1B: Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

Google's Doodle, July 3, 2013,

 in tribute to Kafka on his birthday and his Metamorphosis.

 More about the Kafka Google Doodle in the Los Angeles Times.

1B Students: take a look at--why not read it, too--the
 biographical material about Kafka &
 "'The Essence of 'Kafkaesque'" article that appear below.

"Franz Kafka was born [July 3, 1883] in Prague, where he lived most of his life. [He died June 3, 1924.] During his lifetime, he published only a few short stories, including 'The Metamorphosis,' 'The Judgment,' and 'The Stoker.' He died in 1924, before completing any of his full-length novels." (Source: Random House Inc. Academic Resources).

"During his lifetime, Franz Kafka burned an estimated 90 percent of his work. After his death at age 41, in 1924, a letter was discovered in his desk in Prague, addressed to his friend Max Brod. 'Dearest Max,' it began. 'My last request: Everything I leave behind me . . . in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches and so on, to be burned unread.' Less than two months later, Brod, disregarding Kafka’s request, signed an agreement to prepare a posthumous edition of Kafka’s unpublished novels. The Trial came out in 1925, followed by The Castle (1926) and Amerika (1927). In 1939, carrying a suitcase stuffed with Kafka’s papers, Brod set out for Palestine on the last train to leave Prague, five minutes before the Nazis closed the Czech border. Thanks largely to Brod’s efforts, Kafka’s slim, enigmatic corpus was gradually recognized as one of the great monuments of 20th-century literature." (Source: The New York Times, 9/22/2010) To see the remainder of this article click on this.

For a good overview of Kafka's life, see Bio.  The Times Topics of The New York Times for Kafka is here.

To learn more about Kafka, go to the website The Kafka Project. It has extensive information about Kafka's biography and manuscripts.

Kafka on Books and Reading

"Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle," Kafka wrote.

Later, he would add: "[W]e ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief."

The above letters can be found at Brain Pickings. Kafka made these observations about books and reading in letters to his childhood friend and art historian Oskar Pollak. These letters were dated November 1903 and January 1904 when Kafka was 20 years-old.

Take a look at Kafka's drawing at Open Culture.

The Essence of 'Kafkaesque'

By Ivana Edwards
December 29, 1991
excerpts from The New York Times
for the full article click here.

SO just what does this adjective "Kafkaesque" mean? And why does Frederick R. Karl, author of an exhaustive critical biography of Franz Kafka, [Franz Kafka: Representative Man], believe that the word is as misused as it is used?

Kafka is the only 20th-century literary figure whose name "has entered the language in a way no other writer's has," Mr. Karl says. But "what I'm against is someone going to catch a bus and finding that all the buses have stopped running and saying that's Kafkaesque. That's not."

"What's Kafkaesque," he said in an interview in his Manhattan apartment, "is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behavior, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world.

"You don't give up, you don't lie down and die. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But of course you don't stand a chance. That's Kafkaesque."

The word has become the "representative adjective of our times," Mr. Karl says in his recently published book, Franz Kafka: Representative Man (Ticknor and Fields) and subtitled "Prague, Germans, Jews and the Crisis of Modernism." Mr. Karl devotes the entire epilogue to this elusive subject.

'Tells Us What We Are'

"Kafkaesque," the author says, "defines us. It's the one word that tells us what we are, what we can expect, how the world works. And to find out what that means, you read Kafka. You read The Metamorphosis, which is about a man who wakes up as a big bug, and then you know."

As Mr. Karl showed a visitor around his book-lined study, it was evident that he is a passionist of the meticulously ordered and maintained book shelf, the straight spine -- nothing is crammed or stuck horizontally in the available space.

He recalled when he first unearthed Kafka's most famous short story ("The Metamorphosis") and how "absolutely stupefied" he was.

"I found it in the stacks of the Columbia University Library as an undergraduate, never having heard of it before," he said. "It was dark, and I sat down to read it under almost perfect conditions -- dark, deserted, spooky."

