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The Metamorphosis, in the Penal Colony and Other Stori: The Great Short Works of Franz Kafka
The Metamorphosis, in the Penal Colony and Other Stori: The Great Short Works of Franz Kafka
The Metamorphosis, in the Penal Colony and Other Stori: The Great Short Works of Franz Kafka
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The Metamorphosis, in the Penal Colony and Other Stori: The Great Short Works of Franz Kafka

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Including his most widely recognized short works, as well as two new stories, this translation of Franz Kafka’s writings illuminate one of the century’s most controversial writers.

Translated by PEN translation award-winner Joachim Neugroschel, The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories has garnered critical acclaim and is widely recognized as the preeminent English-language anthology of Kafka's stories.

Neugroschel’s translation of Kafka's work has made this controversial and monumental writing accessible to a whole new generation. This classic collection of forty-one great short works—including such timeless pieces of modern fiction as "The Judgment" and "The Stoker"—now includes two new stories, "First Sorrow" and "The Hunger Artist."
LanguageEnglish
PublisherScribner
Release dateJun 15, 2010
ISBN9781439144596
The Metamorphosis, in the Penal Colony and Other Stori: The Great Short Works of Franz Kafka
Author

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka (Praga, 1883 - Kierling, Austria, 1924). Escritor checo en lengua alemana. Nacido en el seno de una familia de comerciantes judíos, se formó en un ambiente cultural alemán y se doctoró en Derecho. Su obra, que nos ha llegado en contra de su voluntad expresa, pues ordenó a su íntimo amigo y consejero literario Max Brod que, a su muerte, quemara todos sus manuscritos, constituye una de las cumbres de la literatura alemana y se cuenta entre las más influyentes e innovadoras del siglo xx. Entre 1913 y 1919 escribió El proceso, La metamorfosis y publicó «El fogonero». Además de las obras mencionadas, en Nórdica hemos publicado Cartas a Felice.

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Project Gutenberg ebook
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is a hard book to nail down. That despite the fact that the basic (infamous) premise is revealed in the first sentence. It was about all I knew about Kafka or The Metamorphosis when I started the book--that the "hero" wakes up as a cockroach: As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly stay in place and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes.I'd read this work published in 1915 was a seminal work of the early 20th century. I'd read it was important to the Existentialist movement, surreal and absurdest and despairing. So what surprised me about this short novella--it's only about 22 thousand words--is how funny it is. I just found this all pretty hilarious. Is that bad, and wrong? It has been described as horror--but I mean, just the way Kafka describes poor Gregor trying to get around on his little legs--or trying to squeak out explanations to his supervisor or his family... I found nothing very heavy in this--or anything all that philosophical--at least not in any ponderous or pedantic way. It felt more light humor than anything--and really, an engaging introduction for me to this writer who'd I'd definitely read again.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    One of the most famous opening lines in literature: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect." Well, this will certainly be a day unlike all others.A classic work of expressionism. A metaphor for what happens to an individual when he lives a life he loathes, for extreme alienation and rebellion. What the reader brings to the text will inform his or her interpretation, and that makes the work all the more extraordinary.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Metamorphosis is a novella written by Franz Kafka. It's a tragic parable about a man who wakes up as an insect and the subsequent exclusion from society and eventually, his family.
    This is so wonderfully written and paced and the message, so strong in its dark tones, is very balanced with the narrative, making it a pleasure to read.
    In trying to find a similar work, I can think only of Orwell's "Animal Farm", with its strong message also perfectly intertwined with it's narrative. The difference is I find Kafka's writing style more alluring, more poignant.

    I opened it, planning to read only a bit of the beginning and ended up reading all of it without getting up from the chair.
    I suspect I'll be reading this many more times.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I’ve spent the last couple of years catching up on famous pieces of literature that, for whatever reason, I never got around to before, especially those that are ubiquitous cultural touchstones. A lifetime of making casual references to Sherlock Holmes, Jekyll and Hyde, The Last of the Mohicans, and so forth, without actually having read the works in question, always left me feeling like a bit of a poser each time I caught myself doing so. And for some reason, that guilty feeling was never stronger than when I would refer to something as "Kafka-esque," knowing I had never read any Kafka. It made me feel like such a huge poser that I actually crossed over into being a poseur, which, as everyone knows, is far worse.

    So I finally sat down to read Kafka’s most famous work, the short novel Metamorphosis, and it’s everything I had ever meant to express by invoking the man's name: absurd, dark, grotesque, and humorous only in the blackest possible sense of the word.

    I was, of course, already familiar with the very famous first line of the book, translated in my edition as, "One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin." I think I had imagined, before reading, that the book would jump from that absurd beginning immediately in some other direction, but it doesn’t. It’s a good 10% of the way into the book (I read it on the Kindle; no page numbers) before Brundle-fly - sorry, Gregor-roach - even manages to flip over and get out of his bed, and it sets the tone for the rest of the book: unflinching, matter-of-fact in its depiction of surreal things, and compulsively readable at the same time that it’s psychologically uncomfortable and viscerally repelling.

