Second Plateau: The Wish (Not) to be an Interpreter

This plateau wanders about in the wasp-and-orchid trajectories of attraction and pollination variously proliferating out of Kafka’s “Wish to Be a Native American”: two different English translations and their de- and reterritorializations; a series of classroom engagements with the text, originally used as an interpreting source text in order to explore interpreter shame; a series of allegorical readings of the dream-like vignette; a series of stories of interpreter shame and translator burnout; a series of explorations of the many intersections between Kafka’s stories of transformation and ancient Daoist stories of translation (which Kafka read avidly), especially Zhuangzi’s.