Kafka Translated : How Translators have Shaped our Reading of Kafka

2020

Edited by Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg & Benno Wagner: Franz Kafka is published by Princeton University Press and copyrighted, © 2008, by Princeton University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for reading and browsing via the World Wide Web. Users are not permitted to mount this file on any network servers.

The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, 2023

In the winter of 1912, an audience of acculturated Germanspeaking Jews gathered in Prague’s Jewish Town Hall to listen to a recital of Yiddish poetry. An introductory lecture that preceded the recital was delivered by none other than Franz Kafka. The lecture centered on the dread that Yiddish (Jargon, as Kafka called it) invoked in its listeners and discussed its borderline position in between languages. This article approaches the question of the language of critique through a close reading of Kafka’s lecture on the Jargon. Focusing first on the monstrous linguistic figure that Kafka attributes to Yiddish, the analysis later zooms in on the relationship between Yiddish and German, a conflictual relationship, according to Kafka, in which Yiddish cannot be translated into German. To better grasp these relations of untranslatability, I turn to Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida’s work on translation, drawing attention to the proximity between Kafka’s perception of Yiddish and Benjamin’s famous reflections on translation. Kafka’s monster Jargon, I argue, opens up an alternative linguistic position, in which language is experienced performatively, as a translation of sorts. As such, it helps theorize an idea of a language that enfolds a critique of identity from within its own vulnerability.

2017

In recent years, 'writing' has become a keyword in Kafka research. Deconstructivist critics argue that Kafka's primary aim was not the creation of completed works; rather, writing, the continuous transformation of life into Schrift (meaning text or scripture), was for him an aim in itself-and, at the same time, the real and only subject of his texts. 1 Such claims should not remain uncontested. Though writing for Kafka was obviously better than not being able to write, it was definitely no substitute for the production, and indeed the publication, of finished works. Such debates aside, it is clear that Kafka developed a very original and unorthodox way of writing, which in turn had important consequences for the shape of his novels and shorter prose works. This chapter discusses the main features of Kafka's personal version of écriture automatique ('automatic writing'-writing which bypasses conscious control); his techniques for opening a story, continuing the writing flow and closing it; the purpose of his self-corrections; and the consequences that this mode of literary production had for Kafka's novels. Writing in Perfection: 'The Judgement' Kafka was notoriously critical of his own work, but there is one text that even to him appeared faultless: 'Das Urteil' ('The Judgement', 1912). Strangely enough, his main reason for approving of the narration was the way in which it had been written: 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. .. The fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing in water. Several times during this night I carried my own weight on my back. How everything can be said, how for everything, for the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again. .. At two I looked at the clock for the last time. As the maid walked through the anteroom for the first time I wrote the last sentence. .. The conviction verified

2011

The editors and contributors owe their collaboration on this volume to the Centre for Advanced Study (CAS) in Oslo, Norway. Two of the editors-Jakob Lothe and Beatrice Sandberg-were members of the Narrative Theory and Analysis research project, which was proposed and led by Jakob and hosted and funded by CAS during the 2005-2006 academic year. CAS supported not just the project but also a symposium on Franz Kafka in May 2006 that served as the genesis of this book. We owe a profound debt to Professor Willy Østreng, who was director of the Centre at the time we were there, and the administrative staff of CAS, for their friendliness, encouragement, and assistance. Additionally, CAS generously contributed funding to offset the publication costs of this volume. We have also benefited from the collegial intellectual atmosphere fostered at CAS by the other members of the research team: Daphna erdinast-Vulcan, Anniken greve, Jeremy hawthorn, J. hillis Miller, James Phelan, Anette h. Storeide, Susan R. Suleiman, and Anne Thelle. Finally, two of the editors wish to give special thanks to the third-Ronald Speirs-for his invaluable input, not only generally but also with particular regard to his contribution to the writing of the introduction.

New German Review: A Journal for Germanic Studies, 1994

When considering the vast bulk of scholarly research that has been produced in connection with an author such as Franz Kafka, the claim that any one of his texts in particular has been overlooked may at first appear either hard to believe or beside the point. Nevertheless, when it comes to the editorial history of one of Kafka's stories entitled "Der Dorfschullehrer" ("The Village Schoolteacher") this claim does not seem altogether invalid. 1 Although there definitely have been some critics who have tried to include the story in their general assessment of Kafkian prose, (e.g. Wilhelm Emrich, James Rolleston, Margret Walther-Schneider and Herbert K.raft) 2 the same kind of lively debate has not developed around this text as it has in the case of other Kafka stories. 3 Consequently, despite these isolated attempts over the years to bring the story more into the critical limelight, there still have been surprisingly few studies that place this text at the center of their focus. 4 One feature that is particularly striking about this text, and one that has been consistently overlooked by the critics, is the way in which it is itself focused on issues of marginalisation and a certain resistance to interpretation. This story, which contains a description of how a phenomenon documented in a written text fails to gain critical recognition almost appears to have transported that content beyond the framework of the original where it has become a description of the story's own inability to call critical attention to itself. In this way the text seems to have predicted its own fate among the critical community: a text so obsessively devoted to the marginal, insignificant and 'overlooked' seems to have undergone the same treatment at the hands of the critics. This pronounced lack of cr itical interest in a story by an author most of whose other works have been scrutinized in great detail, might lead one to

Thesis Manchester Uk the University of Manchester 2011, 2011

Declaration and Copyright Statement 4 Acknowledgment 5 Introduction: Franz Kafka and Maurice Blanchot: The Space for the Other in Writing 6 Chapter 1: Literature in Blanchot: Worklessness as Spacing between Word and Its Referent 30 Chapter 2: What is Worklessness in Kafka? 50

Philosophy and Kafka, eds. Brendan Moran and Carlo Salzani, 2013

The term Kafkaesque inherits the confusion, distortion, surreal, absurdity and sense of foreboding. The elements of terror and awe are well developed and articulated through the characters and critical situations in which they are placed by Kafka. Fredrick Robert in his work Franz Kafka: Represented Man states that Kafkaesque is more about mysticism, unknown power and human fear. It constitutes the numerous characteristics such as distortion of time and space, unavoidable sense of menace and foreboding and also the mechanism of panopticon. Kafka's approach to the novels is censorious: he artistically left his characters in implausible situation that bring out the inexplicable reality of the modern world. Kafkaesque also encompasses the sexual and political repression that lead to the acquisition of framework within which the notion of awe and menace is panopticized. The structure of power that framed the term Kafkaesque is critiqued through Foucault's work Discipline and Punishment. Kafkaesque is symbolic of mundane world that seemed complex, irrational, unjust and oppressed. Kafka has created the world that consists of humans who endured the pain excreted from the labyrinth of terror and menace. The repressed sexuality is an essential characteristic that structured the term Kafkaesque distortions, considering the historical representation of Kafka's personal experiences it is anatomized through Foucault's History of sexuality. Therefore surreal events that draft the Kafkaesque bring out the quirks of reality representing the modern world constantly proliferate the sense of awe and menace in contrast to the mysterious world of Kafka