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Franz Kafka, a German-language writer of novels and short stories, regarded by critics as one of the most influential authors of the 20th century, was trained as a lawyer and was employed by an insurance company, writing only in his spare time.
Contents
Letters
Kafka wrote hundreds of letters to family and close female friends, including his father, his fiancée Felice Bauer, and his youngest sister Ottla.
Works and first publications in German
Only a few of Kafka's works were published during his lifetime: the story collections Betrachtung (Contemplation) and Ein Landarzt (A Country Doctor), and individual stories (such as "Die Verwandlung" ("The Metamorphosis")) in literary magazines. He prepared the story collection Ein Hungerkünstler (A Hunger Artist) for print, but it was not published until after his death. Kafka's unfinished works, including his novels Der Process, Das Schloss and Amerika (also known as Der Verschollene, The Man Who Disappeared), were published posthumously, mostly by his friend Max Brod, who ignored Kafka's wish to have the manuscripts destroyed. Brod also published letters, diaries and aphorisms.
Many of Kafka's works have uncertain dates of writing and/or were written over long periods of time. In such cases the year the writing of the work began is used. Year and place of the first publication is shown. For many works the German text is available, for several works also an English translation. It is linked in columns "de" (short for "deutsch", German) and "en" (short for English).
English translations
Kafka often made extensive use of a characteristic particular to the German language allowing for long sentences that sometimes can span an entire page. Kafka's sentences then deliver an unexpected impact just before the full stop—that being the finalizing meaning and focus. This is achieved due to the construction of certain sentences in German which require that the verb be positioned at the end of the sentence. Such constructions are difficult to duplicate in other languages, so it is up to the resourceful translator to provide the reader with the same (or at least equivalent) effect found in the original text. German's more flexible word order is not the only problem translating German into other languages. German also lacks an informal language register, uses modal connectives, and syntactic structures which can be translated in more than one way. Kafka did not write in standard High German, but rather in a Praguean German heavily influenced by the Yiddish and Czech languages. This has led philosophers Deleuze and Guattari to describe Kafka's linguistic style as "deterritorialized", characterized by a "withered vocabulary" and an "incorrect syntax".
German sentences also have a different syntactic structure. Unlike English, German is a verb-final language, which places the main verb of a verb string (e.g., "transformed" in "had been transformed") at the end of a phrase. The difference can be seen in the contrast between the original German version of the first sentence in Kafka's "The Metamorphosis":
Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Traumen erwachte fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt. (Original) As Gregor Samsa one morning from restless dreams awoke, found he himself in his bed into an enormous vermin transformed. (literal word for word translation)Another virtually insurmountable problem facing translators is how to deal with the author's intentional use of ambiguous idioms and words that have several meanings which result in writings difficult to precisely translate. One such instance is found in the first sentence of "The Metamorphosis". English translators have often sought to render the word Ungeziefer as "insect"; in today's German it means vermin. It is sometimes used colloquially to mean "bug" – a very general term, unlike the scientific sounding "insect". Kafka had no intention of labeling Gregor, the protagonist of the story, as any specific thing, but instead wanted to convey Gregor's disgust at his transformation. Translators have chosen numerous inexact and unsatisfactory ways to represent "[zu einem] ungeheuren Ungeziefer", unable to convey the repetition of the first two syllables and the equal four syllables of the two words in German:
Another example is Kafka's use of the German noun Verkehr in the final sentence of The Judgment. Literally, Verkehr means intercourse and, as in English, can have either a sexual or non-sexual meaning; in addition, it is used to mean transport or traffic. The sentence can be translated as: "At that moment an unending stream of traffic crossed over the bridge". What gives added weight to the obvious double meaning of 'Verkehr' is Kafka's confession to Brod that when he wrote that final line, he was thinking of "a violent ejaculation".