    I won’t spoil the ending for anyone reading this who is as big a poseur as I was, but I will say this: if Dan Savage woke from troubled dreams one morning to find himself transformed in his bed into Franz Kafka, he’d have started a viral video campaign called "It Gets Worse."
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    At first, I can't bear reading this book. It was about a person who turned into a bug. It was disgusting. I hate bugs. But towards the middle and end part you begin to feel sympathy for Gregor. Who wants to be a bug? It was something he did not choose. i just felt bad for him and how his family treated him. It actually made me cry in the end. This one classic book everyone should read.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A very realistic story about a completely unrealistic event. I love how Kafka describes an absurd occurrence like it's a very natural thing and nothing to be surprised at, and how he gives a completely realistic account of the consequences and behaviour of the people involved.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I came across this book by accident, having learned that it was considered classic, and having missed it during my schooling days, and on whim finding it free on Project Gutenberg, and realizing that it's small story worth reading in few sittings.Opening premise in first line sends a shock wave. It's strange, mildly amusing, and not yet clear where the story will go. However, story is captivating from get-go. For once, this classic lives up to its such designation. For another, despite my surprise at myself, I wasn't bothered about reason of this metamorphosis nor did absence of that took anything away from the story. Usually, ridiculous hypothetical premise of story which is not resolved till end is buzz-kill for me, but Kafka's work transcends that feeling, perhaps by not pretending to be anywhere close to science fiction and by tugging heart at right places. It is science fiction in its premise, but it is not, otherwise.Of course, somethings in story bother you. I am amazed that rest of world wasn't throbbing Samsas' house to see the transformation, and that they could keep it as mildly horrifying novelty, despite their maid, Gregor's senior clerk, and their tenants having observed themselves. How could neighbors, police, scientists, and crowd be kept at abeyance from such rare happenstance? Another convenient coincidence was Gregor's end, brought out without much premonition.What's most amazing is that while story isn't really fast paced, it just seems to keep you on hook. Story from perspective of vermin, of course, helps a lot. Challenges of adjusting to new life, phases of grief displayed by family in handling him, poignancy of whole situation tugs your heart and brought tear drops in my eyes near the end. I am tempted to be angry at his family, but I cannot be seeing what they did under such extraordinary circumstances. I cannot be unsympathetic to Gregor though, for he is such a gentle soul, struggling himself yet always keeping his virtues and noble character to guide his actions.It's simple story, with multiple interpretations, all likely wrong, but which will keep you haunting long after you have read it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I've had nightmares because of work, but I''ve never had Gregor's out of body exxperience where he wakes up one morning and finds that he's become a giant beetle. Kafka's surreal novel - perhaps the first to employ magical realism - .is a tour du force. Gregor, who has been supporting his family (why is left unclear), now must remain locked in his room because his appearance is too unsettling to everyone. Faced with the necessity of survival, his parents and sister now find employment and gradually become more self-suffcient. As this happens, Gregor finds his life draining away. When he finally dies, his family becomes fully actualized.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Strange, not quite what I expected. I felt so sorry for poor Gregor - so selfless and yet, unappreciated by his family as a person. Then despised and seen as a burden once he can't support them all. I was disappointed that his parents and sister could so quickly forget that he was their son and brother and sole provider for years. Especially since he was beholden to the company he worked for only because of his parents' debt. Although Gregor didn't grasp how little his family thought of him through most of the story, I was glad he didn't or his feelings would have been even more hurt.I don't like bugs, especially roaches, so parts of the story grossed me out. But is was well worth the read!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    the family of Gregor provide a morbid, yet griping view of the human souls' capacity for compassion.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Such a weird story. It's completely unclear, he's changed into another creature and he's still absorbed in his day to day.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A perennial favorite. Frustrating, sad, and fascinating. It begs to be dissected and analyzed, while at the same time, it just needs to be accepted as is.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Pretty crazy book. Guy turns into giant cockroach, nearly tears his family apart, grosses out readers across the world.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    My understanding of the grand metaphor at play here is Kafka's feelings of alienation in his being absorbed by the creative act of writing. Thanks to this use of metaphor rather than a literal telling, this story could represent anyone's abruptly becoming their family's black sheep (or 'monstrous vermin', rather) for any reason - a new religious or philosophical conviction, a homosexual who comes out of the closet, or any other event that causes a sudden rift between oneself and one's family, to the extent the people you love and live with feel like they scarcely know you anymore. The stages are there: their initial reaction of horror and the shutting down of communication, grudgingly giving way to the family's sense of duty to acknowledge even its strangest family member, and then ... I'd imagine there's a few different paths after that. Maybe they can reconcile and accept, or maybe not.From Gregor's perspective there's the problem of his no longer being able to communicate with his family in return. He can no longer explain his wants or desires in any language they will understand because he has become entirely alien to them, and so he discovers his own ebbing of empathy for their perspective as well, like a memory in the act of being forgotten. This might be a good classic for adolescents, who so often feel isolated or misunderstood by their family (assuming it's properly introduced.) I read it while ill, an event that tends to skew one's priorities and values and so gave me my own way of relating - the sick invalid who temporarily lacks the same cares as his family around him, shut up in his room and not to be disturbed. Some parts were darkly humorous, but I can't say I found it comforting.