even when the things it was describing seemed to cry out for derangement. But this was part of its secret; for by refusing to crack a smile, or shriek, Kafka leant his scenes exactly the “sureness” and “concreteness” that impressed Willa so much. At the same time, the unflagging confidence of his bureaucratese in the face of, say, a man waking up to find himself transformed into a cockroach, suggested a certain ridiculousness inherent in the proceedings—an “absurdity” (to use another word that English readers would learn to deploy after they had read the Muirs’ translations), not in language itself, but in man’s confidence that something so finite and human could describe God’s infinite universe.
Kafka’s fluent homelessness began to look more and more prescient to the Muirs as the years passed, and the fever-dream of intra-war Europe gave way to the nightmares of the Third Reich and Soviet Russia. It wasn’t just English, either; German, too, was becoming a troubled medium for the couple by the end of the ‘40s. Part of this trouble was simply practical. English-language readers (and therefore publishers) no longer wanted to have anything to do with German books, which meant that for the first time in decades the Muirs found themselves without their usual support. Still, even had these opportunities been available, it is questionable whether or not the couple would have appealed to them—for in the wake of World War II Willa’s feeling for the German language had shifted. Gone was the energetic medium of Rilke and Holderlin that had impressed her so much when she first encountered it—or if not gone then changed: revealed as something whose latent menace felt closer to The Castle than the transcendent lyrics of Holderlin and Rilke:
“I find myself disliking the purposive control, the will power dominating the German sentence. I dislike its subordination of everything to these hammer-blow verbs; I dislike its weight and its clotted abstractions.”
Elsewhere she was more specific, and damning: “Could one then deduce Hitler’s Reich from the less ruthless shape of the German sentence? I think one could, and I think that is why I have come to dislike [the German language]”.
Extreme though these comments might seem, they reveal the critical fact that by the end of the war, Willa could no longer see German as a viable intellectual home. Her rejection seems ironic now given how famous her and Edwin’s translations of Kafka became; and yet at the same time it is appropriate, I think, for it was exactly her restless inability to remain in any of the forms, roles or even languages that she inhabited which made Willa Muir such a valuable interpreter. Her homelessness gave her perspective, not to mention insight into dynamics that for more native speakers were so ingrained as to be invisible, and therefore inescapable. Her translations stand on their own, as subtle readings of a literature whose uniqueness few readers could register, let alone recreate in another language.
Willa Muir continued to escape, which is another way of saying that, like one of Kafka’s own protagonists, she kept searching. What was she searching for? Critics have suggested many possible answers, one of the most persuasive of which is that Willa’s quest was for exactly the kind of artistic self-realization that her husband achieved—an art that (so one reading could go) he was allowed to achieve because of her tireless willingness to support him. And yet in some ways, this slights both the reality of her achievement as a translator and her own interpretation of her life and marriage. A pragmatic idealist (like all translators), she found, occasionally, things that worked. The title of her late memoir is “Belonging”. It begins on the night she first met Edwin, in 1918, in a small flat in Glasgow, and ends in January, 1958, beside her husband’s death bed.
*****
Josh Billings is a writer and translator who was born in Vermont, grew up in Papua New Guinea and Zambia, and currently lives in Rockland, Maine. He has worked as an English teacher and nurse. His translations of Alexander Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin and Alexander Kuprin’s The Duel are available from Melville House Books.
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