by Franz Kafka
The struggle began. My two hands clapped shut the book I had been reading and pushed it aside so that it didn’t get in the way. They saluted me and hailed me as their referee. Then the fingers were grappling with one another, and the hands began their scuttling along the table edge, now right now left, depending on which was prevailing. I did not take my eyes off them. If they are my hands, I must be a fair referee, otherwise I’ll be guilty of a miscarriage of justice. But my job is not an easy one, both palms take advantage of the dark for various bits of skullduggery that I must not overlook, so I press my chin down on the tabletop, and from now on nothing escapes my notice. All my life, without my having anything against the left, I have favored the right. If the left at any point had complained, I would — fair-minded and conciliatory as I am — promptly have put an end to the abuse. But it didn’t make a murmur and merely hung down at my side; while the right might be exuberantly doffing my hat on the street, the left timidly bumped against my thigh. That was no sort of preparation for the battle that was now commencing. Little left wrist, how will you seek to prevail against the mighty right? How assert your girlish digits in the grip of those five others? This isn’t a fair fight, more the ruthless extinction of the left. Already it’s been driven back to the table’s far corner, with the right pounding against it rhythmically like the piston of a machine. If in this dire emergency I hadn’t had the saving idea that these are my own hands that are fighting and that it’s possible for me with a slight jerk to pull them apart, and hence put an end to their fight and their extremity — if I hadn’t happened to have that thought, then the left would have been snapped off at the wrist and thrown off the table and the right, with the immoderateness of the victor, would have driven up into my watching face like the five-headed hound of hell itself. Instead of which, behold them now, lying peaceably together, the right stroking the back of the left, and I, the dishonest referee, complaisantly nodding.
Sweet snake, why so distant, come closer, even closer, there, enough, stay there. Oh, you have no discipline. How am I to have mastery over you when you are so undisciplined. It will be a difficult job. Let me begin by asking you to curl up. Curl up, I said, and you stretch out. Don’t you understand me? You don’t. I am talking to you plainly: curl up. No, you don’t understand. So, I’ll demonstrate it to you with my stick. First you must describe a large circle, then a second inside the first, and so on. If you are still holding your head up, then lower it slowly to the melody of the flute I will play later, and when I stop, then you too stop, with your head in the middle of the innermost circle.
The great swimmer! the people called. The great swimmer! I was coming from the Olympics in the city of X, where I had obtained a world record in swimming. I stood on the steps of the station of my native town — which is it now? — and gazed down at the crowd, indistinct in the evening sun. A girl whose cheek I dandled swiftly draped a cloak over me that said in some foreign language: for the Olympic champion. A car drew up and several gentlemen made me get in, two gentlemen accompanied me, the mayor and someone else. In no time we were in a festive hall, a choir was singing up in a gallery as I stepped in, all the guests, several hundred of them, rose to their feet and chanted something I couldn’t quite make out. On my left was a minister, I don’t know why when he introduced himself I was so alarmed by the word, I eyed him up and down in panic before coming to my senses, on my right was the wife of the mayor, a well-endowed lady indeed, everything about her, especially at chest height, seemed to be bristling with roses and peacock feathers. Opposite me was a man with a strikingly pale face, I missed his name when we were introduced, he had set his elbows down on the table — he had been awarded an unusual amount of space — and stared into space, he did not speak, and on either side of him were two beautiful fair-haired girls who seemed to be in a good mood and had no end of things to say, so that I didn’t know which of them to look at. Beyond that, in spite of the lavish lighting, I couldn’t make out who was there, perhaps because the scene was in continual motion, servants were running here and there serving food, toasts were drunk, perhaps there was even too much illumination. Also, there was a certain amount of disorder — though in no way excessive — because some of the guests, ladies especially, were sitting with their backs to the table and in such a way, furthermore, that not the backs of their chairs but their actual backs grazed the table. I pointed out this fact to the girls opposite, but — though so talkative otherwise — they didn’t have anything to say about it, just looked at me and smiled. When a bell gave the signal — the servants stopped where they were between the rows of chairs — the fat man opposite me got up and gave a speech. I only wonder why the man was so sad! During his speech, he continually mopped his face with his handkerchief, which might have been understandable in view of his bulk and the heat of the room and the strain of giving a speech, but I distinctly noticed that the whole thing was a subterfuge intended to conceal the fact that he was wiping tears from his eyes. After he had finished, I of course stood up and gave a rejoinder. I felt positively compelled to, because there were a few things here and for all I knew elsewhere as well that seemed to call for a clear and public explanation, for which reason I began:
Respected guests! It may have come to your attention that I hold a world record, but if you were to ask me how I came by it, I would have no satisfactory reply. You see, I can’t really swim at all. I always wanted to learn, but I never had an occasion to. So how come I was sent by my country to participate in the Olympic Games? A question that preoccupies me too. To begin with, I must tell you that this is not my fatherland, and try as I may, I cannot understand a word of what is spoken here. The most obvious explanation would be some mix-up, but there is no mix-up, I hold the record, I went home, my name is what it is said to be, everything so far is true, but beyond that point nothing is true, I am not in my homeland, I do not know you and cannot understand you. Now something else that not exactly — but at least diffusely — repudiates the idea of a mix-up: it doesn’t greatly bother me that I don’t understand you, nor does it greatly seem to bother you that you don’t understand me. All I took from the previous speaker’s speech was that it was terribly sad, but not only is this knowledge enough for me, it is in fact too much. And this is how things stand with every conversation I have had since my arrival here. But to get back to my world record [. . .]
