![]() Gone, too, were Kafka’s misspellings, slips of the pen, sparse and unorthodox punctuation, occasionally muddled or mangled syntax, repetitions, abbreviations, contractions, regionalisms, and other stylistic quirks and infelicities.īrod’s impulse to cover up what he saw as defects went beyond ironing out technical imperfections. Sometimes, where Kafka’s efforts to write resulted in a staccato series of false starts and new iterations that veered off in different directions, Brod rearranged the discontinuous scraps and stitched them together to fabricate a seamless composite, discarding whatever wouldn’t fit into a single, integrated whole. This fertile disarray had hardly been visible in Brod’s edition and its English translation. ![]() In the haste and spontaneity of diary writing, he penned unpolished, error-strewn prose. He wrote in fits and starts, constantly breaking off and beginning again. He crossed things out, made corrections and insertions, relentlessly reworked texts in successive variations. In the same notebook he would alternate among different modes of writing, jotting down observations and reflections, drafting letters and fiction, describing his dreams, now and then interspersing drawings. ![]() A record of his abortive attempts to transfer to the page what he called “the tremendous world I have in my head,” they contain much that is fragmentary and disjointed, stumbling and stuttering. These included the restored version of the diaries that so captivated me. Until Brod’s death in 1968, his versions served as the basis for all translations of Kafka, among them those my friends and I had read in the school library.Īfter Brod, new German editions of Kafka’s posthumous works appeared, which hewed more closely to Kafka’s manuscripts, preserving their rough edges and idiosyncrasies, flux and instability. But readers, whether in German, English or other languages, had access only to Brod’s skewed adaptations of Kafka’s literary bequest. Thanks to Brod’s efforts, Kafka rose to worldwide prominence far beyond what he experienced during his lifetime. His heavy-handed editorial interventions reflected an image of Kafka to which he was wedded, one etched for posterity in a biography he wrote: the pious myth of Kafka as a pure, saintly martyr to literature. Yet Brod also took considerable liberties in refashioning the disorderly mass of material that Kafka had left behind into structurally coherent, smoothly readable editions. It is to Brod that we owe the survival of some of the most groundbreaking, visionary, and influential contributions to modern literature - notably, Kafka’s three unfinished novels, “The Trial,” “The Castle” and “Amerika” (as Brod titled it), and his diaries and letters. After Kafka’s untimely death from complications of tuberculosis in 1924, Brod defied his testamentary instructions to burn all his papers, instead setting out on a decades-long undertaking of publishing his posthumous work. Brod had sanitized and sanctified Kafka, diminishing his complexity as a writer and a human.Ī prolific writer and critic, Max Brod had been Kafka’s closest friend and a champion of his writing since their university days. The only English translation available at that time, published in 1948-49, was based on a bowdlerized and substantially altered German edition that Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor, had prepared. In the case of Kafka’s diaries, this was a particularly fraught matter. But for decades, English-language readers had no way to know their full richness.Īs readers, we often don’t think about how translations can vary based on access to different versions of an original text. ![]() That humor, and so much else about Kafka, is nowhere more evident than in his most intimate writing, his diaries. The nightmarish visions that made Kafka’s name synonymous with modern alienation and anxiety had come to eclipse other facets of his work, including humor. Later I learned that Kafka himself would erupt into laughter while reading his stories to his friends, and I was surprised only that this was portrayed as surprising. I distinctly recall the three of us reading “The Judgment” aloud and bursting out laughing at the passage when the protagonist discovers his father’s underwear is unclean and again when his father stands up on the bed to berate him. Two new friends I’d made through our shared interest in literature had introduced me to his fiction, and we took turns reading the Willa and Edwin Muir translations to each other in the high school library. The first time Franz Kafka’s voice entered my head, I was 15. ![]()
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