The German edition of Kafka's Metamorphosis
  (sometimes called The Transformation)
 It was written in 1912 and first published in 1915.

Today, Kafka is in the mainstream of student reading, and of the reading public, which is largely made up of former students, Mr. Karl said. He believes that "The Metamorphosis," "A Hunger Artist," "In the Penal Colony" and "The Judgment" are among the most widely read Kafka stories. He also says that "The Trial," Kafka's best-known long fiction, with its "trappings based on misinformation," has achieved the mythic symbolism of a world gone berserk.

"The Trial" is about Joseph K., who, although in hot pursuit of the truth, is executed for an unnamed crime. Time and space are rearranged so they "can work either for or against the protagonist; the horror of that world is that he never knows what is happening, or when," Mr. Karl writes. "Thus the Kafkaesqueness of the Kafkan world: that insistence to uncover what is always uncoverable, or to recover what cannot be recovered."

Kafka wrote Der Prozess (The Trial) in 1914.
 It was first published in German in 1925.
 The first American edition, seen above,was
 published in 1937; as of May 2014 a near fine
 (i.e., excellent) copy was selling for $4,300.
 The original German edition, seen below,
 was being offered for a price of $21,000.

When asked if Kafka could have become Kafka in any other city but Prague, Mr. Karl hesitated. "Every major writer is a product of a particular juncture, a meeting of the place, the time, the history, so that the answer is no," he said. "Prague wasn't only Prague, it was also a moment in the Austro-Hungarian empire. Prague was for Kafka a great love/hate relationship. He hated the place, yet he could never get away from it."

Mr. Karl recalled his own visit to Prague in 1989, before the fall of the Communist regime, to research his book and lecture on contemporary American literature at Charles University.

"When I got there," he said, "I could speak to people I knew, and they would say, 'Yes, it's a beautiful city, but it's killing us. We're dying here.' And I'd say, 'Prague is so magnificent,' and they'd say, 'That's all we have.' And Kafka felt that. He called it 'an old crone with claws.' "

Mr. Karl's book is dedicated to "the six million Europeans murdered by Europeans," a curious reference to the Holocaust, which came after Kafka died in 1924.

"Remember, I said 'Europeans,' not 'Jews,' " Mr. Karl explained. "I make it very clear that Kafka was not a prophet, but that what he saw coming was a historical development of the most disastrous kind. He was the historian, the genius, of the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

"All those bizarre, surreal works can be seen against that background. The First World War that resulted was the real war. That was the war that determined the course of the 20th century. I see it as a kind of trajectory. All of that was being shaped in the world that Kafka was still a witness to."

Didn't Kafka become a kind of blotting pad for a lot of different theories?

"He absorbed into himself everything that was happening," Mr. Karl said. "Not directly, for he makes very few comments on politics, for example. The entire European world was changed, and indirectly the American world.

"Kafka seems to me to have understood this better than anybody else alive, and in that sense he becomes the person who absorbed the whole historical lesson before most people realized it was a historical lesson. A great writer does this.

"What he also saw was something else -- that history was going to roll over everybody, that everybody was going to become a victim of history. That's Kafkaesque. You struggle against history and history destroys you."

for the full article click here.

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What It Really Means to Be 'Kafkaesque'

Joe Fassler explains in "What it Really Means to be 'Kafkaesque'" how "[w]riters, when they affect us deeply, become adjectives. Some authors’ visions are so recognizable they can serve as a kind of shorthand: the 'Proustian' reminiscence, the 'Dickensian' slum, the 'Orwellian' surveillance program. This is useful, maybe, but not especially precise. Great literature tends to be complex and up for debate, and maybe that’s why these words—eponymous adjectives, they’re technically called lend themselves so easily to abuse."

(from The Atlantic, January 15, 2014.) 

Kafka Editions from Schocken (seen above)

New book covers virtually penned by Franz himself. Contributed by Stephen Coles on Feb 9th, 2011. From Fonts in Use: An Independent Archive of Typography. To learn more about these editions go to this site.  Here are some alternative covers of The Metamorphosis.

