Mark Harman

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Mark Harman (1951 – ) is a renowned translator, most notably of Franz Kafka's work, and professor at Elizabethtown College, where he is chair of the Department of English and Modern Languages [1].

A native of Dublin, Harman was educated at University College 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 cotranslator 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.

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 characterised 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.[2]

A detailed discussion of his work with Kafka's unfinished novel may be found at The Castle, Critical Edition, Harman Translation. He is currently engaged on an edition of Kafka's The Man Who Disappeared, more widely known as Amerika.