A legend is an attempt to explain the inexplicable; emerging as it does from a basis of truth, it is bound to end in the inexplicable.
We have four legends concerning Prometheus. According to the first of them, for betraying the gods to mankind, he was shackled to a peak in the Caucasus, and the gods sent eagles that ate at his liver as it kept growing back.
According to the second, the pain of the jabbing beaks drove Prometheus ever deeper into the rocks until he became one with them.
According to the third, his betrayal was forgotten in the course of millennia, the gods forgot, the eagles forgot, he himself forgot.
According to the fourth, everyone grew tired of the procedure that had lost its raison d’être. The gods grew tired, the eagles. Even the wound grew tired and closed.
The real riddle was the mountains.
Afterword
Franz Kafka is the master of the literary fragment. In no other European author does the proportion of completed and published works loom quite so . . . small in the overall mass of his papers, which consist largely of broken-off beginnings. The prose works that Kafka viewed as finished and which he submitted for publication take up perhaps 350 pages of print, barely a tenth of the whole oeuvre (if one includes the diaries, which contain numerous literary efforts). This is to leave out of account those hundreds of manuscript pages that Kafka personally destroyed or whose destruction he ordered, as well as the numerous notebooks from his final year, whose fate remains a matter of speculation today.
The fragile, fragmentary quality of Kafka’s work has had interestingly divergent consequences: on t
he one hand, it has presented editors and readers with considerable difficulties; on the other, it has caused us to begin to take the literary fragment seriously. World literature is inconceivable without Kafka’s best-known work, The Trial — there are adaptations of it in film and as graphic novel — and in both plot and nightmarish atmosphere, The Trial has affected millions of readers to the degree that the book is hardly any longer considered as what it is: a fragment. Moreover, we have come to accept that there can be such a thing as a completed masterly fragment. Kafka’s three novels, none of them finished, have played no small part in this development.
But what do we do with all the other writing? What is the adequate form for the publication and reception of a work that consists of beginnings of all lengths? Kafka’s friend and first editor, Max Brod, tried to resolve the problem by taking a hand himself, supplying his own titles and cutting away incomprehensible material — all with the aim of presenting actual “works” and of rescuing Kafka from the stigma of a failed author. This is not the way one would proceed nowadays. So, in 1982, S. Fischer Verlag embarked on a critical edition in which every recorded sentence of Kafka’s is presented in its original context, regardless of whether the author endorsed it as publishable, rewrote it, broke off after a few words, or simply deleted it. Not only the major manuscript notebooks were submitted to this process, but so was every single page, even small notebooks filled with pencil scribblings, even single scraps of paper, whose place in the chronology had to be found. The twelve volumes of this critical edition (there is a volume of letters still to come) has served as a dependable basis for all further editions of single works as well as of all new translations.
As an edition, this is a considerable advance, because with it we can, as never before, see Kafka in his entirety. But critical editions address themselves to, shall we say, a limited readership. Academic presentation and generally dry-as-dust philological commentaries scare off the lover of literature, who is looking for something to “merely” read and enjoy, not to study the texts or learn in detail of their genesis. A critical edition is indeed capable of launching new waves of reception — especially if it comes with surprising discoveries — but it still needs general editions for non-academic readers to spread these discoveries and make them available to a wider readership.
It must be said that Kafka’s fragments offer considerable resistance to such an undertaking. They require of the reader that she negotiate a vast number of texts of every length and form, without the aid of a familiar title, say, or an order established by the author — and, yes, in many cases it’s not even clear whether a text was broken off or viewed by Kafka as finished.
Kafka’s unpublished stories and the compilation of short and very short fragments take up two large volumes of the Fischer edition totalling some 1,100 pages (Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, volumes I and II, first published in 1992 and 1993), with each volume accompanied by a further volume of textual variants and commentary. These are literary treasure houses whose fullness, when one browses through them, is simply astounding, because aside from the novels — which of course are in their separate volumes — they contain everything that the term fragment can offer: from the flash of an idea that doesn’t even take up a complete sentence, to a pantomimically sketched scene, to a substantial and almost achieved story.