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I was inspired to read Kafka by listening to and unexpectedly enjoying 'Kafka the Musical' on BBC Radio 4. I downloaded the David Wyllie translation of 'The Metamorphosis' onto my Kindle for free from Project Gutenberg, and I'm very glad I did. The situation - man wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant beetle - must have seemed even more bizarre one hundred years ago than in these strange times; but from this unlikely premise, and in the space of a modest novella, Kafka provides a wealth of satirical comedy and pathos. The selfless and ultimately tragic hero Gregor Samsa leaves an indelible impression on the reader. The great sadness of the story lies in the fact that his family seem more concerned with the indelible stains left by his spoor on the bedroom wall. If, like me, you are late in coming to this great story I recommend you put it at the top of your to-read pile.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Not the kind of story I usually read, but it kept my interest. I found this story to be funny in places, and a little sad.Gregor Samsa "woke up one morning from unsettling dreams" and "found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin". This is how the story starts, with its climax. The rest of the story goes on to tell about Gregor's new life as a bug, and how he and his family react.I am glad I read this story.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    “This was my first time reading Franz Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’. My particular course of study did not encompass works of a philosophical nature, so this is new to me. For those of you that have not read The Metamorphosis, I don’t want to get into too much detail, as I think it would spoil the impact that the book would have on you from the get go. Further to that, try not to Google it or read too much about it prior to picking it up- I promise you, the result will definitely be thought provoking, at the very least. In fact, I read that Kafka insisted that the main subject matter not be printed on the cover of the book- so as not to spoil the effect.After I finished reading it I wasn’t really sure what I thought about it but after having a couple of days to ponder it- I’ve decided that I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed Kafka’s writing style; it was very simplistic and straight forward. Another aspect of the story that I liked was that the climax was at the beginning of the novel and the story develops from there. The protagonist’s reaction to ‘the metamorphosis’ itself was interesting to me, in the sense that there was no apparent alarm there and ‘the metamorphosis’ was seen in the most pragmatic terms, all things considering. I think ‘Metamorphosis’ was Kafka’s view of human nature, how we tend to deny or bury unpleasantness and excuse our bad behaviour, especially with the support of others within our group or circle that happen to be guilty of the same bad behaviour and how society will come to terms, and even to accept injustices done to others. I think also, it could be symbolic of Kafka’s own family experience? It’s a quick little novella that would take you no time at all to read
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    We have all been up stuck up on the ceiling and had an apple lodged in our back. Kafka writes one of the most important stories ever written.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Gregor Samsa lives with his parents and younger sister and lives a perfectly normal life until one morning when he wakes up and finds he is now a human-sized roach. The story is an examination of how a family might react to such an event and how one might feel if this happened to him. I loved trying to imagine life as a roach.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    perfect read for late at night creepy and a great allegory for those in 12-step recovery (AA, NA, Alanon, etc.).
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Like all great books there's something for everyone - in that I mean the many layers that exist can be pentrated (or not) depending upon your entry point, perspective or state of mind at the time of reading the novel. A bad dream, a schizophrenic nightmare you cant wake up from, the viscereal reaction of the community to a misunderstood or feared disease or the simply the sense that most people suck. The fact that the "the great one's" are thought to have found inspiration in this novel should tell you everything.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I generally dislike reading translations, but I decided after some deliberation that learning German just to read Kafka was more work than I was willing to put in. This short story seemed like a good entry into this famous writer’s world. From the first sentence, I was surprised, not by the fact that Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, wakes up to find himself transformed into a bug—something I already knew about—but rather by Michael Hofmann’s (the translator of this Penguin edition) choice of words: “When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed.” As I understand it from the research I’ve done, Kafka used a German word that was much more vague and certainly did not specify what kind of bug Gregor had become. As it happens, cockroaches happen to be the most despicable type of bug while beetles are much more benign to me, this description therefore coloured my entire reading of the story.Before reading the story I thought that the storyline was that Samsa discovers himself transformed into a bug and is completely horrified but then his family, coworkers and strangers aren't the least bit perturbed by his monstrous appearance and he carries on his life “as usual” except he’s a giant bug. I suppose this too would have made a good story—if it hasn’t already—but one quite different from Kafka’s original tale. My erroneous expectations took nothing away from the experience for me and in fact, I found this story could be read on many different levels. For instance, one could easily conclude that this book was a commentary on antisemitism, which was rife in 1915, the year this book was first published, and/or that Kafka was perhaps working out issues of self-hatred or that it was an omen of things to come with the rise of Nazism in the 1930’s when the depiction of Jews as monstrous vermin became ubiquitous in Nazi propaganda. Then again, maybe Kafka didn’t mean to convey anything else than the story itself at face value, which still leaves us with plenty to ponder.An entertaining story with profound impact.