A Short Animated Film on Kafka

What can I say about this short animated film, "Franz Kafka de Piort Dumala"? No more than what you may have to say about it. I invite you to watch it and enjoy.  

Gabriel Garcia Márquez & Franz Kafka

The great Colombian writer García Márquez was highly influenced by Kafka's The Metamorphosis. Here's a passage from the Garcia Marquez website Macondo: "One day, however, [García Márquez's] life changed -- all from reading just a simple book. As if all the lines of fate suddenly converged in his hands, he was given a copy of Kafka's The Metamorphosis. The book had a profound affect on García Márquez; making him aware that literature did not have to follow a straight narrative and unfold along a traditional plot. The effect was liberating: '[García Márquez said] I thought to myself that I didn't know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago.' He also remarked that Kafka's 'voice' had the same echoes as his grandmother's -- 'that's how my grandmother used to tell stories, the wildest things with a completely natural tone of voice.'"

Arthur Miller & Franz Kafka

"Gregor Samsa: Drone Operator" by David Burr Gerrard

Los Angeles Review of Books, March 17, 2014

Susan Bernofsky has chosen “The Death of a Salesman” as the title of the afterword to her excellent new translation of Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” In fact, Gregor Samsa does have a certain kinship with Willy Loman: they share Gregor’s pre-transformation job as traveling salesman and his post-transformation decision to commit suicide, which, in Bernofsky’s words, is “the final service [Gregor] performs for the benefit of his family.” Bernofsky notes that Gregor “is a salesman, but what he has sold is himself: his own agency and dignity, making him a sellout through and through.” This is all true and supports the standard and probably correct interpretation that Gregor is an insect before his transformation, a non-person with no important preferences of his own. This is why I was startled to notice something I had never paid attention to: that Gregor once had a job he actually seems to have liked. Even more surprising is what this job was: a soldier." To read the rest of this review click on this.  An adaptation of Bernofsky's afterward to her translation of The Metamorphosis follows below, after the cover of her book.

Go to Amazon's "Look Inside" for Susan Bernofsky's
translation of The Metamorphosis in 2014.  Click on Amazon's "Look Inside" 
 for her book,  and then you can make a comparison of the first few pages of
 her translation to Willa and Edwin Muir's translation of it  from 1948. Their translation appears in Literature, 3rd edition. An adaptation of Bernofsky's afterward to her translation follows.

ON TRANSLATING KAFKA’S “THE METAMORPHOSIS”

POSTED BY SUSAN BERNOFSKY
THE NEW YORKER, JAN. 15, 2014

This essay is adapted from the afterword to the author’s new translation of “The Metamorphosis,” by Franz Kafka.

Kafka’s celebrated novella The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung) was written a century ago, in late 1912, during a period in which he was having difficulty making progress on his first novel. On November 17, 1912, Kafka wrote to his fiancée Felice Bauer that he was working on a story that “came to me in my misery lying in bed” and now was haunting him. He hoped to get it written down quickly—he hadn’t yet realized how long it would be—as he felt it would turn out best if he could write it in just one or two long sittings. But there were many interruptions, and he complained to Felice several times that the delays were damaging the story. Three weeks later, on December 7, it was finished, though it would be another three years before the story saw print.

As we know from Max Brod’s diary, Kafka read the first section of his “bug piece” (Wanzensache) aloud to friends on November 24, 1912, and again on December 15. People started talking about it, and Kafka received a query from publisher Kurt Wolff in March 1913 on the recommendation of Kafka’s friend Franz Werfel. Franz Blei, the literary editor of the new avant-garde journal Die weissen Blätter, expressed interest, and Robert Musil wrote as well, soliciting the novella for the more established Die neue Rundschau. But months passed before Kafka had a clean manuscript ready for submission, and then World War I intervened, causing further delays (Musil was called up to serve, and because of the war Blei decided to stop printing literary texts). In the spring of 1915, René Schickele took over as editor-in-chief of Die weissen Blätter, and with Max Brod’s help, Kafka placed the story there. It came out in October 1915, and then appeared in December 1915 (though dated 1916) as a slender volume published by Kurt Wolff Verlag in Leipzig.

