Franz Kafka

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Eric

Former Member
The Translators Association, part of the Society of Authors in London, recommends ?85 per one thousand words translated. That's for literature. For commercial or legal texts, you have to pay more. So, it pays to be bi- or tri-lingual...

The joke continues when I step into the local newsagent's shop. While The Guardian, the Times, the Independent, the Daily Telegraph, or any other British daily costs between three and four euros, it's cheaper to know German, French, Italian, Spanish, or just about any other language. Most papers in those languages only cost up to about two euros. There are also weeklies from Eastern Europe.

So it is literally cheaper if you can read things in "Continental" languages, as opposed to relying on Brit&Yankspeak.

I read the first of the three Kafka articles in the print edition of the paper, only afterwards looking up the URL. It's a good, well-informed, survey article. Maybe the literati of London are all scrambling to get it translated, as it's the 125th anniversary year of the birth of Kafka. And all those dumb journos with no imagination read in the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook that this is the anniversary, so they all rush to write derivative articles about works they've heard about but never read.
 
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Irene Wilde

Reader
Eric said:
The Translators Association, part of the Society of Authors in London, recommends ?85 per one thousand words translated. That's for literature. For commercial or legal texts, you have to pay more. So, it pays to be bi- or tri-lingual...
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I suppose I'll have to wait until the dollar comes out of its free-fall before I can afford your services.
 
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Eric

Former Member
I was only teasing in my previous post. Obviously, no one could be expected to learn a language overnight, just to celebrate the anniversary of a writer.

But there is, luckily, a whole industry of Kafka commentary in the English language. This started years ago, and I'm sure there'll a few new book-length works about Kafka appearing in English, this year too.

The first article I mentioned was, in fact, a review of Reiner Stach's 728-page book called simply "Kafka". This appeared in a slightly shorter English translation in 2006:

KAFKA
The Decisive Years.
By Reiner Stach.
Translated by Shelley Frisch.
Illustrated. 581 pp. Harcourt. $35.
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There is a review in the NYT at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/books/review/01roth.html

The Wikipedia lists the following other works about him:

Works about Kafka

Brod, Max. Franz Kafka: A Biography. New York: Da Capo Press, 1995. ISBN 0-306-80670-3

Brod, Max. The Biography of Franz Kafka, tr. from the German by G. Humphreys Roberts. London: Secker & Warburg, 1947. OCLC 2771397

Calasso, Roberto. K. Knopf, 2005. ISBN 1-4000-4189-9

Citati, Pietro, Kafka, 1987. ISBN 0-7859-2173-7

Coots, Steve. Franz Kafka (Beginner's Guide). Headway, 2002, ISBN 0-340-84648-8

Deleuze, Gilles & F?lix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Theory and History of Literature, Vol 30). Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 1986. ISBN 0-8166-1515-2

Glatzer, Nahum N., The Loves of Franz Kafka. New York: Schocken Books, 1986. ISBN 0-8052-4001-2

Greenberg, Martin, The Terror of Art: Kafka and Modern Literature. New York, Basic Books, 1968. ISBN 0-465-08415-X

Gordimer, Nadine (1984). "Letter from His Father" in Something Out There, London, Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-007711-1

Hayman, Ronald. K, a Biography of Kafka. London: Phoenix Press, 2001.ISBN 1-84212-415-3

Janouch, Gustav. Conversations with Kafka. New York: New Directions Books, second edition 1971. (Translated by Goronwy Rees.) ISBN 0-8112-0071-X

Kwinter, Sanford. Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture. Cambridge, MIT Press, 2002. ISBN 0-262-11260-4

Murray, Nicholas. Kafka. New Haven: Yale, 2004.

Pawel, Ernst. The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka. New York: Vintage Books, 1985. ISBN 0-374-52335-5

Thiher, Allen (ed.). Franz Kafka: A Study of the Short Fiction (Twayne's Studies in Short Fiction, No. 12). ISBN 0-8057-8323-7
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And most of his actual works have been translated at least twice into English. Given the fact he lived a relatively obscure life, he is amazingly well documented by any standards.

The Wikidpedia article is at:

Franz Kafka - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Mirabell

Mirabell

Former Member
He is easily one of my favorite writers, I love how he moved in his work, in very short time, from easy, self-pitying melodrama (Das Urteil) to the concision of his later prose.

As you haven't said anything about his work, Eric, what do you say? Do you have favorite texts? I have an essay on Heimkehr somewhere but I cannot find it.
 
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Eric

Former Member
No, Mirabell, 'tis true, I haven't said anything about his texts. But I have read his three longer works in English and hope one day to re-read them in German. I did read the novella Beschreibung eines Kampfes for the first time in German recently, which I have always had a weakness for. It is a curiously bitty work, but I remember when I first read it over 30 years ago that it was weird and interesting. I didn't know what Modernism was in those days.

