A Review of a New Anthology of Kafka Stories in the Light of Franz Kafka, the Writer, Being Everywhere, and Yet Nowhere
Selected Stories by Franz Kafka (Author), Mark Harman (Introduction and Translation), Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2024.
Two years ago, that would be in 2024, I was in Prague in the lead-up to, and on the occasion of, the centennial of Franz Kafka’s death. I even wrote an article for The Cafe Irreal about my experience. Its title (which I thought to be terribly clever), “Kafka, Kafka Everywhere, and Not a Thought to Think!,” reflected my perception that though Kafka’s name, likeness, and life’s story were to be seen anywhere and everywhere in Prague during that time, there was relatively little about his actual writing. This was enough the case that I made the extreme conjecture in the article’s conclusion that we were “witnessing the integration of Franz Kafka into 21st century celebrity culture. A culture in which, a little bit like the Kardashians, the celebrity's life and loves are widely known but precisely why it was that they became a celebrity in the first place has been forgotten.”
Then, upon my return to the United States, I found a review copy of a new Kafka anthology, Selected Stories by Franz Kafka, edited and translated by Mark Harman, in the mailbox. Given the experience I’d just had in Prague, it was almost like the antidote to some mild poison I’d had the misfortune to ingest. Which is to say that the book offers, especially in Harman’s lengthy introduction, a much superior blending of Kafka’s life and work then was the case in most of the events and displays I’d experienced during the Kafka centennial.
This can be seen in the opening lines of the anthology’s introduction (which is subtitled “A Series of Transformations”), which read: “As a twenty-year-old Franz Kafka conveys his belief in the power of literature with a startling image: ‘A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.’ The power of his work derives at least in part from the intensely personal stakes behind his oblique and often experimental prose, which draws on his vivid inner life, his famously vexed relationship with his father, his tormented imaginings, his subversive playfulness, his philosophical probing, and his existential struggles” (page 1). The next two pages then describe his position in world literature and the personal sacrifices he made to write literature. Only then does Harman begin with specific biographical details (when and where he was born, who his parents were, what they did, etc.) and yet, just a page later, we return to the subject of literature, when Harman writes that Kafka’s “parents had little understanding of, or sympathy for, his literary endeavors.”
And this insistence on framing his life in a specifically literary context -- even in that period before he became the writer that we celebrate today -- continues on. Thus, while we learn that the Altstadter Gymnasium, where Kafka was enrolled at the age of 10, was “notoriously difficult” and that Kafka often feared that he might fail at the school, the point is emphasized that his early exposure to the ancient classics at the secondary school (pupils read in both Greek and Latin) left an “abiding impression on Kafka” that later became evident in stories such as “The New Lawyer” and “Poseidon.” Further, Harman discusses the friends that Kafka made there and at Charles University and how “they would prove essential to his development as a writer and a thinker.” (8) Indeed, it was “to these adolescent friendships that we owe the earliest examples of Kafka’s writing,” with Harman citing a couplet that the 14 year old Kafka inscribed in the yearbook of classmate Hugo Berman (who, we learn, later emigrated to Palestine and became a professor at Hebrew University) that presages what Harman calls Kafka’s later “existential sea-sickness on land”:
There’s a coming and a going
A parting and often no—meeting again
This approach stands in some contrast to, for example, the centennial-related exhibition at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art that, though the curators may have intended otherwise, featured an inordinate focus on Kafka the man. Or, as I state in my article: “the clear majority of artists stated in their commentaries (most of the exhibit's works presented comments from the artist as to what inspired the particular work in question, or what it was about Kafka that inspired their work over the years) that the inspiration for the works in question came from Kafka's diaries, his letters to his lovers, or his letter to his father. Only a minority cited one or more of his works of fiction, and even then the more obviously autobiographical story ‘The Judgment’ figured prominently.”