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A man wakes up one day to find he has been changed into a large insect/beetle. The story follows his efforts to deal with this, and his family's reaction to the change. But it's not just a story about a man turning into a beetle, it's a clever way of writing about how a family would deal with the main breadwinner in the house becoming unable to work, and also on a wider scope, the way a family (and the world at large) reacts to someone who is disabled, or terminally ill. It could also be an analogy for how a family treats a member of the family who is now old and needs to be cared for. The man who is now a beetle, is forced to live in his room, shut away from the world, for fear that he will frighten anyone who enters the house. The man who once provided for the family, and thought of them above himself, has now become a burden on them, as they are now short of money, and have to find employment. The once able and hard-working man, transformed into a beetle, is now rejected, and his family blame him for their financial situation and the fact that they cannot move to a smaller house, because they need to have a room to keep him in.The descriptive quality of the writing is excellent, and although it is a sad and gruesome tale, it is also very funny in parts; I couldn't help laughing out loud a couple of times.The main thing that struck me, was that even though this story is nearly 100 years old, it is still totally relevant to today's world (and I'm not sure that's something we should be proud of).
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Better than I remembered. Gregor transformed from a miserable drone working for an unappreciative family and an unappreciative employer into a miserable bug who is forced to hide in his room from his family. This family, little by little, transforms themselves into actual living creatures. All get jobs, all "come out" of their shells (bad pun), all improve. Only Gregor declines and dies, never once feeling any resentment toward those who transformed him from a person into a bug by their parasitic dependence. Fantastic story, incredible matter-of-fact narration.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    We all undergo transformations throughout our lives which changes our perspective, our behavior and the way we see others. It can also radically change the ways in which our friends, family and acquaintances see us. This Kafka novella takes this premise to the extreme, and asks what would happen if one were to transform into the most hideous thing possible- a giant repulsive bug. One could substitute almost anything for the bug analogy and the story would seem just as relevant. This is a remarkable experiment in creative fiction that has not aged one bit.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A classic read - I really didn't know what to expect, but I'm glad I read it. Clever and unique.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    "Die Verwandlung" ist wohl eines der meistinterpretierten Bücher im deutschsprachigen, als auch im englischsprachigen Schulwesen. Hier entführt uns Kafka in eine Geschichte, in der der Handelsreisende Gregor Samsa, der alleine für seine Familie sorgen muss, sich plötzlich in einen Riesenkäfer verwandelt, sodass die Familie auf sich selbst gestellt ist. Von allen Interpretationen gefällt mir immer noch die am besten, dass sich Gregors "Inneres" nach "außen" gekehrt habe. Kafka hat gerne lange Sätze geschrieben, sodass es für ungeübte Leser am Anfang schwierig erscheint, der Geschichte zu folgen. Man kann über "Die Verwandlung" denken, was man möchte, aber diese Geschichte lässt einem aufgrund ihrer Surrealität äußerst viel Raum für Interpretationen und das allein zeugt von einer gewissen Qualität.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Having not read this since college, I found it much more meaningful this time around. Whatever Kafka's intent, I found the tale to be symbolic of the family dynamic when a once integral part of the family becomes helpless or worthless through illness, dishonor, etc. The death of Gregor restored life to the family.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect.This is one of the most famous opening lines in literature, and the general concept of The Metamorphosis, which hovers on the borderline of being a short story or a novella, is one of literature’s most famous and fascinating stories. No explanation is given for Gregor Samsa’s terrible fate; he and his family must simply endure it. Almost the entire novella takes place within the Samsa family’s apartment, and over a mere 61 pages Kafka develops an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia, alienation and sheer misery at the unjustness of the world.This is a book many students are forced to read in high school, probably because of its short length, like The Great Gatsby, with no consideration for the fact that high school students probably aren’t yet equipped to appreciate the themes it explores (again like The Great Gatsby). There are dozens if not hundreds of scholarly interpretations as to what The Metamorphosis is allegorising; mental illness and depression are popular ideas. If I had to throw my hat into the ring I’d suggest it’s about the struggles of adulthood, the sometimes crushing sense of responsibility, the loss of innocence; much is made of the fact that Gregor, in his early twenties, has been working as a salesman to support his recently impoverished family, and following his transformation his inability to work and provide for them leaves him with a terrible sense of guilt. On the very morning of the metamorphosis the head clerk arrives from his office, demanding to know why he has not turned up for work, and it’s almost a scene of black comedy as Gregor attempts to leave the bed and open the door, to reassure his superior that he is fit and able and enthusiastic. The fact that he has turned into a monster is of secondary concern to his job security.This particular edition has a couple of Kafka’s other short stories at the back, presumably because the publisher wanted to pad the length out. None of them struck me as particularly memorable. The Metamorphosis, on the other hand, deserves its status as a literary classic – an enduring symbol of alienation in human society.