I was corresponding with someone recently who was indeed reading his shorter works. I bought a selection of them some months ago, also entitled Beschreibung eines Kampfes, and containing about 30 of his short-stories, fragments, etc., such as Der Bau, Der J?ger Gracchus, Der K?belreiter, Das Stadtwappen, and other short works I remember once having read.

When I do get round to re-reading his longer works, I want to read principally Das Schlo? and Der Verschollene. Everyone talks so much about Der Proce? (as the title is eccentrically spelt in a recent Fischer reprint; a restoration of the original spelling, as I believe) that I want to give that one a miss, initially.

What I like in Das Schlo? is his zany, low-key humour, an aspect of Kafka that often gets forgotten when people discuss the Angst and misery in his books.
 
Mirabell

Mirabell

Former Member
a restoration of the original spelling, as I believe
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Not just the spelling. In the past decade (since 1995 I think, not sure and too lazy to check) faith in the old BRod editions has declined rapidly, as Brod did his friend the same disservice so many editors of Emily Dickinson did her marvellous work: he 'corrected' it, not just the spelling, but also punctuation and even (re)arrangement of textual fragments and even paragraphs within finished works. So now most people use an edition based on Franz' handwritten manuscripts, faithful to all sorts of things down to orthography, I believe, which explains the eszett in the title.

Yes, Kafka is very funny and yes, in my experience, too, that gets overlooked frequently, especially we in Germany tend to read everything drily and as devoid of humor. Beckett who is an incredibly funny writer has the image of a dour prophet of doom here, and, as an American who has taught at several good universities here, complained, Germans tend to read even a text as hilarious as Tristram Shandy with a straight face and without any recognition of its humorousness.
 
Heteronym

Heteronym

Reader
The Metamorphosis is one of the greatest works of literature ever written. No other book I've read has elicited from me such horror and disgust. I still feel a tingle of fear whenever I remember the creepy descriptions of Samsa's insect-like arms twitching in the air, how he hides under the blankets to observe the maid who comes in to clean his room, or how he crawls across the ceiling.

And no other book has ever provoked in me such compassion for the protagonist. I nearly cried over the ultimate fate of Gregor Samsa; ostracized by his family, struggling between his humanity and the freedom of giving in to his new bestiality, finding solace only in his sister's music. When he's done away with and the family breathes a sigh of relief, it's so disturbing, like all their feelings for him were gone.

Still I wouldn't consider Kafka a favorite writer. I loved The Trial, loathed Amerika so much I couldn't finish it, haven't read The Castle yet. I own his collcted short-stories and I enjoy a couple of them: 'In The Penal Colony,' 'The Great Wall of China,' 'A Message from the Emperor,' 'The Next Village,' 'Prometheus'...

But I don't enjoy his writing style. It lacks rythm, lyricism, beauty. I can't immerse myself in the simple pleasure of reading his prose like I can with Saramago or Garc?a M?rquez. I've stopped reading many of his short-stories because his style is uninviting and after a few sentence it becomes a chore.
 
Mirabell

Mirabell

Former Member
Heteronym said:
But I don't enjoy his writing style. It lacks rythm, lyricism, beauty. I can't immerse myself in the simple pleasure of reading his prose like I can with Saramago or Garc?a M?rquez. I've stopped reading many of his short-stories because his style is uninviting and after a few sentence it becomes a chore.
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could that be a question of translation? do you read both kafka and gabo in translation or just one of them...?

because you're quite wrong, you know, about his language.
 
Heteronym

Heteronym

Reader
Hm, I've read The Process and The Metamorphosis, which I've liked, in Portuguese. M?rquez I also read in Portuguese. The short-stories, which I mostly dislike, are from the collected English edition. You may be on to something, it may be one of those cases the English translation is just no good.
 
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Eric

Former Member
I was pleasantly surprised at Zadie Smith's essay-review-article in the New York Review of Books on Kafka, that Nnyhav mentions. She certainly puts the boot in, regarding the Brod editing. She does rather give the reader the impression that Brod was the archetypal groupie: sycophantic while the object of his awe was alive, a ruthless control freak, once he was dead. Also a little blow below the belt at Andrew Motion and Philip Larkin in that article. She praises Begley and his tackling some of the more paradoxical aspects of Kafka, e.g. his Jewish anti-Semitism and the complexities thereof. I must admit that Smith review-essay-article is much more sophisticated than what I found yesterday in Die Welt.

