KAFKA’S SELECTED STORIES
trans by Stanley Corngold
all by Franz Kafka
Norton, £6.99; 400pp

METAMORPHOSIS AND
OTHER STORIES
trans by Michael Hofmann
Penguin, £8.99; 320pp

EVERYONE LOVES Kafka. Writers cite him as an influence or benchmark. Readers keep his sales ticking over. Academics set his texts.

Kafka is supremely teach-able. Take The Judgement, which he wrote after years of false starts in a single furious night in September 1912. The story begins with Georg Bendemann writing to a childhood friend, now a failed businessman in St Petersburg (the old stamping ground of Gogol and Dostoevsky, two of Kafka’s own touchstones), and debating whether to tell his friend that he is engaged.

We expect the fiancée or the friend to appear. From any other writer that is what we would get. Instead we get Bendemann’s magnificently mad father. Consulted on the fiancée question, he launches a multipronged attack on his son whom we begin to suspect of ousting the old man from the family business, neglecting him (suggested via a critique of the old man’s underwear) and of falling for a skirt-raising gold-digger.

Even the existence of the “friend” is thrown into doubt. Perhaps the old man is not so mad? Perhaps Bendemann is the one in the grip of delusions? This all takes place while Bendemann attempts to put his father to bed. The terrible row culminates with the old man passing sentence on his son. “I sentence you to death by drowning!” This sentence is then carried out.

Kafka unfolds narrative bends from within his tales that extend their dimensions beyond the normal three. All the above (and much else; I have simplified) takes less than 14 pages. Kafka’s insistence on concrete actions releases a superabundance of metaphorical possibilities. Almost any interpretation may gambol in the spacious ambit of Kafka’s work: Freudian, Marxist, structuralist, post-structuralist. What does it all mean? Better to ask what doesn’t it mean? “Unimaginable quantities of ink and ingenuity have been spilled on Kafka,” Michael Hofmann writes in the introduction to his fine translation of Kafka’s stories. Stanley Corngold speculates that more is written on Kafka each year than any writer except Shakespeare. Even The Zürau Aphorisms, Roberto Calasso admits, “have been published and translated many times”.

Hofmann’s wise introduction hints at a solution. Although the interpretation of Kafka is endless, reading him is surprisingly easy. “There is no threshold of boredom or difficulty; you don’t even need to have a particularly literary disposition.” Why not just do that? His translations render Kafka’s conservatively modulated, near-dictionless German into a less dry, slightly more expansive English. It is the most readable version of Kafka to date.

The selection is Kafka’s own - the works that he allowed to appear in his lifetime. The (very) short stories of Contemplation form a kind of prologue, reading as if sampled from works yet to be written. With hindsight, some read as self-parody.

“When it had already become unbearable . . .” begins a vignette entitled Being Unhappy. The book gets properly under way with The Judgement. This was when “Kafka became Kafka”, Hofmann comments. The Stoker, which follows, later became the opening chapter of the unfinished novel posthumously published as Amerika, and brings us to the heart of Kafka’s work: the near-novellas Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony, the shorter works collected in A Country Doctor, the four stories of Hunger Artist and three miscellaneous pieces round out the book.

In terms of bulk, this is not much to show for a lifetime’s commitment to literature. But Kafka’s editor, Max Brod, famously ignored the instruction to burn his manuscripts: Amerika, The Trial, The Castle, along with shorter works such as The Great Wall of China, Researches of a Dog and The Burrow and other bits and pieces.

Potentially at least, Kafka is funny. The mainspring of his fiction is the maintenance of hope amid overwhelming evidence. In Metamorphosis Gregor Samsa struggles on, hoping for the best. His predicament is serious, he knows, but surely not hopeless? This from a man who has been locked into his room by his family after turning into a cockroach.

It is less funny, I would argue, at length. Hofmann notes that Kafka’s novels give a heft to the oeuvre that has helped his posthumous reputation. That is a polite way of saying that academics like “serious” writers to have serious-looking bodies of work. My copy of The Castle was given to me, optimistically perhaps, on my 14th birthday by my mother. I had some difficulty finishing it but was mollified by the discovery, 30 years later, that Kafka hadn’t finished it at all. In the strange world of Kafka’s work, the “novels” are the fragments. The short stories reach and define the boundaries.

Corngold has translated and edited Kafka’s Selected Stories for a Norton Critical Edition. All the major stories are here, except for Metamorphosis, which appears in a Norton Critical Edition of its own, also edited by Corngold. For this edition, Corngold states that he has “translated each story ‘cold’ ” and has resisted the temptation of a “colourful colloquial bounce”. Excitability has been consigned to the footnotes.

“Feel the self-reflexivity of this,” one exhorts. There are essays at the back, one of which spends 13½ pages on a 400-word story.

The exorbitance of Kafka criticism is, obviously, Kafka-esque. Wonderfully, Corngold blames its recent explosion on a plethora of work by recently unrepressed academics from Eastern Europe. Damn those Czechs! Kafka’s very concision seems to provoke the bulk response, so we can expect much academic chuntering on The Zürau Aphorisms. These brief paragraphs and sentences, written while he recovered from tuberculosis in 1917, are translated by Hofmann and introduced by Roberto Calasso, in a beautifully produced compact hardback. The contents of this intellectual design-object could have been printed on two sheets of foolscap, but no matter. Kafka compels, and we read on.

Aphorism Five encourages: “From a certain point, there is no more turning back. That is the point that must be reached.”

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