Joyce Crick on translating Kafka

For readers of a classic written in a language not their own, the translator has always got there before them, filtering, selecting, dithering, finally having to decide — because deciding is what the job consists in — between seemingly fine options, when better judgement tells one that none of them, in principle and by the facts of the case, will be the right, true one. What the reader is getting has passed for a second time through Celan’s ‘language-grid’, which has both held something back and let something through; it is already by its choices to some degree an interpretation. Nowhere does this become more apparent than in translating Kafka. His texts above all challenge the reader to a search for meaning, but at the same time are so constructed as to frustrate any single interpretation, inviting several, often incompatible, often only briefly sustainable readings, while the translator’s decision for one fixed option can close off the possibility of all the others. So a note on the translation in this case turns into a note on the attempt to deal with indeterminacies, mutually exclusive alternatives, intractabilities.

--From "Note on the Translation"