The story’s protagonist, Gregor Samsa, is the quintessential Kafka anti-hero. He has worked himself to the point of utter exhaustion to pay off his parents’ debts, and his grotesque metamorphosis is the physical manifestation of his abasement. What exactly is he transformed into? In Kafka’s correspondence with his publisher, he was adamant that the “insect” (Insekt) not be depicted on the jacket of the book. And although he and his friends used the word “bug” (Wanze) when referring casually to the story, the language that appears in the novella itself is carefully chosen to avoid specificity.

The epithet ungeheueres Ungeziefer in the opening sentence poses one of the greatest challenges to the translator. Both the adjective ungeheuer (meaning “monstrous” or “huge”) and the noun Ungeziefer are negations— virtual nonentities—prefixed by un.Ungeziefer comes from the Middle High German ungezibere, a negation of the Old High German zebar (related to the Old English ti’ber), meaning “sacrifice” or “sacrificial animal.” An ungezibere, then, is an unclean animal unfit for sacrifice, and Ungezieferdescribes the class of nasty creepy-crawly things. The word in German suggests primarily six-legged critters, though it otherwise resembles the English word “vermin” (which refers primarily to rodents). Ungeziefer is also used informally as the equivalent of “bug,” though the connotation is “dirty, nasty bug”—you wouldn’t apply the word to cute, helpful creatures like ladybugs. In my translation, Gregor is transformed into “some sort of monstrous insect” with “some sort of” added to blur the borders of the somewhat too specific “insect”; I think Kafka wanted us to see Gregor’s new body and condition with the same hazy focus with which Gregor himself discovers them.

That same blurred focus applies to other aspects of the story. Although Vladimir Nabokov—with his penchant for exactitude—has mapped out the Samsa flat in some detail, I am far from certain that Kafka himself—with his penchant for the blurred perceptions of bewilderment—was much concerned with the apartment’s precise geography. How many rooms does this apartment have? Many, too many; just as Gregor, lying on his back in the story’s opening sentences, discovers he has “these many little legs” waving in the air above him. Both are physical correlatives of a life that has gotten out of hand. Kafka is not even particularly attentive to the continuity of his cast of characters. Early on in the story we see the maid give notice and flee, only to find her still working in the household several pages later and in fact doing all the cooking, since now it is the cook who quit. Except for the charwoman who plays a starring role in the penultimate scenes, the household help is just part of the furniture of the story, like the cabinet that gets shifted to another room.

Even the main characters tend to appear categorically, named only by their functions: “father,” “mother,” “sister.” Only one of them gets a name, Grete (rhymes with beta), but even she is usually referred to only as “sister” throughout, until the decisive moment near the end when she becomes instead a “daughter.” By defining all these characters through their relationship to Gregor, Kafka slyly allows Gregor’s point of view to dominate the story even when he is not actually present in the scene being described.

One leitmotif I was unable to preserve in translation is the theme of ruhig/unruhig. Ruhigdenotes “calm,” “peaceful,” “quiet,” “tranquil,” “at ease,” and unruhig its opposite. Starting with the unruhigen Träumen (“troubled dreams”) in the first sentence, the narrative oscillates between untroubled and troubled, tranquil and harried, peaceful and unsettled. Since no one word in English fits well enough in all the contexts Kafka presents, I decided to translate the word in many different ways; but note when you are reading all these synonyms that you are watching a motif unfold.

The post-metamorphosis activity that gives Gregor the greatest sense of freedom appears in my translation as “crawling”: he enjoys crawling around the walls and ceiling of his room. Ironically, the German verb kriechen (which also translates as “to creep”) has the additional meaning of “to cower.” To kriechen before someone is to act sycophantically toward him. In this sense, too, Gregor’s new physical state appears as a representation of his long-standing spiritual abjectness.

