Kafka Unleashed & Plato: Tallyho ~ The Hunt for Virtue ~

   Two comments received from Dr. Walter H. Sokel

                 Author of: Franz Kafka, Tragik und Ironie

Dear Phillip,

I have read with great pleasure and interest your fine translation of "Nocturnal Deliberations" in the typed version you sent me last as well as your very illuminating and suggestive "Postscript." I like your way of translating very much, am quite excited about it, and find it essentially preferable to previous translations. Your version has a freshness and edge to it that come in my opinion closer to Kafka's spirit than previous versions.

To be sure, there are a number of words and phrases that strike me as not English usage.  I marked them on the ms. and I could send you a list if you would like me to. But those are minor details. On the whole, the translation strikes me as most alive and exciting. I like the liberties you take. They strike me as enhancing the relevance of Kafka's text .

Concerning your "Postscript' I fully agree with your stated aim of presenting a more subjectively rendered and experienced Kafka for contemporary global audiences. You rightly point out the global responsibility of any new translation into English.

I do not quite feel the appropriateness of your distiinction between a canape and a couch or sofa. I for one cannot perceive the distinction.

Also I believe the "Heiligen" are to stay to render Kafka's intention. He obviously wanted to make sure that the Samsa household is not to be seen as Jewish.  But those are minor squibbles within an overall enthusiastic agreement. Bravo!

I want to thank you very much for letting me read your translation.

With all good wishes,

Walter

Dear Phillip, It seems to me your essay lives up beautifully to its title {Uncovering the Platonic in Kafka:  Journal of the Kafka Society of America, 2010}. 

It really has two distinct aspects--one is the way of translation, the other is the not very obvious Platonism of Kafka. 

I have found the latter particularly subtle, interesting, and valuable. What you bring out, if you permit me to be humorously colloquial, is the "haemisch" (Yiddish for "heimisch") side of Kafka. Now, the haemisch is connected with the Platonic by finding man at home with himself in the universe. One would not expect that of Kafka. because, as we know, he is usually presented as abysmally pessimistic, forlorn, doubting-despairing, and inclined to the enigmatically infernal. But you, rightly it seems to me, bring out the, in the best sense, sheltered,self-satisfied,"at home in the universe,"--the Platonic side of Kafka. There i s a Buergel, a little Buerge, a guarantor, a Verbindungssekretaer, waiting far under covers, and, in a rare moment, the covers come off. 

Too bad K. is such a weary schlemiehl that he misses the point (in more senses than one), falling asleep. 

But in "The Burrow" there is that moment where the artist-narrator finds himself at home in his art which is self-sheltering self. 

And is that not the essence of Platonism? To find the barrier between self and universe transcended and the two at union with each other?

To have been responsible for such ideas is no mean achievement. Thank you, Phillip.

Your appreciative

Walter

"It would be nothing short of a shame for NWUP to pass this excellent opportunity by."

Reader’s Report: Essential Kafka,

Translated by Phillip Lundberg

 I find this to be a highly successful project, and as a long-time university professor who has taught Kafka for many years, both to German readers and non-readers, I can whole-heartedly recommend its publication by NWUP. The primary basis for my appreciation is the faithfulness the translations consistently demonstrate to the arc, pace, scale, and cut of Kafka’s fictive narrative, many of whose notable achievements Lundberg has encompassed in the volume. By his own account, Lundberg occasionally needs to violate the constraints of Kafka’s historical moment and some of its linguistic usages in order to locate the apt phrasing that best captures the true tenor of a fictive situation. But even if this is occasionally so—to wit, his importing the term “deconstruction” to characterize the Burrow Creature’s paradoxical “negative” dwelling, the effort is in the interest of conveying the experience of reading Kafka in its “original” German (one notoriously corrupted anyway by its Czech, Yiddish, and Hebrew nuances). Lundberg should be credited and rewarded for rendering the experience of reading Kafka with a fidelity simply not achieved by the Muirs. He transports us beautifully into the nocturnal environment of the Herrenhof motel (a place where Castle bureaucrats perform their dirty business of many stripes; the one extract from a Kafkan novel in the volume) where not only the environment but Kafka’s sentences are slurred, run-on, insomniac, on the verge of exhausting the reader. Lundberg’s paragraph breaks are close to Kafka’s. Kafka may be known for introducing the abrupt sentence into German fictive style, but the paragraphs are often rambling, seeming never to end. Reading them to their conclusion is an athletic as well as mental test. Lundberg perfectly renders this multifaceted challenge to reading and exegesis.

