The new French translation of the diaries and letters of Franz Kafka in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade is an opportunity to re-establish the language of an author who is not always sure of his German, but who is on target.
The prestigious collection of Gallimard editions publishes Thursday, May 12 volumes III and IV of the works of the Jewish writer from Prague (1883-1924), his non-fiction texts.
To discover
Discover the “Best of the Goncourt Prize” collection
Everything was retranslated from A to Z, distributed among seven collaborators.
The story of Kafka's reception in French is that of a precursor, the writer Alexandre Vialatte, who discovered him in 1924 with
Die Verwandlung
(
The Metamorphosis
).
Vialatte will be Kafka's official translator for Gallimard, long untouchable.
His translations were taken up in the first versions of the Pléiades, between 1976 and 1989, by this novelist who marked the literature of the 20th century by his atmospheres, his intrigues, his strange, harrowing style.
These translations, sometimes faulty, were corrected in endnotes.
"Redo everything"
“Vialatte's assessment is simple: he was a gifted writer, perfectly readable, but who freed himself a little from the original text, even a lot. So we had to redo everything
, ”explains to AFP the Germanist Jean-Pierre Lefebvre, who coordinated these new Pléiades.
This titanic work gave rise to two first volumes in 2018 (
News and stories
and
Novels
).
Today he delivers such essential works by Kafka as the
Letter to the Father
or the correspondence with the two women who marked him, Felice Bauer and Milena Pollak.
Read alsoA new translation of Kafka's works in the Pléiade
Jean-Pierre Lefebvre, agrégé in German and normalien who has also translated Stefan Zweig and Sigmund Freud a lot, warns in the preface:
“We, French-speaking readers, do not always have an exact idea of the Kafkaesque language.
It is indeed much more direct than that of Vialatte.”
“This lexical sobriety is observed above all among speakers of a learned and less instinctive language, anxious not to risk conjugation errors or lack of relevance,”
he writes.
Kafka was bilingual.
In his youth, we spoke a lot of Czech at home.
He had studied and worked (at an insurer) in German.
Moreover, he learned Yiddish - and certain passages of the Pleiade maintain the Hebrew alphabet.
Effective in professional contexts, his German, in literature, is wary of risk.
“A much simpler German”
“We did careful research, and found that he had a much simpler German, with less vocabulary, variations than other writers who did not shy away from repetition, whereas editors can recommend variations, on the contrary”
, explains Jean-Pierre Lefebvre to AFP.
Example: a translator had initially written
"I was badly dressed"
.
La Pléiade retains:
“I was badly dressed.”
“Dodgy, that's telling, but it doesn't correspond to Kafka. He always keeps this caution. In German, there are somewhat perilous turns of phrase, the regimes of a certain number of prepositions which are complex, a syntax which makes it possible to construct sentences like real enigmas, resolved at the very end by a verb... Him, he avoid”
, explains the translator.
Another example: the astonishing frequency of an inelegant adverb,
“allerdings”
, literally
“in any event”
.
“This term has a fairly broad spectrum that justifies different translations into French, depending on the context.
But it is better to limit the number
, according to Jean-Pierre Lefebvre.
It is a prodigious language, with simple means
.
One of Kafka's finest texts, which illustrates him best, is the
Letter to the Father
, never read by the father in question, and miraculously saved by the executor Max Brod, who considered having it disappear as long as she was virulent.
To this authoritarian man, Kafka launches:
“This often predominant feeling in me of being nothing (a feeling which can also be noble and fruitful in other ways) is due in large part to your influence.
I would have needed a bit of stimulation, a bit of friendliness, to have someone clear my way a bit instead of blocking it like you did."