There is a plenitude that is hard to master and that in and of itself becomes intractable: the reader will run into some jewel, and not find it again without long seeking. Indexes or other editorial aids are mostly inapplicable to these texts, and the paperback editions that merely cut away the variants and commentaries didn’t change that. Hence, decades after their first publication, Kafka’s fragments have remained terra incognita, even for the majority of his German readers.
The difficulties and obstacles when it comes to the translation of such chaotic material are comparable. While there are innumerable renderings of classic Kafka tales like Metamorphosis, there have only been a very few, mostly half-hearted attempts at presenting the unpublished fragments in other languages. As a result, we have Kafka as a major twentieth-century author in many languages — even as reading for schoolchildren — but what readers see in all these languages is only the tip of the iceberg, with its gigantic base obscured from sight. Kafka’s fragments are literally “lost” to all these readers and will probably remain so for years to come.
The situation in English is no better. In 1954, Schocken Books issued a now out-of-print volume, Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings, edited by Max Brod and translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins. Alongside Kafka’s “Letter to his Father,” this volume actually contains no complete “stories,” only “other writings” in the form of notes, fragments, and aphorisms. This was the first, and for a long time the only attempt to allow the English-speaking reader access to Kafka’s workshop. In 2012, Sun Vision Press published Ida Pfitzner’s translation of the complete volume I of the Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, under the title Abandoned Fragments. The far longer volume II — containing Kafka’s later writings, from 1916 to 1924 — has yielded a few individual translations of prominent pieces, particularly the unfinished story “The Burrow” and the Zürau Aphorisms, but the great majority of the pieces have been neglected for decades and remain practically unknown.
The present edition offers a representative selection from volume II of the Nachgelassene Schriften in Michael Hofmann’s translation. The selection seeks above all to be accessible: these texts are highly approachable, “readable” pieces—not mere linguistic shards or variants, but substantive texts giving a sense of the enormous array of literary forms of which Kafka was such a great master.
In addition, our volume contains some twenty pages of texts by the younger Kafka that have lately appeared in the Abandoned Fragments volume. In this way, the reader is not restricted to discoveries from the later Kafka, but is offered a tour of the great fragmentarian in every epoch.
Reiner Stach, july 2020
Index of first lines
A: “Be honest!,”
A coffin had been made ready, and the carpenter,
A delicate matter, this tiptoeing,
A farmer stopped me on the highway,
A friend I hadn’t seen for many years now,
A large loaf of bread lay on the table,
A legend is an attempt,
A rainy day,
“As I sit opposite you like this, Red Peter,”
Away from here, away!,
Boats glided past,
Children are all over the church steps,
Conventional accounts of world history,
From a bar came the sound of singing,
He gripped his lower lip with his upper teeth,
“How did I get here?” I exclaimed,
I am fighting,
I arrived out of breath,
I can swim as well as the others,
If you keep on walking,
I have buried my reason happily in my hand,
I have — who else may speak so freely of his gifts,
I lay on the ground at the foot of a wall,
I loved a girl who loved me back,
In our house, that massive building,
I stood in front of the mine engineer in his office,
It is always very early morning in this city,
It is a mandate,
It is a small shop, but there is a good deal of life,
It is Isabella, the old dapple-gray horse,
“It is not a barren wall,”
It was a very difficult task, and I was afraid,
It was no prison cell,
It’s the animal with the long tail,
I was allowed to set foot in a strange garden,
I was helpless in the face of the form,
I was rowing on a lake,
I was sitting in
the box next to my wife,
I was staying in the Hotel Edthofer,
I was stuck in an impenetrable thicket of thorns,
I went abroad to live among foreigners,
“Ladies and gentlemen,” thus the address,
Let me say it unambiguously: everything that is said,
No one slept, there was no sleeping,
“Of what does your power consist?”
People are individuals and fully entitled,
“Remarkable!” said the dog,
Some farm laborers on their way home at night,
Some people approached me and asked me to build,
So you want to leave me?,
Sweet snake, why so distant,
The city resembles the sun,
The Count was eating lunch,
The deep well,
The great swimmer! the people called,
The housing department got involved,
There are many waiting here,
There was a simple wooden fence,
There was a small pond where we drank,
The struggle began. My two hands clapped shut,
To be perfectly honest,
Twenty little gravediggers,
We had a visitor whom I had often seen before,
We have all heard tell of Red Peter,
We were walking on smooth ground,
What is bothering you?,
What is your complaint, forsaken soul?,
When he escaped it was night-time,
When I got home at night,
When one night the small mouse,
Why are you accusing me, you bad man?,
“You are forever speaking of death,”
You don’t have to leave the house,
“You never draw water from the depths of this well,”