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The Metamorphosis, in the Penal Colony and Other Stori - Franz Kafka

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Scribner

An imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Translation and introduction copyright © 1993, 1995, 2000 by Joachim Neugroschel

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Scribner trade paperback edition May 2000

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Library of Congress Control Number: 92-43912

ISBN 978-0-6848-0070-7

ISBN 978-1-4391-4459-6 (ebook)

Selections from this translation first appeared in the Forward.

CONTENTS

Introduction Joachim Neugroschel

THE EARLY STORIES

Conversation with the Worshiper

Conversation with the Drunk

Great Noise

CONTEMPLATION

Children on the Highway

Exposing a City Slicker

The Sudden Stroll

Decisions

The Outing in the Mountains

The Bachelor’s Unhappiness

The Businessman

Absently Gazing Out

The Way Home

The People Running By

The Passenger

Frocks

The Rejection

Reflections for Amateur Jockeys

The Window Facing the Street

The Wish to Be an Indian

The Trees

Unhappiness

THE JUDGMENT

THE STOKER

THE METAMORPHOSIS

IN THE PENAL COLONY

A COUNTRY DOCTOR

The New Lawyer

A Country Doctor

Up in the Gallery

An Ancient Manuscript

Before the Law

Jackals and Arabs

A Visit to the Mine

The Next Village

An Imperial Message

The Anxiety of the Head of Family

Eleven Sons

A Fratricide

A Dream

A Report for an Academy

FIRST SORROW

THE HUNGER ARTIST

INTRODUCTION

On-Site Migration

Our grandparents spoke Yiddish, our parents spoke German, and those of us who are left speak Czech.

That statement by a Prague Jew sums up the linguistic and cultural history of not only the Prague Jews but, by extension, the vast majority of European Jews since the end of the eighteenth century. During this period, the various Jewish communities in Europe and its colonies have passed from Jewish languages to a few simultaneous and/or sequential non-Jewish languages and perhaps ultimately back (or forward) to Hebrew in Israel. Outside Israel, this process has shifted the Jews from an ethnic category with a core religion and multiple Jewish subcultures (Ashkenazi, Sephardic, etc.) to a religious category whose various communities are scattered through many countries, where they are largely assimilating into the local non-Jewish cultures.

Franz Kafka was born in Prague at the end of the nineteenth century, and for most of his lifetime Bohemia and Moravia belonged to Austria-Hungary—until 1919, five years before Kafka’s death in 1924. During that era, the Jews in Prague, like many Jews within the Dual Monarchy and most Jews in the German empire, were discarding Yiddish in favor of German, the language of the dominant culture, while holding on to their own religious practices and identities. Parallel developments were taking place wherever Jews were, in fact, allowed to assimilate into the language and culture—especially throughout Western Europe, but far less so in the tsarist empire.

This process of what I would like to call reacculturation began when Napoleon offered French citizenship, nationality, and complete civil rights to the Jews in France: they would thereby become French Jews if they agreed to give up their own Jewish culture and languages, their peoplehood, and maintain only their religious identity. They agreed—under great pressure—thus abandoning some centuries-old Jewish languages and cultures in France: Jehudit (Judeo-Provençal), Western Laaz (Judeo-French), and Alsatian Yiddish. (Western Laaz, incidentally, had helped to provide the substratum of Yiddish during its birth phase in Alsace-Lorraine.)

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, new generations of Central and West-European Jews spoke a Jewish tongue with their parents but a non-Jewish one with each other—and of course with Christians. When Karl Marx or Heinrich Heine wrote to their parents, their letters (still extant) were in Western Yiddish (misnomered Judendeutsch in German). Much later, Bernard Berenson wrote an article about his childhood experiences with Yiddish and its literature—which, however, like many assimilated Jews, he dismissed as irrelevant. Elias Canetti, in his memoirs, The Tongue Set Free, describes his Sephardic family in their native Sofia and the Ladino they spoke—which, however, he eventually replaced with German. And Primo Levi, in his autobiographical collection The Periodic Table, touches on the Judeo-Italian language used by his family and the local Jewish community.

Those are better-known exemplars of the countless Jews whose families passed from Jewish to non-Jewish in language and society, thus becoming, perhaps unwittingly, a transitional minority. Such on-site migration paralleled the mass migrations of Jews, especially from Eastern to Western Europe and then to the New World. Franz Kafka was a member of the on-site migration—while Karl Rossmann in The Stoker (Amerika) acts out the geographic migration.

Language in modern Europe became a defining national and then political characteristic—especially with the emergence of the nation-states in the nineteenth century. A natural, i.e., biological, rationale was supplied by Darwin, for whom language—and English in particular—was a sign of higher evolution. When describing some aborigines whom he brought back to London (in The Origin of Species), he explains that the ones who managed to pick up some English were obviously the more highly evolved in the group. Such thinking pervades all modern politicizing of language, especially imperialism—not to mention onsite imperialism: by giving up their own language and assimilating to the surrounding languages, Jews became more acceptable to their host nations and to themselves, both socially and civically—and economically.

