Mark Harman (born 1951) is an Irish-American literary translator, most notably of Franz Kafka's work, and professor emeritus of German and English at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania.Banville, John. "Kafka: Selected Stories, edited by Mark Harman review — the master who never wasted a word" The Guardian, 9 July 2024.
Life and education A native of Dublin, Harman studied at University College Dublin and Yale University, where he took his BA/MA and PhD, respectively.
Career He has taught German and Irish literature at Dartmouth, Oberlin, Franklin & Marshall, and the University of Pennsylvania. He is also a freelance translator for many newspapers and scholarly journals.
Kafka translations Harman gained public recognition for his 1998 translation of Franz Kafka's The Castle, for which he won the Lois Roth Award of the Modern Language Association. As a translator, Harman wrote, "Translation is a complex issue, and retranslation doubly so," referencing the double challenge to confront both the text in the original and in other translations. Harman has characterized the current moment as a "great era for retranslation" to reexamine the versions through which generations of English-speakers have encountered important works from other tongues.Harman, Mark, Digging the Pit of Babel: Retranslating Franz Kafka's Castle New Literary History, New Literary History, Volume 27, Number 2, pp. 291–311, Spring 1996. Harman discusses his translation in a preface to his translation of The Castle.Kafka, Franz (1998). The Castle: A New Translation, Based on the Restored Text, Translated with a preface by Mark Harman. New York: Schocken Books. .
His translation of Kafka's Amerika: The Missing Person, more widely known as Amerika, was published in 2008.Kafka, Franz (2008). Amerika: The Missing Person, trans. Mark Harman. New York: Schocken Books. . His translation of selected stories by Kafka was published in 2024.Kafka, Franz (2024). Selected Stories, translated and edited by Mark Harman. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. .Banville, John. "Kafka: Selected Stories, edited by Mark Harman review — the master who never wasted a word" The Guardian, 9 July 2024.
Other translations and works Harman is also the translator of Soul of the Age: Selected Letters of Hermann Hesse 1891-1962 (1991, edited by Theodore Ziolkowski).
In The New York Review of Books, John Banville wrote that Harman's "elegant new translation" of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet was "likely to become the standard one".Banville, John. "Study the Panther!". The New York Review of Books, January 10, 2013.
Harman edited the 1985 volume Robert Walser Rediscovered: Stories, Fairy-Tale Plays, and Critical Responses and also served as co-translator for several included works. Reviews appeared in The German Quarterly, South Atlantic Review, and Colloquia Germanica.
Scholarly reviews
Harman has also reviewed work by other translators in scholarly journals, for example in a 1983 issue of The German Quarterly he reviewed Christopher Middleton's work on Robert Walser in Selected Stories. In 2008, he reviewed the Walser collection Speaking to the Rose
Awards 1998 - Lois Roth Award of the Modern Language Association
Works Note: the lists below are incomplete.
Translations Hermann Hesse, Soul of the Age (1991, edited by Theodore Ziolkowski), a volume of selected letters by Hermann Hesse The Castle by Franz Kafka (Schocken Books, 1998) Amerika: The Missing Person by Franz Kafka (Schocken Books 2008) Franz Kafka: Selected Stories, translated and edited by Mark Harman. (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2024) Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (Harvard University Press, 2011)
Editor Robert Walser Rediscovered: Stories, Fairy-Tale Plays, & Critical Response Including the Anti-Fairy Tales, Cinderella & Snow White by (University Press of New England, 1985)
References
External links Missing Persons: Two Little Riddles About Kafka and Berlin Jeremy Adler. "K. Rations: Over the decades, readers have been offered multiple versions of 'The Castle.' Has the definitive one arrived?" Discussion of English translations of The Castle, The New York Times, March 29, 1998.