Wow, I get the impression our bookshelves look freakishly similar. :)
Kafka has been among my favourite authors since I was a teenager. One of the reasons I am near-fluent in German today is that I was obsessed with wanting to read Kafka's books in their original text. His prose is layered with double-entendre and grammatical devices which do not translate well (or at all) to English. A good example is one of the titles you mentioned, The Metamorphosis. In a biological context, Kafka's word, Verwandlung, does mean metamorphosis, but in non-scientific usage it means "transformation" or simply "change". Or, in Catholic doctrine the same word is used for the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the flesh and blood of Christ. Interestingly, although a Jew, Kafka's religious metaphors drew almost exclusively from Christian symbolism. Yet, as someone who was raised Catholic I have always felt Kafka made more sense out of the inherent contradictions of Christianity than any other writer I encountered.
Fascinating feature of Der Prozeß (The Trial): when it was found (after Kafka's death), the pages were out of order and not consistently numbered. Although the sequence of pages within chapters is easily deduced from the flow of text from one page to the next, each chapter started a fresh page and chapters were not numbered, so some doubt exists as to the intended order of chapters, and, for some chapters, even whether they are not alternative versions of others.
Two other books I loved were Das Schloß (the Castle) and Amerika, despite their having been left unfinished by their author's untimely death. The latter is especially compelling, given that Kafka knew almost nothing about America beyond a few stereotypes and what little he could glean from books, newspapers, and popular culture, and even then gets several details wrong (his Statue of Liberty holds a sword rather than a torch). Nevertheless, as with much of Kafka's writing, it contains the veracity of a dream (and a fever-dream at that).
Well, as you've seen by now, I can go on and on forever on nearly any topic... but I do love Kafka and everything he created in his wonderful twisted vision during his far-too-short life upon our earth.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2009-03-27 04:08 pm (UTC)Kafka has been among my favourite authors since I was a teenager. One of the reasons I am near-fluent in German today is that I was obsessed with wanting to read Kafka's books in their original text. His prose is layered with double-entendre and grammatical devices which do not translate well (or at all) to English. A good example is one of the titles you mentioned, The Metamorphosis. In a biological context, Kafka's word, Verwandlung, does mean metamorphosis, but in non-scientific usage it means "transformation" or simply "change". Or, in Catholic doctrine the same word is used for the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the flesh and blood of Christ. Interestingly, although a Jew, Kafka's religious metaphors drew almost exclusively from Christian symbolism. Yet, as someone who was raised Catholic I have always felt Kafka made more sense out of the inherent contradictions of Christianity than any other writer I encountered.
Fascinating feature of Der Prozeß (The Trial): when it was found (after Kafka's death), the pages were out of order and not consistently numbered. Although the sequence of pages within chapters is easily deduced from the flow of text from one page to the next, each chapter started a fresh page and chapters were not numbered, so some doubt exists as to the intended order of chapters, and, for some chapters, even whether they are not alternative versions of others.
Two other books I loved were Das Schloß (the Castle) and Amerika, despite their having been left unfinished by their author's untimely death. The latter is especially compelling, given that Kafka knew almost nothing about America beyond a few stereotypes and what little he could glean from books, newspapers, and popular culture, and even then gets several details wrong (his Statue of Liberty holds a sword rather than a torch). Nevertheless, as with much of Kafka's writing, it contains the veracity of a dream (and a fever-dream at that).
Well, as you've seen by now, I can go on and on forever on nearly any topic... but I do love Kafka and everything he created in his wonderful twisted vision during his far-too-short life upon our earth.