         I much admire Lundberg’s taste in selecting what is for him the essential Kafka. I’ve been on record for some time for highlighting the centrality of the animal monologues as places where Kafka’s aesthetics, his minority position of the deterritorialized, and his greatest innovation as a writer (nothing less than synthesizing the post-modern rant that also became the voice of the late Joyce, Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Camus, and others) converged. He rightly commits himself as well to the formative positions in Kafka’s oeuvre occupied by such pieces as “The Judgment,” “The Metamorphosis,” and “The Great Wall of China.” The one glaring omission—so far as I am concerned—and I am indeed a particular reader of Kafka, is “Der Hungerkunstler.” This piece would be absolutely crucial in highlighting the immense aesthetic meditation in “Die Verwandlung” (even if understated) and in linking the early breakthroughs to the late animal ruminations. In his commentary, Lundberg openly avows that he is an interpreter as well as translator of Kafka. I would fervently hope that he and NWUP could add “A Hunger Artist” in the apposite site relatively early in the volume, precisely as the interface and pivot to the overall selection I strongly believe it to be. With this single addition, the selection would be significantly less arbitrary and more representative.

         Lundberg’s deft treatment of works including “In the Penal Colony” and “A Report to the Academy” highlights not only Kafka’s theoretical (or in his terms “philosophical”) preoccupations; it makes accessible in unprecedented ways Kafka’s political critique, particularly of heavy-handed Europeanism and its colonialist apparatus.

         Comments that Lundberg makes—both in the official postscript (better than an introduction) and in his (unofficial, I assume) epistle to prior readers--clearly indicate that he has carefully weighed his role in the process.  He has theorized his posture and function and has demonstrated beyond doubt his commitment to both the ethics of translation and of cultural production.

         If NWUP takes on this project, and as I say, I fervently hope it will, I think it is obligated to make some niche and context for crucial literary translations in its publishing program and materials so that the effort doesn’t go lost and unaccounted for. This new translation will stand up for itself proudly among the classical versions and amid the spate of new attention to Kafka as well. I would certainly adapt it in my courses for non-German speakers. It does you no good to mount this effort if you do not advertise the volume properly and undertake the measures to get it into classrooms other than my own. If Essential Kafka arrives at the outset of a project to make available more translations of this sort, be assured that Lundberg’s translation will “anchor” such a program admirably.

         There are lots of wonderful touches here: parenthetical inclusion of pivotal German keywords thoughout; an overall modernization of Victorian idiom (including occasional appeals to today’s argot; e.g. switching“friend” to “buddy” in “The Judgment”; starting out with this tale, commonly acknowledged to be Kafka’s breakthrough story; removal of the racist cliches tinging the Muirs’ translation of “In the Penal Colony”;  the wonderful irony of the cries to the “honorable director” early in “The Metamorphosis”; as duly noted by the translator, selection of “Robespierre” as the ape’s name in “A Report to the Academy”;  “picayune” throughout (as opposed to “tiny” or “miniscule”).   In “Josephine”: “Phooey on your protection” (p. 246), “No way José, (p. 254). Bravo!

         Kafka, as we all know, is more than just a great innovator of modernist literature. His work primed and affected imagination and cognition during an era that saw unprecedented migration, two global wars, seismic economic upheavals, unprecedented systems of industrial production, political and ethnic repression, and industrialized death. It could be argued that Kafka programmed his readers’ Imaginaries so that they were prepared for the grim Real of the 20th century. While poor and unworthy translations are, hypothetically, capable of coming into being, Lundberg’s project is so clearly marked by philosophical commitment, theoretical acuity, linguistico-poetic talent, and literary and creative ethics that there is more than room enough in the existing literary and critical worlds for this project. It would be nothing short of a shame for NWUP to pass this excellent opportunity by.

         You may reveal my identity to the translator, but not the secret location in the Carpathian Mountains where Gregor’s carapace is stored. Please remember to send me a complimentary copy when the edition appears. I wish you smooth deliberations and production-stages in this thoroughly laudable project.

Comment received from Dr. Lucy Kunz

I really appreciate a fresh and vivid interpretation of both Plato and Kafka.  Phillip Lundberg's words challenge me to think again about (in part) familiar texts, and through the new juxtapositioning I feel that I have gained a much greater understanding of the literature which he has translated into his spunky English. Thanks!  

Comment Received from Dr. Elliot Zashin - March 2018 - Kafka Unleashed, New Edition/Book!

Whether it is a first immersion or a re-immersion, readers of Phillip Lundberg's anthology of Franz Kafka's works of fiction will find this a fascinating experience. Lundberg not only provides new translations of lengthy portions of two novels and several major stories/narratives but also considerable commentary and unusual supplemental materials. Lundberg well knows that 'every translation is an interpretation,' and he has given much thought to Kafka's intentions as he sought to understand and portray human consciousness. Lundberg is attuned to the nuances of terminology, while he works to give Kafka's language a contemporary feel. This volume is edifying and thought-provoking; a true gift to any serious reader.