Internally, however, religious Jews looked forward to the coming of the Messiah and/or a return to Palestine and thus saw their given Jewish language as part of a transitional condition. Then again, many Jews regard(ed) their Jewish language as culturally inferior to either Hebrew or a non-Jewish tongue, especially the national/administrative language of a country. For Jews throughout Central and Eastern Europe, German was the language of enlightenment, civilization, modernity.

For Kafka, language is likewise viewed—sardonically—as the hallmark of being human. When Gregor Samsa is turned into an insect, his speech can barely be understood and the family members act as if he cannot understand them; only the (uneducated) housekeeper addresses him directly, though teasing him. The ape in A Report to an Academy takes his first step toward becoming a human being by saying, Hey!; this makes him virtually the embodiment of the assimilating Jew. Kafka satirized the European attitude toward language yet employed language as his foremost instrument.

Born in the multilingual Austro-Hungarian city of Prague, the site of the first German university, Franz Kafka was raised and schooled in German in his assimilating Jewish family, although unlike most Prague Germans—Gentiles or Jews—he was somewhat fluent in Czech. Kafka made wondrous use of Prague German, which itself became a transitional tongue in the Czechoslovakian capital. The Nazi regime, banning Kafka and murdering most of the Jewish speakers of Prague German, ultimately precipitated the expulsion of the Germans from Prague, thereby abolishing a very old and very rich area of German culture. As a result, Kafka’s oeuvre has now become a monument to Prague German, which, like so many dialects and regional variants of German, was liquidated along with the Fascist era.

The language of these Prague Germans differed crucially from what was spoken in the German lands: Prague German was never fed by a local German dialect, which, perceptibly or not, infiltrates the speaking and writing of every German, even the most fastidious writer—down to the very forms, genders, syntax, stresses, and inflections. Surrounded by Czech but by no German dialect, Prague German has been described, half derisively, as a holiday German, because, for better or worse, it lacks the slang, colloquialisms, and dialectal influences that color High German in most areas. Still, Prague German was lovingly influenced by the forms and phrases, the quirks and cadences of Austrian, especially Viennese, German—that is, a regional standard usage but not a substandard dialect. More colloquial in their speech than they realized, the Prague Germans nevertheless saw their tongue as a pure linguistic and stylistic model that they used in their literature—which therefore sounds more colloquial than its authors sensed, just as their spoken language sounded more literary than that of most German speakers. We write the way we speak, they said. Indeed they did—and they almost spoke the way they wrote.

Kafka’s prose likewise reveals a careful and lucid Prague German with an Austrian tinge. In his earliest stories, he tested certain expressionist and even surrealist innovations, shredding syntax, short-circuiting imagery, condensing emotions and tableaux into brief, sometimes even tiny shards and prose poems, to evoke a moody and sometimes wistful lyricism that patched these various fragments into a world of jocular mystery. Ultimately, however, especially in his master tales, The Judgment and The Metamorphosis, he settled into a generally traditional language that paid scant homage to contemporary stylistic upheavals in German and French.

Thus, less than twenty years before Kafka began writing, the interior monologue or stream of consciousness had been invented in French literature by a Belgian novelist, Edouard Dujardin (Les Lauriers sont coupés, 1887) and in German literature by a Viennese Jew, Arthur Schnitzler (in his short story Lieutenant Gustl, 1890). Ultimately reaching British literature and thriving in the fiction of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, this innovation affected Kafka as little as most other modern linguistic experiments. Compared with the far more realistic contents of Joyce, Woolf, and Schnitzler, the world of Kafka’s writings is so bizarre, so alienated, so grotesque that a both humorous and anguished incongruity arises from the juxtaposition of subject and style, absurdity and realism. Kafka’s shock effects (and shock is a major component of modernism) were powerful enough in those times—and by sticking to an everyday, sometimes impartial prose that takes the nightmares for granted, he intensifies their overwhelming impact. Thus, in telling us that Gregor Samsa (whom we are supposed to know) wakes up to find himself turned into a giant bug, the author, commencing in medias res (like Arthur Rimbaud in The Drunken Boat, though not in the first person) reports in a cool, casual, objective tone that displays no surprise at this unnatural antimiracle.

However, the objectivity and matter-of-factness of the narrative voice are breached by a stylistic device that had a long tradition in European, especially Yiddish, literature. While commonly used in English, this device has no name here: we refer to it both by the French term, style indirect libre, and by the German term erlebte Rede. Fusing the author’s objective omniscience (third person, past tense, etc.) with the character’s innermost mental view, this device offers empathy in its older (pre-Madison Avenue) sense: a process of total mental and spiritual identification. Tomorrow was Sunday. The past tense, was, stakes off the narrator’s viewpoint, the noun tomorrow evokes the character’s viewpoint. Otherwise the use of a past tense with tomorrow would be a logical discrepancy. By now, style indirect libre has become so overused in European languages as to be a flagrant symptom of pulp and kitsch. However, by skillfully exploiting this method, Kafka manages to lead us from poker-faced protocol to subjective angst, forming a bond between tragicomical protagonists and desperately smirking readers—only to alienate the characters even more, since the bond is unilateral: the persona can never leave the imaginary world and can therefore never link up with the real author and the real reader. Empathy becomes alienation.

