China and the West

Sun Kunrong schreibt : Kafka used absurd plots and a simple, seemingly emotionless language to camouflage his already dreamlike subconscious and philosophical ideas. These facts do not make translation easy. China, however, cannot afford to ignore Kafka’s work as a literary, cultural and social phenomenon... The key concern in translating Kafka’s works is to preserve their internal structure while making them comprehensible as well as appreciable to Chinese readers. For them, the world presented by Kafka is an extraordinary and unknown one. These facts make it necessary for Chinese translators and readers to have a correct understanding of Kafka’s epoch. A good literary translation must render the form and the spirit of the original into the target language, maintaining the particular language and style of the author. Rendering Kafka’s dialogues, and especially their colloquial expressions into acceptable Chinese is rather difficult. How to render the syntax of the original into Chinese is an important aspect of translation. A translator should familiarize himself with the biography and world views of Kafka, for parellels do exist in depicted events in his works and real happenings in his life.