Kafka by Luis Scafatti

Review

What we learn about Kafka from his uncensored diaries

This article is more than 5 months old

On the centenary of his death, a new English translation of the great writer’s journals reveals some surprising details

Stuart Jeffries

Wednesday 1 May 2024

A

fter his death on 3 June 1924, a letter was found in Franz Kafka’s office in Prague addressed to Max Brod. “Dear Max, 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.”

Diaries by Franz Kafka review – caught in the act

Franz Kafka

Diaries by Franz Kafka review – caught in the act

This article is more than 5 months old

His uncensored journals disclose a messier, more sexual, complex figure – and reveal much about the process of writing

Chris Power

Wednesday 24 April 2024

 

In the late summer of 1917, following the first signs of the tuberculosis that would kill him within a decade, Franz Kafka went to stay with his sister in the Bohemian countryside. During this unexpectedly calm period in an otherwise perennially besieged life, he wrote a series of aphorisms. One of them runs: “The true path is along a rope, not a rope suspended way up in the air, but rather only just over the ground. It seems more like a tripwire than a tightrope.”

 

Franz Kafka letter shows author’s anguished struggle with writer’s block

This article is more than 3 months old

Letter to friend and publisher Albert Ehrenstein, to be auctioned in June, details struggle to write at time of tuberculosis diagnosis

Kate Connolly in Berlin

Monday 3 June 2024

A rare letter written by Franz Kafka to his publisher shows just how anguished a struggle it was for the Bohemian writer to put pen to paper, especially as his health deteriorated.

 

The Head of Franz Kafka, at Prague’s Quadrio shopping mall.

Franz Kafka’s Prague: a centenary tour of the writer’s home city

A hundred years after his death, the author’s presence is as strong as ever in the Czech capital – from his childhood homes and the literary cafes he frequented to the remarkable buildings immortalised in his work

Paul Sullivan

Monday 3 June 2024

It’s a boiling summer’s day in Prague and I’m staring into the austere face of Franz Kafka. Not the real Kafka, of course – he died exactly a century ago, which is why I’m here – but a cast-iron plaque on the wall of his birthplace. The house, a replica as it turns out, sits pretty much on Old Town Square, which as usual is thronged with tourists snapping pics of its fairytale architecture, sipping drinks on terraces and gawking at its 15th-century astronomical clock. It’s impossible to imagine Kafka – 6ft tall and skinny, with dark, intense eyes – in this vibrant, carefree milieu. But then the Prague that Kafka was born into, in 1883 – the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, part of the Austro-Hungarian empire – was a very different city. And Kafka himself, alienated both as a Jew and a minority German speaker, had a sensitive imagination that interpreted the city’s narrow, winding streets as claustrophobic and its looming spires as threatening.

Franz Kafka

Review

Kafka: Selected Stories, edited by Mark Harman review – the master who never wasted a word

A Franz Kafka scholar’s perceptive annotation and translation highlights every subtle shade of humour and brilliant aphorism in these singular tales

John Banville

9 July 2024

In the case, the singular case, of Franz Kafka, the law of diminishing returns might be applied in an adapted form: the more diminished the text, the richer the return. He was a master of the fragment, and an aphorist every bit as great as Nietzsche or Rochefoucauld. Consider these few examples. “A cage went in search of a bird.” “I feel like a Chinaman going home; but then, I am a Chinaman going home.” “There is a destination but no way there; what we refer to as way is hesitation.” “In your struggle with the world, hold the world’s coat.” And then there is that famous, and famously sly, response he gave to his friend Max Brod who had asked if there was any hope to be had in the world: “Plenty of hope – for God – no end of hope – only not for us.”

Who was Franz Kafka?

Who was Franz Kafka?

Franz Kafka was one of the greatest German-speaking writers of the 20th century. Born in Prague (then Austria-Hungary) in 1883, he received little recognition for his literary work during his lifetime. In his works, Kafka deals with themes such as alienation, existential fear and the absurdity of modern life.

Grey-eyed-Kafka

• 
  
• Avishag Zafrani 
• 7 July 2021
• 
  

Kafka’s art is accessible again. Hundreds of his drawings are now available, free, from the National Library of Israel, where the Kafka Archive–a collection of his work saved by his friend and collaborator Max Brod–remains to this day. The only disappointment, it would seem, is that there is no unpublished text among these recovered papers. On the other hand, one stresses the number of drawings and illustrations, which must then have a greater meaning than expected…

Kafka / “Only In This Way Can Writing Be Done”

“Only In This Way Can Writing Be Done” — Franz Kafka

by AINEHI EDORO

October 10, 2012

1912

23 September:  This story, “The Judgement,” I wrote at one sitting during the night of the 22nd-23rd, from ten o’clock at night to six o’clock in the morning. I was hardly able to pull my legs out from under the desk, they had got so stiff from sitting. The fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing over water. Several times during the night I heaved my own weight on my back. How everything can be said, how for everything, for the strongest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again. How it turned blue outside the window. A wagon rolled by. Two men walked across the bridge. At two I looked at the clock for the last time. As the maid walked through the ante-room for the first time I wrote the last sentence. Turning out the light and the light of day. The slight pains around my heart. The weariness that disappeared in the middle of the night. The trembling entrance into my sisters’ room. Reading aloud. Before that, stretching in the presence of the maid and saying, “I’ve been writing until now.” The appearance of the undisturbed bed, as though it had just been brought in. The conviction verified that with my novel-writing I am in the shameful lowlands of writing. Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul. Morning in bed. The always clear eyes. Many emotions carried along in the writing–joy, for example–that I shall have something beautiful… — 