The sources of alienation in Kafka and in his characters (they are not necessarily identical with him) have been thoroughly investigated by scholars. His attempts at being universal are taken for granted; after all, literature, since Aristotle, has been seen—often purblindly—as a universal category. John Updike even praises Kafka for avoiding Jewish parochialism (The New Yorker, 1983). Although well-meaning and certainly sympathetic with Kafka’s predicament as a Jew, Updike expresses the bias of the dominant culture, which takes itself for granted: it subliminally sees itself as universal and axiomatic while viewing external and smaller cultures as parochial and relative. This prejudice likewise extends to the other, to colonized and marginalized groups like women and homosexuals, racial and religious minorities. Black writers like Willard Motley or Frank Yerby were not African-American authors: they mainly depicted whites. Female authors have been criticized for writing about women—and then praised or castigated for writing like a man. Book reviewers, if no longer boycotting gay novels, will nevertheless chide them (as does The New York Times) for not including more heterosexual characters. (When was the last time they attacked heterosexual fiction for not including more homosexuals, or accused Balzac or Proust of having too many French characters?)

In most countries, Jews have written about Jews when working in Jewish languages and about non-Jews in a non-Jewish language. Canada is a good example: until recently, its English-language Jewish writers (like Leonard Cohen, though unlike Mordecai Richler) have dealt with Gentile themes, its Yiddish writers with Jewish themes. The one country that flouts this rule is the United States: a specifically English-language Jewish literature has evolved here (next to a Yiddish and also a Hebrew literature). Nevertheless, even in its heyday, the American Jewish novel, whatever its worth, was derided as clannish by certain Jews and non-Jews. The post-World War II era has produced something of a German-language Jewish literature in Germany and Austria, but with only a few thousand German-speaking Jews left, the audience is chiefly Gentile.

Franz Kafka went along with this skewing and masking of cultural subjectivity. Had he written about Jews, his audience would have been vastly reduced; after all, in his day, less than one percent of native German speakers in Germany and Austria-Hungary were Jewish. Like most Jews writing in German (say, Hermann Broch or Elias Canetti or Ernst Toller), Kafka tended to depict explicitly non-Jewish, indeed often Christian characters. Still, we can’t be sure that these aren’t disguises—just as the names of his protagonists sound suspiciously like Kafka: e.g., Samsa; and just as Raban, being almost homonymous with German Rabe (raven) is a quasi-translation of Kafka, the Czech word for raven. The Jewishness of Kafka’s themes and figures is open to interpretation. Persona, from the Latin word for mask, can, as in C. G. Jung, refer to the role that a person is playing in life.

Take the filmmaker Josef von Sternberg: when he transformed Heinrich Mann’s novel Professor Unrat into the film The Blue Angel, the director had a hidden agenda in delineating the authoritarian German high school professor. As he explains in his memoirs, Fun in a Chinese Laundry, the film character was partly suggested by a Hebrew teacher under whom von Sternberg had suffered as a boy. Not so dissimilarly: when Kafka wrote The Judgment in an all-night session, he composed it, according to his diaries, on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, which is also known in Hebrew as Yom ha-Din, the Day of Judgment. It is such secret itineraries, conscious or not, that make art less than universal, more than parochial, leaving it open to multivalent readings that may unearth an intrinsic and perhaps necessary closetiness. Still, like the Oscar Wilde heroine who dons a beautiful mask, which then becomes her face, the underlying strata are finally replaced by the surface disguise. Albert Einstein (who spent some time in Prague) left us with a modern metaphor for that phenomenon when he described our physical world as the three-dimensional surface of a four-dimensional universe.

On Translating

No matter how much space can be devoted to a stylistic and linguistic analysis of any writer, at least twice as much would be required for investigating a translation: along with the discussion of the original text and the English text, we would have to delve into the actual migration from one language and culture into another. Let me therefore limit myself to focusing on a couple of facets, which, I hope, will show the confusions and complexities of any translation.

NATURAL(LY) AND THE NATURE OF NATURE

Natürlich—both adjective and adverb—is a normal, indeed fairly bland and bromidic word in German. It means: natural(ly), of course, by all means, sure, needless to say, etc. As an interjection, a concession, it goes almost unnoticed. Yet it conceals an intricate reference to cerebral and behavioral manipulation by Western culture and religion.

During the nineteenth century, as traditional absolutes were being replaced by new (usually scientific and technological) absolutes but also by numerous relatives, the concept of nature and natural changed in meaning and power. Often, the word divine was replaced by natural.

