A hundred years after Franz Kafka’s death, two new books testify to his enduring appeal and make the case for reading him afresh. Mark Harman’s translation, Selected Stories, returns to the spikiness of the German original, and the anthology A Cage Went in Search of a Bird showcases 10 contemporary writers’ responses to the Kafkaesque.
Published in honour of the centenary, the short stories in the collection use a line, idea or atmosphere from Kafka as inspiration. They share a method: take an aspect of modern life that appears banal and view it through the lens of the Kafkaesque to reveal its underlying strangeness. So, Elif Batuman describes a surreal flat viewing that becomes a kind of existential tribunal, Tommy Orange writes a parable about Covid anxiety and Naomi Alderman explores a world in which artificial intelligence has rendered us absurdly interconnected.
Helen Oyeyemi’s Hygiene unfolds like a nightmare about online intimacy in which the date you believe you’re texting morphs into a bizarre unknown persecutor who wants to know: “Are you just another slob looking to leave some sort of mark on every pristine expanse you stray across?” The funniest story in the collection is by Charlie Kaufman, whose films have long been mining Kafkaesque territory. His postmodern tale about an autofiction writer trapped in the ever tightening loops of an identity crisis also doubles as a commentary on the perils of attempting to interpret Kafka.
Some of the most interesting stories in the collection work to harness the latent political anger inherent in Kafka’s portrayal of arbitrary systems of power. Headache by Leone Ross is a truly sinister story that reflects on the prejudices underpinning a healthcare system that consistently fails women of colour. The formula is a generative one, as Kafka’s distinctive world vision is highly compatible with modern life.
Selected Stories, translated and edited by Harman, offers some of Kafka’s best-known short writings alongside more obscure, fragmentary passages, arranged chronologically. An extensive introduction places Kafka within his context and teases out parallels between his life and art. Knowing, for instance, that his day job as an insurance clerk involved sifting through injured workers’ claims sheds light on one of his most enduring legacies – and a hallmark of the Kafkaesque – a vision of the world in which the individual is always at the mercy of senseless bureaucracy. But Harman’s introduction also does a good job of unsettling the stern image of Kafka that exists in the popular imagination; extracts from letters and diaries show him as surprisingly tender and funny.
The impulse to reveal a different Kafka to the one we think we know is at the heart of this new translation. Over the years the irregularities in the original writings have been smoothed over; Kafka’s friend and posthumous editor Max Brod did his best to clean up the notebooks, while subsequent English translations have sought to standardise and improve the text. Harman’s approach is to return to the original, attempting to mirror the German syntax as closely as possible and to retain idiosyncrasies such as Kafka’s sudden and disorienting shifts in tense. Annotations alert us to the untranslatable ambiguities of certain words, and a substantial footnote is dedicated to deciphering the type of verminous creature we are supposed to envision as the hero of Kafka’s most iconic story The Metamorphosis, which Harman strikingly translates as The Transformation, arguing that the former is inaccurate and inappropriately Ovidian.
All of this may seem like mere pedanticism. What exact species of insect – if indeed it was an insect – Gregor Samsa woke up as one morning is a question that may have tormented Nabokov but is unlikely to hold the attention of most well-adjusted readers for more than a few seconds. The point of Harman’s critical apparatus is not to distract the reader from the text but to introduce a note of uncertainty. When a writer is as famous as Kafka, a complacency creeps over the way we think about their work. We don’t need to have read Kafka to know what he wrote about, or to identify an experience as Kafkaesque. Harman’s unexpected choices and extensive notes are a reminder that the way we choose to translate and interpret a text isn’t fixed. Selected Stories returns to Kafka some of his original strangeness.
