KAFKA AND JOYCE ON WORDS.

KAFKA AND JOYCE ON WORDS. Mark Harman, a distinguished translator of Kafka, has an article on approaches to translation in the Times Literary Supplement (May 21) which includes striking passages from Joyce and Kafka on how even the most basic words in a language can have different meanings to people of different backgrounds. The passage from Joyce comes from A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN. Stephen Daedalus comments on how English words have a different meaning to an Englishman than they do to Stephen: “The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words ‘home’, ‘Christ’, ‘ale’, ‘master’ on his lips and on mine!” Harman juxtaposes a passage from Kafka’s diary: “Yesterday it occurred to me that I did not always love my mother as she deserved and as I could, only because the German language prevented it. The Jewish mother is not ‘Mutter’, to call her ‘Mutter’ makes her a little comical.” Harman offers as one reason for the similar comments is that both Kafka and Joyce “understood the potential of being outsiders writing in a mainstream, metropolitan language.” If “ale”, “home” and “mother” have different meanings for different people—and they do—then reading is more complicated than we usually assume.