My poem “dachte er, es war kein” is an intentional mistranslation of a single line of prose from Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung. It belongs to a sequence of small, experimental translations of Old English and German texts, including Die Verwandlung, the Grimm Brothers’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen, and The Exeter Book, a tenth-century codex of Anglo-Saxon poetry.
These small poems playfully engage in a feminist project of purposely “mishearing” these male authors and their canon texts. They’re made by interpreting the sounds of the source texts rather than their meanings. Sometimes called homophonic or sonic translations, each poem is a nest of sounds, associations, and images assembled from what catches my attention in the original. Here “dachte er, es war kein” becomes “daughter, it’s working.” “Über dem Tisch” becomes “all but empty,” and “Tuchwaren” becomes “too far in.”
Original text: “... dachte er, es war kein ... etwas zu kleines Menschenzimmer ... vier wohlbekannten Wänden. Über dem Tisch, auf dem eine auseinander gepackte Musterkollektion von Tuchwaren ...” Source: Franz Kafka. Die Verwandlung (Leipzig: Verlag der Kurt Wolff, 1915).
Read the poem this note is about, “dachte er, es war kein.”
Kristen Renee Miller is the translator of Marie-Andrée Gill’s Heating the Outdoors (2023) and Spawn (2020), both published by Book*hug Press.