Translating Kafka: German Translation Workshop with Ian Ellison and Hannah Scheithauer

We celebrate Franz Kafka’s centenary at Oxford Translation Day with a workshop where participants will explore the linguistic challenges and creative opportunities of translating the deceptively clear yet fragmentary prose of one of the most widely read and frequently translated of twentieth-century writers. Beginning with the famous opening sentence of The Metamorphosis, Ian Ellison and Hannah Scheithauer will guide participants through other examples of Kafka’s shortest stories and aphorisms, evaluating a range of published translations of some of Kafka’s pithiest and quirkiest texts. We will then have the chance to produce our own version of the lesser-known story ‘An Imperial Message’. No prior knowledge of German is required.

Register via Eventbrite, here.

Ian Ellison is the post-doctoral research associate of the AHRC-funded “Kafka’s Transformative Communities” project at Oxford and a visiting fellow at Wadham College. His first book, Late Europeans and Melancholy Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium, was published in 2022. He was longlisted for the 2024 Observer Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism and in 2023 he was shortlisted for the Peirene-Stevns Translation Prize.

Hannah Scheithauer is a DPhil at The Queen’s College, Oxford. Her research, which is supported by the Clarendon Fund and a Queen’s College Graduate Scholarship, investigates transnational forms of memory in contemporary literatures in French and German.