Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka

Kafka’s “Lost Writings” … not really lost, but now translated into English

https://www.ndbooks.com/book/the-lost-writings/#/

https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/franz-kafka-06-29-20

Short Talk on Kafka on Hölderlin

Anne Carson
“I cannot keep my dreams straight.” By this complaint Kafka meant, keep them going in a straight line from front to finish. His dreams were inclined to swerve back on themselves, for example his dream of Hölderlin. Kafka dreamed that Hölderlin caught fire. “Finally you somehow caught fire.” Kafka began to beat out the fire with an old coat. Now the swerve begins. “Instead it was I who was on fire.” Here the swerve collides with itself. “And it was I who beat the fire with a coat.” Finally the swerve subsides in a hopelessness that is reasoned yet also neurotic. “But the beating didn’t help and only confirmed my old fear that such things can’t extinguish a fire.” Myself I find palindromes bleak—how they march forward as if to unfurl some wisdom then there we are cowering again at the back of the cave. And wasn’t it also Kafka who dreamed of swimming across Europe with Hölderlin river by river? So off they go, but soon the reasoning sets in. “I can swim like the others only I have a better memory than the others, I have not forgotten my former inability to swim. But since I have not forgotten it my ability to swim is of no avail and I cannot swim after all.” See that swerve and collapse. That after all mood in which he pinches the little specimen in two fingers and nips off its wings.Myself I don’t dream at all these nights.- from the New York Review of Books

David Foster Wallace on Kafka

David Foster Wallace Reads Franz Kafka’s Short Story “A Little Fable” (and Explains Why Comedy Is Key to Kafka)

 

How did Kafka become Kafka?

How indeed. The public impression of a neurotic, socially inept recluse is far from the truth, but one that even those who have read widely in his works can be forgiven.

The English translation of Reiner Stach’s third volume of his Kafka biography (though covering the author’s early years) is a work of great scholarship and corrects many myths of the man who, while reading drafts of the early chapters of The Trial to friends, had to stop frequently because he was laughing so hard.

 

Albert Camus on Kafka:https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/10/04/albert-camus-franz-kafka/

 

Parables

W. H. Auden posited that Kafka was perhaps the greatest master of the parable. Here is Kafka’s “On Parables”

Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says: “Go over,” he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least. All parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have every day:that is a different matter.

Concerning this a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares.

Another said: I bet that is also a parable.

The first said: You have won.

The second said: But unfortunately only in parable.

The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost.

Perhaps the greatest of Kafka’s parables comes in the cathedral scene in The Trial. In the magnificent film version by Orson Welles, it is moved to the very beginning of the story:

 

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