Harman’s apparent desire to make the introduction into a short, literary biography is furthered by his use of pictures in that section. This is well demonstrated by the black and white picture of a plain wooden writing desk that is verso to the first page of the intro’s recto. The photo’s caption begins “A desk once owned by the Kafka family; probably Franz’s.” And there are several other such – let us call them illuminatory – photos included in the introduction. These would include a picture of the Hasidic Rabbi of Belz with his retinue at the Marienbad spa in 1916, a time and place at which Kafka also encountered him (the text discusses Kafka’s comments about the encounter as well as the influence of Hasidic tales on his writing), and a picture of the interior of the Santa Maria Antica church in Verona, which Kafka visited and described in his diary “in language,” Harman states, “that seems to echo the cathedral scene in The Trial.” (p. 40)
But it is also in the context of the photographs that I can perhaps most clearly, in this brief space, emphasize the difference between a literary biography of Kafka, such as Harman presents, and the more celebrity-oriented biography that the centennial was often projecting. Which is to say that among the more than fifty photographs included in the introduction, only three were of the women that Kafka had close relationships with – Felice Bauer, Milena Jesenská, and Dora Diamant. Contrast this with a German-Austrian TV series, Kafka, that was being premiered in the Czech Republic during the centennial: the miniseries had six episodes in total, the titles of where were “Max,” “Family,” “Felice,” “Office,” “Milena,” and “Dora.”
Not, I want to emphasize, that this wasn’t an interesting group of women. Milena Jesenská, for example, was not only a worthy literary personality in her own right but also a heroic figure in the anti-Nazi resistance, and reading Reiner Stach’s discussion of Felice Bauer not only gives us a unique glimpse into the life of a professional, working woman of that time, but also of her involvement with cutting edge office technology of the time, specifically the Parlorgraph (Kafka: The Decisive Years, pp. 259-61, 281-3). But the issue that I am raising here is, of course, one of striking a balance between Kafka’s literature and his life. That is: why didn’t even one of the six episodes of Kafka reference his literary works, and why should fully half of them have been titled after his “women”? [1]
Here again Harman’s more integrative approach contrasts favorably. Felice Bauer, except for one incidental mention, doesn’t appear until page 33 of the 65-page introduction, when Kafka’s first encounter with her is described. Furthermore, after a few details of that first meeting are given, the discussion soon turns to how their meeting influenced Kafka in his writing of the break-through story “The Judgement.”
***
It might seem at this juncture that this article is not so much a review of Selected Stories by Franz Kafka as it is a point of departure for my continuing ruminations on the treatment of Kafka’s life versus his literature.
However, because I do not want, myself, to fall into the trap of excessively focusing on the life of Kafka (even in the context of criticizing others’ excessive focus on his life), I will turn my attention to what is, after all, the ultimate purpose of the book: presenting a selection of the great writer’s stories through the translations of Harman.
The selection of stories in the anthology is fairly standard and representative of Kafka’s work, and it is presented chronologically such that “A Country Doctor” follows after “In the Penal Colony,” which follows after “The Transformation” (Metamorphosis), which follows after “The Judgement”, etc. It certainly pleased me that “The New Lawyer” and “Poseidon,” two of my favorites, were included among the dozen or so short fiction selections.
I have already noted Harman’s effective use of photographs in the introductory part of the anthology, and this use continues with the use of an in-text photograph to accompany the introductory note to most of the stories. Thus, a picture of the dust jacket of the first edition leads off “A Hunger Artist,” and leading off “A Country Doctor” is a picture of the proof of the title page that shows corrections in Kafka’s own handwriting. For “The Judgement” we get a period photograph showing a distant view of the “apartment building … where Kafka wrote ‘The Judgement’ and of the bridge which he could see from his window,” both of which, of course, figure in the story itself. [2]
And though my rudimentary German means that I cannot be an effective judge of the stylistic fidelity of the translations, I can state that the stories do read well and that Harman makes a real, and unique, attempt to present to the reader the complexities of translating Kafka. There is, to this end, a discussion in the translator’s preface on the broader issues of the translation of Kafka, which are then elaborated on in his use of footnotes in the texts of the stories themselves. Thus, in one example of this, he writes in the preface that “Another challenge for the translator is how to render little words informally known as ‘flavoring particles,’ which carry a range of possible meanings … and so the translator needs to figure out from the context which of the multiple meanings of those little words makes the most sense” (p. xiii). Then, through his use of footnotes, we come across some examples of this in the text, such as in “The Transformation,” where the second paragraph begins:
“What’s happened to me?” he [Gregor Samsa] thought. It was not a dream. His room, an ordinary human’s room, only a little too small, lay quietly* between the four familiar walls… (p. 85)
The asterisked footnote to “quietly” reads: “* ruhig has two meanings, calmly or quietly. In the original text, ruhig occurs, in various forms, some eighty times.”
