Mark Harman

Mark Harman grew up in Dublin and took his doctorate at Yale, where he wrote a dissertation on Kafka and Kleist. He later taught German and English at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, where he is now professor emeritus. On WebToTell he appears as the translator of Franz Kafka's The Castle, not as its author.

His work is translation from German, with Kafka at the center. He has also put Hermann Hesse's selected letters into English (Soul of the Age, 1991) and Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. Harman writes about the craft too. In an essay for Literary Hub he argued that Kafka's Die Verwandlung would be better known in English as The Transformation than as The Metamorphosis. He has described retranslation as a way to look again at the versions generations of readers inherited.

His Castle came out from Schocken in 1998, rendered from the restored text of the novel. J. M. Coetzee reviewed it in The New York Review of Books and called it likely to be "the translation of preference for some time to come." In 1999 the Modern Language Association gave it the first Lois Roth Award for a translation of a literary work. Later came Amerika: The Missing Person, which restores Kafka's own title for his first novel, and in 2024 Selected Stories from Harvard University Press, with a biographical introduction and notes on the allusions and wordplay.

Start with The Castle. A man known only as K. arrives in a village claiming a job as land surveyor, and spends the whole book failing to reach the authority that supposedly hired him. Harman's preface explains the choices behind his version. If you want Kafka in shorter doses afterward, Selected Stories is the natural next step.