The forgotten Scots who gave Kafka his voice - Engelsberg ideas
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The forgotten Scots who gave Kafka his voice
June 10, 2026
Boyd Tonkin
Themes: Culture
For half a century, Edwin and Willa Muir's translations were how the Anglophone world read Kafka. A prize-winning study of his translators barely registers their contribution.
The Penguin Modern Classics edition of Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis. Credit: Nia Bell
Kafkaesque: Ten Great Writers Translate the Twentieth Century, Maïa Hruska, translated by Sam Taylor, William Collins, £16.99
In 1995, a zanily inventive Scottish film won the Oscar for best live-action short. Two decades before his stint as the 12th incarnation of Doctor Who, Peter Capaldi wrote and directed Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Richard E Grant, as the tormented author in his Prague garret, struggles in the face of endless interruptions to decide the kind of metamorphosis to inflict on his hapless hero, Gregor Samsa. A banana? A kangaroo? The arrival of a (misdirected) joke-shop costume, and a squashed cockroach, show him that it has to be a giant ‘insect’.
The joke works because everybody knows that Kafka – modern prophet of alienation and victimisation, invoked even when unread – converted poor Gregor into a big bug. That ‘insect’, however, owes its existence to two other Scots – except that neither exactly fitted that description. Willa and Edwin Muir – Willa born in Angus to parents from Shetland, Edwin a proud ‘Orkneyman’ who called himself a ‘good Scandinavian’ – published their translation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung) in 1933. The couple’s pioneering advocacy of Kafka’s works began with The Castle in 1929. It would continue until an edition of In the Penal Colony, with other stories, in 1948.
Thirty years of literary wandering, from 1919 to 1950, took the Muirs to new-born Czechoslovakia, Germany, Italy and several short-term British homes. They wrote (fiction, poetry and criticism as well as translations), taught and – in Edwin’s case – held senior British Council posts in Edinburgh, Prague and Rome. In addition to translations – not only from Kafka, but such landmark modern German novels as Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers – Edwin built up a body of visionary, myth-inspired verse. Seamus Heaney would later praise his poetry for its unique ‘stand-off with modernity’, and rank it with the great ‘tragic ironists’ of postwar Europe. Willa wrote formally ambitious satirical novels (Imagined Corners, Mrs Ritchie) and, a stalwart if eccentric feminist, saw her treatise Women: an Inquiry published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1925.
The pair sometimes regretted becoming a ‘translation factory’, first of all to pay their modest expats’ bills. Edwin’s 1954 Autobiography laments that the craft ‘began as a resource and hardened into a necessity’. Willa, a prize-winning classicist at the University of St Andrews, was the finer linguist of the two. She had spells of resentment at the assumption that she had served as a sort of technical assistant to her creative husband, and at the ‘whole current of patriarchal society’ that made her invisible. ‘Edwin only helped,’ one journal entry complains in 1953, although other accounts testify to a process of complete equality. They reportedly tore books in half, tossed a coin to pick a portion, and later revised each other’s labours.
However they split the job, the results proved solid and durable. The Muirs gave Kafka a distinctive voice in English for half a century: fluent, formal, enigmatic and mesmeric. They worked from the – now-amended – texts that Kafka’s friend Max Brod edited, after he had declined to honour the author’s dying request in 1924 to destroy all unpublished manuscripts. In the 1980s, a team led by the Oxford scholar (and friend of Kafka’s niece, Marianne Steiner) Malcolm Pasley began to issue revised editions. Only then did a fresh wave of English translations start to supplant the Muirs’. But it was Willa and Edwin who ventriloquised the writer that I (and countless other readers) first encountered; who chose, for example, a ‘gigantic insect’ for Kafka’s sinister ungeheueres Ungeziefer. Does the creepily non-specific ‘monstrous vermin’, or something similar, do a better job? The Muirs’ successors think so. They seldom hold back in denunciations of the work of the impecunious, vagabond not-quite Scots, as too ‘faulty, too domesticated, too in sync with Max Brod’s Messianic vision of the texts… and too lacking in humour’ (a summary verdict from Michelle Woods’s valuable 2014 study Kafka Translated).
According to their detractors, the Muirs conveyed to the Anglosphere a Kafka who sounded too smooth, too sombre and too saintly. Still, their achievement deserves loud hosannas. Almost by chance, they ran across the uncanny, disorienting and inexhaustibly strange works that would help define the culture of the century, and fought against stiff odds to make them common...