Nature, says Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen, is something we were put on this earth to rise above. For Christianity and European civilization, nature has always been something to be overcome, conquered, tamed, domesticated—subdued and subjugated for human use. The West draws an artificial line between nature and human or man-made—as if a beaver’s natural dam and an engineer’s technological dam were not subject to the same physical laws, the same natural laws. After all, whether you jump off the Jungfrau or the Eiffel Tower, you are prey to the same law of gravity and you will fall at the same speed. Naturally, this ancient distinction between natural and man-made gives Homo sapiens a special place in Creation—and the privilege of bending Mother Nature, and her children, to his will.

In an inconsistent yet compatible fashion, the natural was also seen as quite the opposite—an ethical imperative: not only in natural law (which nevertheless changes from culture to culture and era to era), but in human conduct. While religion and government attacked some forms of behavior as being natural, they lauded others—likewise as being natural: for instance, men’s domination over women, whites’ domination over blacks, Europe’s domination over the rest of the world, the nuclear family, family values, etc.

To confuse things further, unnatural has always been a putdown no matter how good or bad the natural.

In the United States, books and movies about the Wild West summed up this process as the subjugation by men of land, nature, and savagery—a process that was then complemented by the arrival of women, who brought Christianity, culture, refinement, breeding—i.e., civilization.

The cataclysmic upshot of this citing of natural and unnatural as ethical standards was European Fascism, which, in touting nature and natural man (yet deploying the most destructive prenuclear technology in history), set up life-and-death categories. The Nazi government even tried to change Nature’s name, Natur, into the more Germanic (and therefore more natural) Allmutter or Werdemutter. Rather than letting Darwinism and evolution take their alleged natural course, Fascism (unnaturally) lent Mother Nature a helping hand: anything and anyone that a Fascist state declared unnatural was segregated and ultimately killed.

In Kafka, the protagonist often has to pay a terrible price when, willingly or not, he goes against nature: not only by turning into a bug (Gregor Samsa), but also by, say, abandoning both his child and his parents (Karl Rossmann in The Stoker), or betraying his father (Georg Bendemann in The Judgment). Ultimately, nature takes its (or her) toll, and the punishment is no less severe than the ones meted out by vengeful deities in Greek tragedy. Kafka may assault and expose the nuclear family and its destructive patriarchal basis, yet he longs to restore it, to give the punitive father his natural place. Rossmann, orphaning his unborn child and orphaning himself by leaving home, seeks both father and family in the New World. Samsa, by dying, reestablishes the natural order of domestic things. Bendemann, by carrying out his own death sentence, puts his father back in power.

Now as a rule, one might render natürlich not necessarily as naturally but as of course, or needless to say. However, given the tradition that Kafka was working in and against, I’ve translated this adverb as naturally throughout. I have no choice: this innocent-looking word encapsulates a crucial pattern in Western and Kafkaesque thinking.

TENSE AND ASPECT

In its verbal structure, English, like the Romance and Slavic languages, divides motion and being into and imperfective aspects. I go vs. I am going; I went vs. I was going; etc.

In an English narrative, the action, the bare bones of the plot, are rendered with the perfective tenses, while the background is filled in with imperfective tenses. This development in European languages seems to have begun at the same time as the introduction of spatial and mathematical perspective into European art: verbal tense and artistic perspective divided reality into foreground and background. Thus, a piece of fiction usually begins with an imperfective verb by way of introduction (I was sleeping); then, shifting into a perfective verb, the narrative launches into the plot (I woke).

German verbs make no such distinctions. (The noun Imperfekt, applied to the simple past, i.e., preterite, is an inaccurate borrowing from Latin and Romance terminology; it is best ignored and replaced with Präteritum, preterite.) In a German narrative, foreground (plot) and background are distinguished by the syntax: the often Ciceronian sentence tends to devote main clauses to the plot and relative clauses to the background (of course, given the multiple, often myriad, and sometimes even contradictory tasks of each grammatical element, this division of labor is never entirely strict). As a result, hypotaxis, or syntactic subordination, has a very different role in German, which clearly marks each subordinate clause not only with commas but also by shifting its verb to the very end, so that we can easily tell which clause is describing foreground and which background. (Once again, this assignment of linguistic tasks is not always rigorous.) Similarly, whenever German offers a quick string of very brief sentences or main clauses, English would tend to subordinate some of them as present participles, which German seldom uses to introduce clauses, limiting participial clauses to extremely lofty, highfalutin diction.

Confronted with the cat’s cradles and Chinese boxes of German clauses, the American translator has to figure out when to use perfective, imperfective, or participial verbs in English: you have to decide if a German clause or sentence (German uses the same word, Satz, for both concepts) is foreground or background, superordinate or subordinate—or somewhere in between. Kafka learned Kleist’s lesson about the anxiety created by intricate hypotaxis and the suspense of waiting for the verb to drop like the headsman’s ax at the end of a long and harrowing sentence. Hard to duplicate in English.

In the first sentence of The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung), the reader slides through the casual tone, confronts the words ungeheuren Ungeziefer (monstrous vermin), and finally crashes into the concluding past participle verwandelt (transformed), which ties the whole sentence together, telling us what has happened to Samsa and explaining what the title means.

Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt. (Literally:

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