Mark Harman (translator)
{{Short description|Irish-American translator}}
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Mark Harman (born 1951) is an Irish-American translator, most notably of Franz Kafka's work, and professor emeritus at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania, United States, where he served as Professor of German & English and College Professor of International Studies.[http://www.etown.edu/directory/index.aspx?sid=056943a7-39f9-4c31-b241-57e0787f1241 Dr. Mark Harman], Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania, USA.
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 (1985) and translator of Hermann Hesse, Soul of the Age (1991, edited by Theodore Ziolkowski). He is also a freelance translator for many newspapers and scholarly journals.{{fact|date=February 2022}}
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, Mark, [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_literary_history/v027/27.2harman.html Digging the Pit of Babel: Retranslating Franz Kafka's Castle New Literary History], New Literary History, Volume 27, Number 2, pp. 291–311, Spring 1996. {{doi|10.1353/nlh.1996.0022}} A detailed discussion of his work with Kafka's unfinished novel may be found at The Castle, Critical Edition, Harman Translation.{{fact|date=February 2022}}
His translation of Kafka's Amerika: The Missing Person, more widely known as Amerika, was published in November 2008.{{fact|date=February 2022}}
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".{{cite book | url=https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674052451&content=reviews | title=Letters to a Young Poet — Rainer Maria Rilke | date=18 April 2011 | publisher=Harvard University Press | isbn=9780674052451 }}
References
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External links
- [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_literary_history/v027/27.2harman.html On the retranslation of The Castle]
- [http://www.kafka.org/index.php?id=185,302,0,0,1,0 Missing Persons: Two Little Riddles About Kafka and Berlin]
- [https://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/reviews/980329.29adlert.html?_r=1&oref=slogin Review of The Castle], The New York Times
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Category:Alumni of University College Dublin
Category:Yale University alumni
Category:University of Pennsylvania faculty
Category:German–English translators
Category:21st-century American translators
Category:Irish emigrants to the United States
Category:Translators of Franz Kafka