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Neumann (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1996). The critical apparatus,
published as a separate volume, includes the not extensive variants
in Kafka s surviving manuscripts. The manuscripts of The Judgement,
The Metamorphosis, and some of the sketches in Meditation survive,
but not that of In the Penal Colony.
The Letter to his Father was made available by Max Brod in the
volume Wedding Preparations in the Country, published in 1953. This
translation follows the manuscript as presented in the volume of the
Critical Edition, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente II, edited by
Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1992), 143 217.
NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION
For readers of a classic written in a language not their own, the
translator has always got there before them, filtering, selecting, dith-
ering, finally having to decide because deciding is what the job
consists in between seemingly fine options, when better judgement
tells one that none of them, in principle and by the facts of the case,
will be the right, true one. What the reader is getting has passed for
a second time through Celan s language-grid , which has both held
something back and let something through; it is already by its choices
to some degree an interpretation. Nowhere does this become more
apparent than in translating Kafka. His texts above all challenge
the reader to a search for meaning, but at the same time are so con-
structed as to frustrate any single interpretation, inviting several,
often incompatible, often only briefly sustainable readings, while the
translator s decision for one fixed option can close off the possibility
of all the others. So a note on the translation in this case turns into a
note on the attempt to deal with indeterminacies, mutually exclusive
alternatives,1 intractabilities.
But I made one decision very early: to try to render Kafka s exceed-
ingly complex syntax as closely as possible. This often meant going
further than English syntax can naturally accommodate. Kafka s vir-
tuoso syntax is in any case unnatural, with its endless sentences pro-
liferating with qualificatory sub-clauses, themselves impeded by
dense clusters of adverbs; with his headlong sequences of appositions,
with no pause for breath in between from a merciful and all devices
for suspending any final resolution to a statement. They are a vehicle
for the way his figures think, as these conduct their seeming-rational
arguments with themselves, which so often, after great expenditure
of mental energy, conclude a paragraph or even a page later with
the proposition they began with, as Georg Bendemann does when
considering whether to summon back his far-away friend, or in
Gregor s panic-stricken attempts to explain his delayed departure to
1
For example, in Meditation are the ( stark durchbrochene ) curtains where the boy
is eating his supper full of holes because they are torn or because they are made of lace?
There is nothing in the context or the (child s? or narrator s?) language to guide one
conclusively to one or the other. I have opted for the latter, but without certainty.
xxxvi Note on the Translation
the chief clerk. These symptoms of the figures bad faith (Georg is
deceiving himself, Gregor deceiving himself as much as the chief clerk)
already strain the German syntax, and ask to be conveyed comparably
in the English translation too. Some compromises are unavoidable,
though I have tried to keep them to a minimum: for example, having
to break up a group of obstructing adverbs, when the obstruction was
the point; or slipping in an and or a present participle to ease the
tense strings of appositions, when the tension was the point. These
are normal tactics in translating from relatively dense German into
looser modern English syntax. Only, with Kafka one has a bad con-
science about it.
Kafka also conveys the zigzag movement of this pseudo-
argumentation by deploying a number of shifty qualifiers: allerdings ,
doch , übrigens , aber , wohl , vielleicht , als ob , and so on. The
problem here is to catch the elusive tone, the location of emphasis.
The range of English resources is every bit as nuanced as the German:
although , besides , anyhow , after all , still , nevertheless , on the
other hand and if and perhaps and but . Still, to get them in the
right place and qualifying the right word... The problem is especially
tricky in those cases where the same qualifier could indicate either
understatement or extremity, duck or rabbit: from fast and beinahe
to ganz and geradezu and the intractable förmlich ; and equally,
from quite , almost , or pretty well , to outright , positively , prac-
tically , those qualifiers, especially literally , that qualify themselves
and really mean not really .
Where Kafka s syntax is elaborate and complex, his vocabulary is
as restricted as the world his figures inhabit, confined to the language
of family, office, and business, as colourless as the drained lives his
figures lead. It is all of a piece with this narrowness of range that the
same words should get repeated: again and again the officer in In the
Penal Colony reiterates the objects of his obsession: the apparatus and
the procedure of its functioning, the new , the old commandant.
The problem for the translator here is one of self-abnegation, of hav-
ing to choose the neutral word and resist the temptation of gratuitous
colour, especially when Kafka s situations are often so absurd as to
seem to invite it: the family hullabaloo when Gregor breaks out is
more properly just a commotion, and the literary pleasure not one of
expressiveness but of ironical contrast between sober style and wild
event. It is telling that the most vivid language is put into the fathers
Note on the Translation xxxvii
mouths, as coarse and energetic as they are themselves, in the fictions
as well as in the Letter to his Father, where it most probably had its
model.2 The style of the early Meditation pieces, on the other hand, is
far more mannered, even playful, more self-consciously literary. One
suspects that the first of Kafka s bonfires contained texts of this kind.
The Letter differs in many ways from the other pieces in the present
collection. Many of its paragraphs are shaped by the rhetoric of foren-
sic attack: Kafka the lawyer makes out the case for the prosecution in
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