No translation should ever be regarded as an adequate substitute for the original. Any literary translation is successful only if it directs attention to the original and makes access to it seem desirable. The editor still remembers a bar mitzvah present he received almost five decades ago in the city where Karl Kraus had died but a few months previously: a selection from the Hebrew poetry of Chaim Nachman Bialik in German translation. let an adaptation of the final message of that book's translator conclude these remarks: "Learn German, gentle reader, and read Karl Kraus in the original!"-- Editor Harry Zohn, in his introduction (p.27) to In These Great Times
, a Karl Kraus reader published by Carcanet Press in 1984. Emphasis mine; the image above is taken from the same books.While one is acquiring sufficient Hebrew to read Bialik and German to read Kraus in their original languages, the translated writings available in editions by Penguin
and University of Chicago Press
, respectively, are a good place to start for a taste. (Cross-posted from The Wonder Reflex)
