Mark Harman (translator)
Mark Harman is an Irish-American translator, most notably of Franz Kafka's work, and professor emeritus of German and English at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania.
Life
A native of Dublin, Harman studied at University College Dublin and Yale University, where he took his BA/MA and PhD, respectively. He has taught German and Irish literature at Dartmouth, Oberlin, Franklin & Marshall, and the University of Pennsylvania. He is editor and co-translator of Robert Walser Rediscovered: Stories, Fairy-Tale Plays, and Critical Responses and translator of Hermann Hesse, Soul of the Age. He is also a freelance translator for many newspapers and scholarly journals.Harman gained public recognition for his 1998 translation of Franz Kafka's The Castle, for which he won the Lois Roth Award of the Modern Language Association. As a translator, Harman wrote, "Translation is a complex issue, and retranslation doubly so," referencing the double challenge to confront both the text in the original and in other translations. Harman has characterized the current moment as a "great era for retranslation" to reexamine the versions through which generations of English-speakers have encountered important works from other tongues. Harman discusses his translation in a preface to his translation of The Castle.
His translation of Kafka's Amerika: The Missing Person, more widely known as Amerika, was published in 2008. His translation of selected stories by Kafka was published in 2024.
The New York Review of Books wrote that his translation of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet was "likely to become the standard one".