He is editor and co-translator of Robert Walser Rediscovered: Stories, Fairy-Tale Plays, and Critical Responses (1985) and translator of Hermann Hesse, Soul of the Age (1991, edited by Theodore Ziolkowski).
[citation needed] Harman gained public recognition for his 1998 translation of Franz Kafka's The Castle, for which he won the Lois Roth Award of the Modern Language Association.
Harman has characterized the current moment as a "great era for retranslation" to reexamine the versions through which generations of English-speakers have encountered important works from other tongues.
[2] A detailed discussion of his work with Kafka's unfinished novel may be found at The Castle, Critical Edition, Harman Translation.
[citation needed] The New York Review of Books wrote that his translation of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet was "likely to become the standard one".