On translating Kafka and creative plateaus
WHM discusses what he learned about Kafka from Bluma Goldstein and how that informed his translation of Ein Landarzt. Also: creative plateaus.
Hello.
I've made progress on numerous projects since you last heard from me, including an SF&F story collection, but have no major releases to point you to.
I considered rushing something out because one of the things I promised myself I'd work on this year is the pile of various things that are almost but not quite ready for publication. But then I decided that while I should focus on bringing projects to publication, I should also make sure the results are as good as I can make them.
This is the beauty and the danger of self-releases: it's easy to stall without outside deadlines; it's also easy to rush stuff out the door just to get it off your plate.
I do have a Will Esplin track for you: it's a relentless 160 bpm glitchy industrial techno single titled 3ntremet2-6w. Please give it a listen (for free on Bandcamp) if that description appeals to you.
I also brought back to the internet something that's been missing for several years (ever since I took down my WHM blog, which this newsletter replaces [in a better way, imo]): my translation of Kafka's short story Ein Landarzt.
More on that below as well as some thoughts on creative plateaus, which I've somehow managed to hit in both fiction writing and music producing recently.
I'd blame that on everything that's going on right now, but while the dissolution of the U.S. as committed (in, admittedly, a flawed way throughout our history) to a substantive/liberal democracy adds extra layers to the mess that is my creative life, honestly, both plateaus were a long time coming: almost predictable in their arrival and primarily driven by where I'm at in both journeys.
On a brighter note: I had fun writing the rest of this newsletter, so at least there's that.
On translating Kafka
In the late 1990s, I took a Kafka class with Bluma Goldstein in UC Berkeley's German department. It was a formative experience. I came in with a love for Kafka's fiction—mainly The Metamorphosis, which I had read in high school—but no real understanding for his life or context for his work.
What Goldstein brought to the class, in addition to being a demanding grader who wanted essays that were well-written and on non-rote topics (which was invaluable preparation for grad school for me), was an approach to Kafka that demystified him and situated him in the socio-cultural and political contexts of his time. This wasn't about Marxist readings or feminist readings or Jewish readings of Kafka, although elements of each were part of the mix, but, true to Goldstein's interests and training, a mix of the sociological and historical with the cultural.
Given that most of the coursework so far for my English literature degree had focused on close readings or used specific theoretical frames (Frye for a Western Regionalism seminar, various theorists beloved by the theory turn in English departments for other courses, etc.), it was refreshing to engage with a more interdisciplinary approach to fiction. And it cemented my love for the works of Kafka alongside a frustration with how he's translated, taught, fetishized/invoked in popular culture, etc.
Two anecdotes that Goldstein liked to share that illustrate how her thinking influenced how I think about Kafka:
- She talked about Kafka reading his work (I think it was a chapter from The Castle) to a small group of friends and laughing out loud through it because he found it so humorous.
- She said Kafka was visiting an art exhibition with a friend (was it Max Brod? It probably was Max Brod.). There was a painting there that showed a factory owner (suit, hat, pocket watch, etc.) holding chains to which were attached his workers, and the friend wanting to know what Kafka thought about that, and Kafka replied that if the painter wanted to be more correct the owner would also have chains on him, and, yes, one could go off on a lot of clumsy interpretations and reactions to this anecdote—this was relayed not as some profound analysis of capitalism but as a reminder to not encase Kafka in isolated genius, not turn him into some anomalous writer who was not influenced at all by his own time.
I don't know if either of these anecdotes are true or how well she told them or how well I have remembered them. But they're illustrative of two things that often gets overlooked in Kafka's work and, especially, ignored in the work of later writers who are influenced by him:
- Kafka's work is humorous and intentionally so
- Kafka's work is steeped in and commenting on his current social and political context
Fast forward to the end of my time in grad school at SFSU, which blurred into me working on campus in a full-time position, and at some point (either for a paper I had written on stasis in fiction or the run up to my oral exam, which required a German component) I had noticed that all the widely available English translations of "Ein Landarzt" omitted what I considered to be a crucial aspect of the text: that it flips from past to present tense. This is important not only to the surreal quality of the story, but because the disruption of time leads to the stasis in the ending. That is, we start with a normal literary realist set up told in simple past: a country doctor needs to go visit a patient on a wintry night, but he doesn't have a horse that will pull his wagon, and his maid's attempt to borrow one come up short. Then as a team of horses is suddenly and magically? mystically? devilishly? provided for him, the story switches to present tense and becomes dream like, fairy tale-ish. Finally, when the doctor fails in his task, the story switches back to past tense, but not back to that of literary realism, of a conclusion or an epiphany (although both exist, of sorts), but one of fairy tale or horror: a past that is frozen in endless movement without being able to reach a destination.
So I decided to undertake a translation of the story that would carry that narrative technique into English. I also wanted to give the story a stronger sense of context, so I transposed it to the American West. Professor Goldstein had wanted us to make sure we understood that "Ein Landarzt" was a bureaucratic position and that was important to the story, especially when he invokes that status to the boy with the wound, and it seemed to me that "Country Doctor," which is the approach that had been taken so far in English translations (or at least the popular ones I had access to), came across as too folksy, too the timelessness dignity of the kind country doctor or vet (or both), too BBC/Masterpiece Theater.