Finally Gregor has only himself to blame for the wretchedness of his situation, since he has willingly accepted wretchedness as it was thrust upon him. Like other of Kafka’s doomed protagonists, he errs by failing to act, instead allowing himself to be acted upon. Gregor Samsa, giant bug, is a cartoon of the subaltern, a human being turned inside out. He has traded in his spine for an exoskeleton, but even this armorlike shell (“carapace” and “armor” are the same word in German, Panzer) is no defense once his suddenly powerful father starts pelting him with apples—an ironically biblical choice of weapon.

Gregor is a salesman, but what he’s sold is himself: his own agency and dignity, making him a sellout through and through. For this reason I occasionally use the word “drummer” (commercial traveler) to describe his profession, referring back to another of his ilk, “a hardworking drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest of them.” That’s Willy Loman as described by Arthur Miller in Death of a Salesman (1949). The Metamorphosis is Kafka’s own Death of a Salesman, with all the sad, grubby tragedy, all the squalor. Like Willy Loman, Gregor is a suicide, though of a different sort: he dies a hunger artist, perishing of starvation because nothing tastes good to him anymore. And like Willy’s, Gregor’s death is the final service he performs for the benefit of his family.

At the same time Kafka’s tragicomic tale—unlike Miller’s—is very often hilariously funny. I imagine Kafka laughing uproariously when reading the story to his friends. Gregor’s naiveté (one might also call it gullibility) combined with his earnestness and his tendency to sound somewhat overwrought in his assertions is perfectly risible. To bring out this side of the story, I’ve emphasized the slight tone of hysteria in Gregor’s voice wherever it seemed justified.

The story is brutally comic in parts, and never more so than at the moment when it is revealed that—despite the fact that Gregor has been living more or less as an indentured servant to pay off his parents’ ancient debts—the family has plenty of money; not enough to allow them to stop working altogether, but a proper little nest egg. And although they are described as poor, they are never too hard up to retain the services of at least one domestic servant.

One last translation problem in the story is the title itself. Unlike the English “metamorphosis,” the German word Verwandlung does not suggest a natural change of state associated with the animal kingdom such as the change from caterpillar to butterfly. Instead it is a word from fairy tales used to describe the transformation, say, of a girl’s seven brothers into swans. But the word “metamorphosis” refers to this, too; its first definition in the Oxford English Dictionary is “The action or process of changing in form, shape, or substance; esp. transformation by supernatural means.” This is the sense in which it’s used, for instance, in translations of Ovid. As a title for this rich, complex story, it strikes me as the most luminous, suggestive choice.

(c) 2014 by Susan Bernofsky. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Illustration by Hannah K. Lee

Inspired by Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis

A "meal," above, inspired by Kafka's The Metamorphosis. Here's a passage from the novella: "There were old, half-rotten vegetables; bones from the evening meal, covered in white sauce that had gone hard; a few raisins and almonds; some cheese that Gregor had declared inedible two days before; a dry roll and some bread spread with butter and salt . . . ." [photograph by Dinah Fried from her Fictitious Dishes; more at http://fictitiousdishes.com/ Thanks to Eva Urška for the tip.] 

Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis

by graphic artist Peter Kuper

WATCH with CAUTION!
 Animated and film versions of
 The Metamorphosis are too numerous,
 and they will live forever online. None,
 that I've seen, are a substitute for Kafka's novella.
 Against my better judgment, here are three adaptations:

The Metamorphosis, above,
 by Spanish filmmaker Carlos Atanes, 1993. 

 Animated version, above, of

 The Metamorphosis by Charlie Amos

The official trailer for Metamorphosis, 

a 2011 film based on Kafka's novella.

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Now this film, above, is of a little more interest and helpful to what we are doing. Christopher Plummer stars as the late Vladimir Nabokov, the celebrated Russian-American novelist and teacher, who is admired for his novels Lolita (1955) and Pale Fire (1962), among many others. Later in his life Nabokov was a professor at Cornell, and Plummer plays him giving a lecture on Kafka and The Metamorphosis.

