Philipp Lundberg: Essential Kafka

Phillip Lundberg

Essential Kafka: Rendezvous with 'otherness'. Five Stories by Franz Kafka

This translation of Kafka has a dual purpose, for starters it intends to provide English readers with a better translation: that Kafka's prose should find a more fitting analogy in 'modern (American) English' whereby it should come to life to a greater degree, and that his underlying philosophy—and I say philosophy in the greater sense—thus, should be grasped more readily. The second purpose is to explore issues regarding translation per se: what is the proper role of the translator? and why are so many translations done so poorly? The five stories included in this book have been carefully selected to present Kafka's literary genius in its historical genesis: from Metamorphosis (1915), Report to the Academy (1917), In the Penal Colony (1919), The Burrow (1923/24) - to Kafka's "last word" Josephine the Songstress or The Mouse Folk which was written shortly before Kafka's death in 1924.

This book also contains a short postscript on the art of translation that argues against the current modus operandi of translation theory, indeed, it goes so far as to quote from Kafka's diaries as well as from Schliermacher and early Roman translators on the responsibility of the translator to capture the spirit of the work in an imaginative manner. Kafka's prose does not defy understanding, rather it allows man to break through the barrier of 'otherness' by its honest presentation of the same. Buy here!