This translation, which I accomplished primarily on my BART commute home from SF State, may or may not be a good one, but it is important to me.
First, it being opinionated and somewhat personal set the mold for the kind of criticism that interests me.
Second, completing an act of creation in bits and pieces gave me a sense of satisfaction that would slowly develop into me writing fiction.
And third, it solidified what kind of influence Kafka would have on me as a writer.
There's a timeline where I don't take Goldstein's course (or she doesn't teach it), and Kafka's influence turns me into yet another American dude writing some abstract, shallow version of the "Kafkaesque" (to be fair, maybe I've ended up there anyway).
And look: many people have written much smarter things about literary translation than I can. Many people have written more profoundly about Kafka and his work. Or about the importance of the humanities and learning a second language (although my German was never that good and has mostly atrophied since then: I'm a terrible example of so many things, tbh). Or about the links between writing fiction and criticism.
All I can say is that this translation is important to me and my creative development, and it wouldn't have happened without Bluma Goldstein.
On creative plateaus and what to do about them
As I mentioned above, I managed to hit creative plateaus with both my fiction writing and my music producing this year.
With the fiction writing, it has to do with feeling like I'm reaching the end of one mode/phase/set of themes/set of ambitions. With music producing, it's that I'm now competent enough at it to know all the things I'm not good enough at yet to really produce polished, professional-level work.
With both, there's some confusion about where I'm going with genre. Funnily, or inevitably, enough, it's the same issue with both: I'm feeling the pull towards both the popular and the experimental.
When you reach a creative plateau, there are a few approaches to take:
- You can remain there and just keep putting out work you already know how to produce
- You can abandon the whole enterprise (and I continue to argue that to not write is a valid choice)
- You can switch medium/genre, which allows you to once again experience the thrill of the quick scale up through the beginner phase (this is also a valid choice—there is a real pleasure in being a life-long dilettante and given the state of trying to build a career in music or fiction or visual art, etc. right now, it's probably the best choice if you want to be happy in your creative activity)
- You can reset and start putting in the work to climb up to the next plateau
Normally, the last item in a list like this is the one the self-help guru wants you to take on and the rest of the essay/book is about how to accomplish it.
I'm not going to do that.
Because I really do think all four are valid choices.
And the truth is that as much as I try to resist mystifying artistic work, there are elements to it that can't be accounted for by a set of bullet points. Any one of these four approaches could put you in a space that actually swings you back into where you were trying to go (or should be going). The mind or the muse or the mind and the muse can be quite perverse that way.
And, at least for me, what will probably end up happening is a combination of all four. Creative work isn't some upward climb. It's more like wandering through caves or a dark forest or a city. There are phases, seasons, dead ends, dark passageways, efforts that don't pay off, and things you just luck into or come by naturally.
One of the primary issues with advice for artists is not just that not every method works for every artist (which does get noted at times), but that who you are and the current socio-cultural climates (both micro and macro) you exist in interact in different ways with what you're trying to create. And all that is always changing.
This is especially true if you feel the need to resist the tracks that have already been laid down.
There are ways to control this (limiting input; setting up dedicated spaces; taking as much time as you need to complete projects [and being able to ditch a lot of the work you start/finish]), but most of us don't have the luxury of indulging in those ways due to money, time/energy, and the (healthy) desire to maintain relationships with partners, children, friends, artistic/fandom/political/religious communities, etc.
And the ways of control don't always work, either. Sometimes you fold your creative practice into this precise, beautiful thing; sometimes you end up with just a bunch of tight folds.
There is one thing you can do: intentionally put in time doing and not doing whatever you want to work on creatively. But not too intentionally—with a certain awareness but not by pre-programming yourself too much.
Because if you're looking at making art as if A leads to B, well, you have no way of knowing if it will do that for you, and also it you line everything up too much, you risk stifling where you're actually trying to go and wasting time on work that is acceptable but not as interesting as what you might be capable of.
I'm not saying don't have goals and plans and approaches; I am saying don't lock yourself into them too tightly.
To sum up: when it comes to creative plateaus, put in the work, leave room for not work, and don't define the work/not work as some set program.
What am I going to do?
I'm going back and learning some of the fundamentals of music production while at the same time being lackadaisical, almost amateur-ish, with how I approach genres (which is entirely the wrong thing to do if you want to build an audience, but that's fine: it's what I want to do).
And I'm not sure about the fiction writing.
Part of it is doing more reading of the popular and the experimental in an almost random way (my mind resists programs). Part of it is finishing my story collection and getting a better handle on what I've already done and haven't done but might want to do and figuring out my strengths and weaknesses. Part of it is, frankly, going to be to flail around and let myself be at time anxious, at times indifferent about it.
It'll be painful.
And fun.
See you in May!
My Bookshop Wishlist (buy me a book, and I'll write about it)
P.S. I checked just now, and Goldstein passed away in 2023, sadly I can't find an online obituary for her. I also discovered she wrote a book—Enforced Marginality: Jewish Narratives on Abandoned Wives—so I've ordered it.
P.P.S. In my search for info about Goldstein, I did find this (see item 8).