The same passage illustrates Harman’s additional use of endnotes for the passages which need critical attention that go beyond specific issues of translation. So, when Kafka writes above “It was not a dream,” Harmon asks in the endnote (p. 236), “Who tells us that Gregor’s new bodily appearance is not a dream?” before pointing out how it is that Kafka, in the story, through the narrator, “rules out the possibility that Gregor’s transformation is a waking nightmare, thereby effectively preempting attempts to present his predicament as a fantasy” (an important point, I might add, for an irrealist). This dual use of footnotes and endnotes worked well for me. As a reader of Kafka, the footnotes brought me closer, when I was curious, to the German original while as a translator myself I was interested in some of the issues of translation that came up in the stories. And, though I am not precisely a literary scholar of Kafka, I can, via The Cafe Irreal, lay some claim to being a theorist of Kafka, and in this regard the endnotes were often of real interest as well.
***
It could of course be argued, by way of conclusion, that, if we wanted to fully and absolutely emphasize Kafka’s literature over his biography, we could simply turn to anthologies of his stories that have no introduction at all or ones that only present a brief introduction. In the case of the former, we could point to the three collections published by Twisted Spoon Press several years ago; indeed, this series can further point to its "purity" from any form of biographical or critical intervention by the fact that they reproduce in translation the only three story collections -- Contemplation (1913), A Country Doctor (1920), and A Hunger Artist (1924) -- whose publication was overseen by Kafka himself. An example of an anthology with a brief introduction is the Penguin Classics 2007 anthology Metamorphosis and Other Stories, in which the translator, Michael Hofmann, writes a nine-page introduction that focuses entirely on the stories and the translation of them. Indeed, the only biographical sketch given is on the first page inside the book cover, an “about the author” description that sits above and is a little over twice the length of the “about the translator” description that fills out the page.
But if we are looking for a single volume that presents both a substantial biography of Kafka that never loses sight of his writing, and then seriously presents that writing, then Harman’s Selected Stories by Franz Kafka is that volume.
[Footnote 1] My most striking encounter with this “life and loves of Franz Kafka” theme was at the Franz Kafka Museum in Prague whose exhibition, though it is still up and running, I saw several years ago.
Which is to say that, though the museum does on the whole present a creatively exhibited portrayal of Kafka’s life, times, and work, the memory of the exhibition that stands out for me was when I entered a large room from whose darkness emerged four large, illuminated, black and white portraits of Felice Bauer, Julie Wohryzek, Milena Jesenská and Dora Diamant. Indeed, I recall thinking at that moment that the surest guarantee for a Central European woman of that time to gain immortality was to have dated Kafka.
Nor is it necessary, even for somebody visiting Prague in a non-centennial year, to pay admission to the museum to become familiar with the images and life stories of these women while out and about in Prague: at the McCafe, that is, the “café” portion of the McDonald’s that overlooks the Kafka statue in the center of Prague, there is an exhibit dedicated to Kafka that also features pictures and descriptions of “Kafka’s women.” Back to the Text
[Footnote 2] Of additional interest to our readers here is the fact that the apartment building was long ago torn down and replaced by the Hotel Intercontinental, which is referenced in the title of Cafe Irreal contributor Michal Ajvaz’s first book, Vražda v hotelu Intercontinental (Murder in the Intercontinental Hotel, 1989), despite the fact that there is not a reference in the book to either a murder or that hotel. Back to the Text
G.S. Evans is the coeditor of The Cafe Irreal. His fiction and essays have appeared in various Czech journals, including Host, Labyrint, Listy, A2, Tvar, H_Aluze and Analogon. His translation of the inter-war avant-garde theorist Karel Teige's book The Marketplace of Art was recently published by Rab-Rab Press.
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