To see a stop motion animation of the Samsa family home go here. The animation is based on Vladimir Nabokov's sketch that accompanied his lecture on Kafka's Metamorphosis. If the link does not work, copy  this link, http://vimeo.com/56019499 , into your browser.

The first page, above, is from Kafka's The Metamorphosis with Nabokov's annotations and his sketch of the creature that he said, "has six legs, that [Gregor] is an insect." (This page, marked by Nabokov, appears in his Lectures on Literature.) Nabokov adds, "Commentators say cockroach, which of course does not make sense. A cockroach is an insect that is flat in shape with large legs, and Gregor is anything but flat: he is convex on both sides, belly and back, and his legs are small. He approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown. That is all. Apart from this he has a tremendous convex belly divided into segments and a hard rounded back suggestive of wing cases. In beetles these cases conceal flimsy little wings that can be expanded and then may carry the beetle for miles and miles in a blundering flight. Curiously enough, Gregor the beetle never found out that he had wings under the hard covering of his back. (This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know that they have wings.) Further, he has strong mandibles. He uses these organs to turn the key in a lock while standing erect on his hind legs, on his third pair of legs (a strong little pair), and this gives us the length of his body, which is about three feet long. In the course of the story he gets gradually accustomed to using his new appendages—his feet, his feelers. This brown, convex, dog-sized beetle is very broad."

Other Writings on Kafka

"I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting"; or, Looking at Kafka
To the Students of English 275, University of Pennsylvania, Fall 1972

by Philip Roth

“I always wanted you to admire my fasting,” said the hunger artist.“We do admire it,” said the overseer, affably.“But you shouldn’t admire it,” said the hunger artist.“Well then we don’t admire it,” said the overseer, “but why shouldn’t we admire it?”“Because I have to fast, I can’t help it,” said the hunger artist.“What a fellow you are,” said the overseer, “and why can’t you help it?”“Because,” said the hunger artist, lifting his head a little and speaking, with his lips pursed, as if for a kiss, right into the overseer’s ear, so that no syllable might be lost, “because I couldn’t find the food I liked.If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.”These were his last words, but in his dimming eyes remained the firm though no longer proud persuasion that he was still continuing to fast.

-Franz Kafka,  from “A Hunger Artist”

1.

I am looking, as I write of Kafka, at the photograph taken of him at the age of forty (my age)—it is 1924, as sweet and hopeful a year as he may ever have known as a man, and the year of his death. His face is sharp and skeletal, a burrower’s face:pronounced cheekbones made even more conspicuous by the absence of sideburns; the ears shaped and angled on his head like angel wings; an intense, creaturely gaze of startled composure—enormous fears, enormous control; a black towel of Levantine hair pulled close around the skull the only sensuous feature; there is a familiar Jewish flare in the bridge of the nose, the nose itself is long and weighted slightly at the tip—the nose of half the Jewish boys who were my friends in high school.Skulls chiseled like this one were shoveled by the thousands from the ovens; had he lived, his would have been among them, along with the skulls of his three younger sisters.


Of course, it is no more horrifying to think of Franz Kafka in Auschwitz than to think of anyone in Auschwitz—it is just horrifying in its own way. But he died too soon for the holocaust.Had he lived, perhaps he would have escaped with his good friend Max Brod, who found refuge in Palestine, a citizen of Israel until his death there in 1968. But Kafka escaping? It seems unlikely for one so fascinated by entrapment and careers that culminate in anguished death.

Read the rest of Roth's essay here.

Is Franz Kafka Overrated? by Joseph Epstein in the The Atlantic, July/August 2013 (posted June 19, 2013). A response to Epstein's essay is "Why Kafka Matters"  by David Ulin, published in the Los Angeles Times, June 26, 2013. For the Kafka kid in you, or the kid in Kafka, see If Gorey and Sendak Had Illustrated Kafka for Kids.