On Kafka - Karen Leeder in TLS:
‘Reiner Stach’s new edition of Kafka’s most famous novel, Der Process (The Trial), is the first in a planned five-volume series of Kafka’s works. The novel opens with the iconic everyman Josef K. waking to be arrested “without having done anything wrong”. The reader then follows his blundering attempts to assert his innocence and access the courts that accuse him; he is finally executed, none the wiser, “like a dog”. But the story of the novel is almost as peculiar as the story it tells. Kafka’s first editor, his friend Max Brod, saved his manuscripts from destruction twice – once by disobeying Kafka’s instruction to destroy them, then again fifteen years later by smuggling them out of Prague in a suitcase the very night that the Nazis occupied the city. For publication Brod assembled a version of the novel from unnumbered fragments, flyleaves and bits of text in notebooks, placing them in the order he thought Kafka might have intended and changing spelling, punctuation and many other details he deemed to be errors.
The handwriting of the manuscript makes clear what Brod did not: that when Kafka sat down in mid-August 1914, two weeks after the start of the First World War and on the heels of his abandoned engagement with his on-off fiancée Felice Bauer, the writer penned the first and last chapters together. Over the next years he began many aborted chapters in which Josef K. attempts to find his way through the labyrinths of the law, but in which Kafka also tries to find a path between his starting point and the inevitable end. This task he never completed.’
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‘The real strength of this edition is the almost 150 pages of context that cumulatively guide our reading of the influential work. Stach comes at this task as the author of a monumental three-volume biography of Kafka – which the Nobel laureate Imre Kertész called “a novel in itself” – and with this authority he aims to free the text from the sprawling interpretative framework that has accrued around it. In this spirit his glossary is firmly focused on aspects of narrative technique, on the radically limited perspective that does not move beyond the narrow scope of what the protagonist can see, hear, experience and understand. He also highlights places where Kafka reveals – unobtrusively, with the addition of a single innocuous word – the discrepancies between what Josef K. thinks or says and what he does. Most intriguing, alongside the reflection on dream motifs, is the way Stach draws out what he calls the “mirror function” of court. Rather than the arbitrary intervention of a powerful outside authority, the court emerges from this reading as something that appears when Josef K. summons it and disappears when he rejects it.
Stach also strives to illuminate the humour so often lost in the nightmare: Josef K. helplessly proffering his Radfahrlegitimation (a licence to ride a bike, required at the time) as proof of identity to the arresting officers. Discussion of Kafka’s corrections also serves to better understand the tiny but powerful change in the first sentence from gefangen (captured) to the resonant verhaftet (arrested); the addition of a scheinbar (apparently) to emphasize Josef K.’s ignorance; or the obsessive rewriting of the final sentence until it reached its final, brilliant balance: “‘Like a dog!’ he said; it seemed as though the shame was to outlive him”.’
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‘All translation is difficult, but rendering Kafka especially so. The difficulty resides in the fact that, as the Kafka translator Michael Hofmann observes, his language is “as approachable as it is strange”. If Kafka’s Prague German is austere, it also rests on ambiguity and self-consciously plays games. But multiple layers of meaning that are held in tandem in one language rarely offer themselves in the same way in another language. Faced with a term, a translator must choose.
A case in point is the famous first sentence of the story known as “The Metamorphosis”, which Harman retitles “The Transformation”: “Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt”.
Harman has: “One morning when Gregor Samsa awoke in his bed from restless dreams he found himself transformed into a monstrous insect”.
The word Ungeziefer is famously non-specific, indicating something like vermin or a pest. Equally ungeheuer – the opposite of geheuer, or familiar – ranges in meaning from egregious to monstrous. A translator must decide whether to maintain the impression of deliberate ambiguity, for example with “some kind of monstrous vermin” (Joyce Crick’s solution for Oxford World’s Classics); or focus the inner eye with the splendidly specific “cockroach” (Hofmann for Penguin Classics). Kafka had a horror of an actual insect being depicted on the cover of his work; although the writer and entomologist Vladimir Nabokov claimed to have identified the precise species of beetle, in fact the creature Gregor becomes is a deliberate shapeshifter in terms of form and scale.’
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‘Such flaws notwithstanding, all three of these works are united in a valuable campaign to bring Kafka back to his readers. This can never be a bad thing: Kafka was known both for laughing aloud as he read his texts to friends and for refusing to explain them. One of his parables, “Prometheus”, unpublished in his lifetime and not included by Harman, reports four versions of the legend of the Titan, chained to a rock for betraying the secrets of the gods to men and fated to have his liver eaten afresh every day by an eagle – for eternity. In Kafka’s version, after the gods have grown weary, the eagle has grown weary and even the legends have faded away, there nevertheless remains “the inexplicable mass of rock”.’
Read the article here.
The court is at our disposal, or at least the disposal of Josef K.
No explanations, just laughter.
We must learn to laugh without feeling the need to explain ourselves. Silence is second-best, after laughter.