Unlike the stalwart scribes that comprise the dominant strain of German letters, giants like Goethe, Mann and Brecht, one-man classics factories who spew wisdom in every breath and make library shelves buckle under the sheer weight of their words, Heinrich von Kleist belongs to a parallel literary strain, a trembling class of German writers whose ranks include playwrights Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz and Georg Büchner, enigmatic prose masters Franz Kafka and Robert Walser, and poet Paul Celan, to name a few. Their work—call it imperiled poetry, naked drama, or in Kleist’s case, self-destructing stories—puts its finger on the raw nerves of the real, sabotaging any pretense of certainty. Far from satisfying the reader’s need for assurance, Kleist’s stories still read today, 200 years after his death by suicide at the age of 34, like kamikaze attacks on the status quo.

Attempting to translate his prose is a rarefied, risky business akin to playing Russian roulette with a gold bullet, strolling over a half-frozen lake, or savoring blowfish sushi from which one is not altogether certain the chef has removed the deadly venom. The thrill of that lingering doubt naturally adds to the tingle, making every word all the more vital. Kleist played for keeps in everything he did, and every tempered sentence trembles with that sense of imminence transmuted from life into literature.

Having tackled other daunting stylistic challenges, including an English rendering of Robert Musil’s Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, now in its third edition (Eridanos, 1988; Penguin 20th-century Classics, 1993; Archipelago Books, 2006)—which, I am proud to note, was cited in the journal Modern Austrian Literature as “a kind of classic in itself”—I took on Kleist with mixed delight and trepidation. In the Musil translation, done more than 20 years ago, I had deemed it expedient to selectively subdivide his interminably long Teutonic sentences to appease an American predilection for syntactical simplicity. The result made Musil accessible to the contemporary English reader, while not, I hope, mutilating the essence. (Although a disgruntled Musil did appear to me in a dream, protesting what he called “schlamperte Arbeit,” a sloppy job.)

I have since come to the conviction that a sentence is a writer’s most intimate signature of self, that its structure follows the fault lines of the psyche that shaped it and should not, except in rare cases in which not to do so would obfuscate meaning, be tampered with in translation. This is particularly true of the Kleistian so-called “Schachtelsatz,” (box-sentence), a painstakingly constructed, airtight narrative nugget with a grain of truth at the core, around which he built his stories, layer upon layer, the way an oyster salivates pearls around a grain of sand. Disinclined to undue haste, the 19th German mindset took its sweet time in the telling, often getting tangled in subordinate clauses and occasionally losing its thread along the way, but Kleist always pulls it off with the surefootedness of a sleepwalker on an internalized tightrope.

Or to bend the metaphor, with his finger on the thread of Ariadne, Kleist took frequent strolls in a psychic labyrinth of his own confection, unafraid to meet, indeed courting the Minotaur within. He can no more be blamed for the convolutions of his narrative thread than can the Grimms’ Märchen hero Hans be blamed for strewing bread crumbs when he ran out of white pebbles. That was the only way out.

“A novel” it says on the eye-catching cover, but Miklós Vámos’s The Book of Fathers is a highly readable saga spanning the last three centuries of Hungarian history, so perhaps a brief introduction won’t come amiss. Quite unrelated to the languages around it, Hungarian, together with its speakers, has nevertheless been an integral part of Europe for more than 1100 years. This context provides not only the setting for Hungary’s extraordinary history—which vastly overflows its contemporary borders—but also the tension that drives Hungarian culture and my lifelong interest in it.

Though language is nowadays widely accepted as the touchstone of national identity, Hungarians have long been intensely aware of the isolation and distinctiveness of their tongue—both a plus and a minus, often at the same time —and have always particularly prized its embodiment in literature as their highest cultural value. As writers have regrouped over the last two decades and cleansed the language of the mire of Communistspeak, acceptance of the best-known contemporary literary personality Péter Esterházy’s dictum that “it is better for the writer to think in terms of ’subject’ and ‘predicate’ than ‘people’ and ‘nation’” has increasingly meant that a number of Hungary’s most outstanding writers speak to the whole world, even as they often (paradoxically) try to exorcise the Hungarian past and mine linguistic registers unexploited under even soft Communism. Only a few of their works are available in English translation, and not all of these do justice to the originals; and even those that do, give only a hint of the enormous range and vitality of Hungarian literature in our time.

Becoming a translator is the sort of thing that can happen to a writer who falls desperately in love with a foreign language and all the new possibilities it offers for saying things in different ways. There are so many gaps between languages, so many things that can be so deftly expressed in one language while they are almost impossible to explain in another, and the more conscious you become of these discrepancies, the more temping it becomes to start triangulating back into English, looking for ways to coax your own language into saying all these new things.

My first experiments with translation began when I was just starting out as a writer. I tried my hand at translating not because I had a grand plan for revolutionizing the English language, but because I was fascinated by what the foreign writers I was reading in German were doing in their texts as they played with the possibilities their language gave them. It’s possible to construct sentences in German that keep the reader waiting for the verb until the very end. What about in English? It’s possible in German to insert entire squadrons of complex adjectival phrases between the article “the” and the noun it belongs to. What can we do to make up for English’s inability to do so? I found that I enjoyed gnawing on problems like this the way some people enjoy crossword puzzles.

I never set out to become a professional translator. Translating was just something that happened on the side while I was preparing myself to be a writer, scholar and teacher, for the simple reason that I never stopped working at it. It was fun. People said they liked the stories I translated for them, so I felt encouraged to do more. It was a good way to act on the impulse I often had to show other people things I liked. For example, I became Yoko Tawada’s translator just because I happened to stumble on a tiny one-page story by her in the Austrian literary magazine manuskripte that I liked so much I wanted people I knew to see it. After translating the story, I wrote to Tawada care of the magazine asking for permission to publish it, and by return mail she sent me another little story with a note asking me to please translate that one too.