Arnon Grunberg

Key words

Model

Coetzee on Kafka and some of his English translators – in NYRB (1998):

‘Naturalness is a concept not easily pinned down, but to Edwin Muir it appears to have included freshness of phrasing and lexical variousness. Thus, paradoxically, the Muirs are often more vivid than Kafka, whose German tends to be restrained, even neutral, and who is not afraid to repeat key words again and again.’

(…)

‘When Kafka is obscure enough to defeat any but an inspired reader (what is a clinging street, eine festhaltende Strasse?), the Muirs’ tactic is to take a guess at what Kafka might have intended, rather than—the last honorable recourse of the baffled translator—to fall back on word by word transposition. Their guesses are not always convincing—here “the obsession of the street.”’

(…)

‘Kafka’s language is generally clear, specific, and neutral; in the novels—The Castle in particular—it can seem monotonous if one is not caught up by the forward drive of the sentences, their urgent but rather abstract energy, for which Kleist’s prose provided Kafka with a model. Brod recalled that “anyone who had the privilege of hearing [Kafka] read his own prose to a small circle, with a rhythmic sweep, a dramatic fire, a spontaneity such as no actor ever achieves, got an immediate impression of the delight in creation and the passion that informed his work.” In its spareness and apparent matter-of-factness, Kafka’s language has been claimed to be typical of the German of Prague, and particularly of the German of assimilated middle-class Jews, but the claim is questionable. It is more likely that it was influenced by the precision of good legal prose, the medium in which Kafka worked day by day. The manuscript of The Castle exhibits a number of Prague German usages. Though Kafka did not change these to standard German in the course of his revisions, he clearly did not intend them to stand in the text as indicating the use of dialect, and (correctly, to my mind) neither the Muirs nor Harman translate them into nonstandard English.
Nor, after the opening chapters of the book, does Kafka maintain any socially realistic distinction between levels of language: the people of the village as much as the Castle officials seem able to produce exegetical monologues on the most trivial of questions at the drop of a hat. Thus the translator, once he or she has found a variety of English that, to his or her mind, does justice to Kafka’s variety of German, does not often have to change gear. Indeed, the temptation to be resisted is to introduce a linguistic variousness that is absent in the original.’

Read the complete essay here.

What is a ‘festhaltender Strasse’ is a good question. A street that is holding on to you? A poet could get away with it. A mystic also maybe.

And the seemingly monotony of Kafa’s language works often better in his shorter pieces.

So called normality is nothing but the monotony that turns out to be absurdity.

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