Mark Harman (born 1951) is an Irish-American translator, most notably of Franz Kafka's work, and professor emeritus at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania, United States, where he served as Professor of German & English and College Professor of International Studies.[1]
Life
editA native of Dublin, Harman studied at University College Dublin and Yale University, where he took his BA/MA and PhD, respectively. He has taught German and Irish literature at Dartmouth, Oberlin, Franklin & Marshall, and the University of Pennsylvania. He is editor and co-translator of Robert Walser Rediscovered: Stories, Fairy-Tale Plays, and Critical Responses (1985) and translator of Hermann Hesse, Soul of the Age (1991, edited by Theodore Ziolkowski). He is also a freelance translator for many newspapers and scholarly journals.[citation needed]
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.[2] A detailed discussion of his work with Kafka's unfinished novel may be found at The Castle, Critical Edition, Harman Translation.[citation needed]
His translation of Kafka's Amerika: The Missing Person, more widely known as Amerika, was published in November 2008.[citation needed]
The New York Review of Books wrote that his translation of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet was "likely to become the standard one".[3]
References
edit- ^ Dr. Mark Harman, Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania, USA.
- ^ 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. doi:10.1353/nlh.1996.0022
- ^ Letters to a Young Poet — Rainer Maria Rilke. Harvard University Press. 18 April 2011. ISBN 9780674052451.