As for the German sense of humour that Mirabell alludes to, we non-Germans have to tread carefully when discussing the phenomenon. But it does strike me that "German humour", in its oxymoronic guise, is a Germanic thing, not confined to Germany itself. I see clear signs of this over-seriousness in Sweden, Finland, Estonia (which was run for centuries by Baltic-German barons), and the Netherlands. Where countries have been fortunate enough to have Jews to bring a touch of laughing gas to the culture, things have improved markedly. Jewish humour can be self-deprecating, and is certainly both sly and witty. Germanic humour, on the other hand, can descend from the pedestals of pomposity too piss & shit slapstick, at which the Germanics laugh themselves silly, whilst those from without that cultural zone can find it embarrassingly boorish. I cannot imagine an Aryan Charlie Chaplin, Woody Allen, Seinfeld, Phil Silvers, and a hundred other comedians.
 
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Paul

Reader
I'm a great fan of Kafka. I've read the three novels and have three collections of short stories.

I really do rate The Trial over any of his other work, even Metamorphosis. That book to me feels much more polished.

I do think that The Castle, had it been finished completely and given a proper edit, could have been even greater than The Trial, though. It has all the themes of the Trial, but they are taken to a greater, more extreme level of frustration and fruitlessness. And it contains much more of the humour that's been mentioned.

The main problem I have, like Heteronym, is with Amerika (or The Man Who Wasn't There). I either simply didn't understand it, or it was just a bit of an ill-conceived attempt. There are scenes (the large hotel/restaurant for one) that felt like being real Kafka, but mostly I had a weird feeling that someone else had written it. It does pain me to say it, as I like his writing so much, but I thought it just wasn't very good. Perhaps someone with more knowledge than me could defend that book, because I really do want to be wrong about it and I?m happy to re-read it with a new outlook.

I love many of the short stories, too. His imagination (and humour) really flies in them.

There is the issue of whether it was a good idea to actually publish some of the very-unfinished work and the various fragments. I think most authors would feel pretty unhappy about having to include their aborted attempts and literary doodles when their entire career is being judged. But, personally, I quite like them, and can easily forgive a lack of polish in some stories when we also have such a rare and interesting mind being displayed.
 
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Eric

Former Member
Just out of interest, in #7 I used the German names, most of which are familiar to everyone. But one of his three novels has two titles: Amerika (America) but also Der Verschollene which translates as "missing person" or "missing presumed dead", which gives an interesting twist to the tale. So whether the English title The Man Who Wasn't There is an exact rendering is an interesting question. Reminds me of the William Hughes Mearns poem:

As I was going up the stair
I saw a man who wasn?t there
He wasn?t there again today
I wish that man would go away.

I'm looking forward to re-reading a few of the Kafka stories.
 
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Sybarite

Reader
I read The Trial a couple of years ago and found that I wanted to fling to book at a wall in lieu of being able to grab the central character by his throat and shake him. At that point, it becomes irrelevant (to me) how good or otherwise the writing is.

I commented to someone the other day that I probably should try Kafka again, but such an experience doesn't fill me with optimism.

The Brod hoard (BBC).
 
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Heteronym

Heteronym

Reader
I understand your feelings about K. It doesn't look like he tries very hard to survive, does it? He just strolls passively through everything and then dies.
 
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Sybarite

Reader
Heteronym said:
I understand your feelings about K. It doesn't look like he tries very hard to survive, does it? He just strolls passively through everything and then dies.
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I think you've hit the nail on the head, Heteronym. It's difficult to feel any level of sympathy with a character who is so passive – pathetic, really. I had a similar response to Winston in Orwell's 1984 and, albeit to a lesser degree, Meursault in Camus's The Stranger (although I personally found that easily the best of the three books mentioned).

How does one create that sense of helplessness – without creating characters that are so pathetic that readers don't care about them or even, as I did with 1984, actively feel a sense of 'good – serves you right', at the end?

Crossing media, I'd suggest that that is perhaps best achieved in Terry Gilliam's film Brazil (jointly penned with Tom Stoppard), with the character of Sam Lowry, who isn't particularly effective, but does make an effort.

I have told myself that I'll try Kafka again – there's always the feeling, with a writer like him, that you worry whether or not you're the one who's 'wrong' if you don't 'get it'. For different reasons, I have a similar response toward Hemmingway: I should like (revere) his work but find it a drag.
 
Heteronym

Heteronym

Reader
Meursault doesn't strike me as passive, more emotionally detached from everything; he just tries to live according to a complex standard of freedom which rejects any ties: family, friends, love.

One problem might be that these characters are more ideas than people: they're personifications of the authors' worldviews. Kafka, who lived a very submissive relationship with his father and lead a monotonous life as a clerk, sees Mankind as a weak, helpless lot against a rapidly-changing, dehumanising, bureaucratic world. For Camus, Meursault is the ultimate free man, who lives without deceit and according only to his decisions.

In both novels it seems the the authors invented the characters to prove their theses instead of inventing a story to fit their characters. I'd say it works better in The Trial than in The Stranger.

Now in 1984 how can you not like Winston, who is willing to kill, lie, steal and throw acid into peoples' faces for freedom?
 
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