A native of Dublin, Mark Harman is Professor of German and English at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania. A prize-winning literary translator and Kafka scholar, he has also taught at Dartmouth, Oberlin, Franklin & Marshall, and the University of Pennsylvania. Among his previous translations are Franz Kafka’s novel The Castle (Schocken), winner of the Modern Language Association’s Lois Roth Award; Kafka’s Amerika: The Missing Person (Schocken); Hesse’s selected letters, Soul of the Age (Farrar Straus); Robert Walser Rediscovered (New England), which he edited and co-translated; short works by contemporary German writers ranging from Günter Grass and Martin Walser to Christoph Hein and Segvi Ozdomar; and, most recently, Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (Harvard). He has also written extensively about modern German and Irish literature for publications ranging from the Times Literary Supplement, New England Review, New Literary History, Partisan Review, Sewanee Review and Sinn und Form to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post. He has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Ledig House, Djerassi Foundation, and a grant from the Austrian Chancellor’s office. His additional publications include an essay on Kafka and metaphor in Kafka for the Twenty-First Century (Camden House) and a commentated translation of Kafka’s “Message from the Emperor,” in the New York Review of Books. The translation was originally commissioned by fellow American Academy alumnus Martin Bresnick, who set the piece to music.