Franz Kafka

James G. Todd / The Trial by Kafka

 

Franz Kafka's The Trial: Josef K's End, 1977

THE TRIAL 

BY FRANZ KAFKA

Illustrations by James G. Todd

Franz Kafka's The Trial: Josef K. Meets Painter, 1977

Franz Kafka's The Trial: Leni's Kiss, 1977

 

El Lissitsky, ‘Announcer’, 1923 © Wikiart

 

Kafka’s Sirens (Revisiting a Jewish Generation)

What did Kafka’s work mean to the rising generation of German Jews who embraced it with fervor in the 1910s and 1920s? What experience of the modern European Jew was refracted for them in his writings? Faithful to Kafka’s heartfelt cry of “Psychology, Never Again!” Bruno Karsenti traces the profoundly modern path that Kafka traced out for this generation, a path that one could tread without nostalgia for a lost Orthodox world, but along which one draws strength from a tradition that cannot be silenced, even to the point that its silence moves us.

• Bruno Karsenti 
• 
  
• 
  
• / 7 July 2021

“Kafka kept asking himself: ‘How do we get through life?’” Interview with Reiner Stach

 

Kafka and his sister Ottla

 

“Kafka kept asking himself: ‘How do we get through life?’” Interview with Reiner Stach

• 
  
• Ruth Zylberman 
• 13 April 2023
• 
  

In a magnificent biography, Reiner Stach brings to light, with scientific meticulousness and a rare narrative brilliance, a Kafka in colour, caught up in his intimate contradictions and those of his time.  In this first volume, devoted to the years 1910-1915, the reader follows step by step his discovery of Yiddish theatre, the consolidation of his vocation as a writer and his attempt to establish a love and marital bond with Felice Bauer through a monumental epistolary relationship. A meeting with Reiner Stach, who renews our vision of Kafka and our perception of the biographical genre.

Kafka’s K.

Franz Kafka, Author anonymous.

Kafka’s K.

• Jean-Pierre Lefebvre 
• 22 March 2021

Jean-Pierre Lefebvre is the author of the most recent French translations of Kafka’s short stories, novellas and novels, published in the Pléiade (the French Great Books collection) in 2018. He is currently editing Kafka’s diaries and letters for publication. For the first issue of the review K., we could not help but ask him what images and ideas came to him when he considered Kafka’s initial. He answered us as an astute translator and philologist, attentive to the subtle messages contained in names and words, and as a poet for whom Kafka’s work is a mental landscape to be contemplated.

 

A Kafka for Our Times

A new completist edition of Kafka’s diaries lures readers into the Kafkaesque experience of seeing the author dissolve into an auto-fictional scrapheap

BY

MARCO ROTH

JANUARY 17, 2023

My first copy of Kafka’s diaries was salvaged from a crowded shelf in Bookleaves, a secondhand shop on New York’s West Fourth Street. I paid $2 for each volume—the price marked in pencil on the overleaf. Two standard-size (8-inch-by-5.25-inch) paperbacks slid easily into the side pockets of the overcoat I’d thrifted from my father’s closet. By that point, my senior year of high school, my father had lost so much weight from his illness that the coat no longer warmed him. Although the garment always remained too big, it was plenty warm for me, and I never then doubted I’d eventually fill it.

A Letter on Kafka

 

Franz Kafka

A Letter on Kafka

On faithful translation and who it is for

BY

ROSS BENJAMIN

AND

MARCO ROTH

JANUARY 19, 2023

Editor’s note: Earlier this week, Tablet Critic at Large Marco Roth reviewed a new translation of Franz Kafka’s diaries (“A Kafka for Our Times”). 

Marco Roth notes that an important text in Kafka’s diaries—his first draft of what became the opening of the unfinished novel posthumously titled Amerika—appears in his diary notebooks out of chronological order, because Kafka broke it off in mid-sentence and then resumed writing it in one of his earlier notebooks. Roth then misleadingly implies that the new Schocken edition of the Diaries, in my translation, doesn’t provide guideposts to help readers navigate this: “The reader must stumble on the second half first, without benefit of footnotes or an index entry.” He neglects to mention that the words Continuation of the text from page 256 appear in parentheses and italics before the second half of the draft begins (on p. 86), and that a superscript at the end of the first sentence refers readers to endnote 219, which explains “Continuation of the first part, contained in the Sixth Notebook (pp. 244-256), of the text …” In the Sixth Notebook the first half of the draft likewise refers readers to an endnote after the first few words: note 606, which cross-references the earlier pages and notes. At the end of the first half there’s another italicized parenthetical: Continuation of the text on page 86. Finally, in the Translator’s Preface, on p. xiv, I highlight the fact that this draft was published in this sequence as one of the idiosyncrasies of a faithful transcription of Kafka’s handwritten diaries. The necessity of keeping to the sequence of the notebooks arose from Kafka’s occasional habit of grabbing an older notebook that happened to be at hand to continue his diary writing in its remaining blank pages, sometimes from the back, without dating every entry.