The Sons (3 page)

Only in the last year of his life did Kafka manage to break away from his parents and Prague, to live in Berlin with a young Jewish woman from Poland named Dora Dymant. Despite the advanced state of Kafka’s tuberculosis, they planned to marry; but Dora’s father, an Orthodox rabbi, objected. Thus Kafka stayed a son all his life, and after his death, in June 1924, was brought back to Prague to be buried in the family plot, where his parents were placed a few years later. Today his name is inscribed on the single family tombstone, just above his father’s name.

M
ARK
A
NDERSON

AMONG THE COUNTLESS examples of translation of modern European literature into English there are few critically influential and truly potent texts. The Muirs’ translations of Kafka are surely among them. It is no exaggeration to say that the English Kafka—from the 1930s through the 1950s especially—was at least as well known, at least as much read, and subjected to at least as much interpretation as the German Kafka. One does not idly tamper with such texts; in a sense, they have become a kind of holy writ, for better or worse. And taken all in all, it has been for the better, we are bound to say. It would be neither fair nor, indeed, well informed to call them inadequate or to dismiss them out of hand as outdated. They contain passages of great brilliance and solutions that still cannot be improved upon.

But there are problems with them. The English texts do contain mistakes, awkward passages, evasions, lapses in cadence and rhythm, avoidances of deliberate humor, and a few hopelessly snarled sentences. And there are, as well, a number of brutal, self-perpetuating typographical errors; they have dug themselves in and will not be budged from printing to printing.

For our present purposes, however, quite modest guidelines have been set down: to get rid of the few outright errors in the translation of these four texts; to untangle some of the more congested locutions; to expunge archaisms; and to replace with more suitable renderings what by now are correctly seen, in this country at least, as somewhat quirky Briticisms. Instead of retranslations, we have made adjustments.

A line-by-line comparison of the Muir (and Kaiser-Wilkins) versions with the present “adjusted” versions will reveal a great many small changes, but nothing that will cause alarm. The reader will discover, for instance, that Georg Bendemann, that upwardly mobile young businessman, and his father no longer live in a “ramshackle” house (that never did make any sense). Mother Samsa, collapsed in her chair toward the end of the story, a symbol of the utter and final rejection of the insect son, is “
now
sound asleep,” no longer “
not
quite overcome by sleep” (a tiny but appalling typo that for years has left open the unlikely possibility that she still acknowledges her son, is still with him on his third and final crawl back into his bedroom—thus can the substitution of a
t
for a
w
lead to a fundamental misunderstanding of a key moment). No longer do the “wards” of the stoker’s little sea-chest “snap home”; it is simpler, if less picturesque, for the bolt to snap shut. And so on. Such changes, and there are many of them here, have been made toward the ultimate goal of getting the flow and sound of Kafka in English to approximate the astonishing style of the German.

Still, such changes do not diminish the marvellous work done decades ago by the Muirs and others. The present texts are still theirs in nearly every sense.

A
RTHUR
S. W
ENSINGER

For Fräulein Felice B
.

IT WAS A Sunday morning at the very height of spring. Georg Bendemann, a young merchant, was sitting in his own room on the second floor of one of a long row of low, graceful houses stretching along the bank of the river, distinguishable from one another only in height and color. He had just finished a letter to an old friend who was now living abroad, had sealed it in its envelope with slow and dreamy deliberateness, and with one elbow propped on his desk was looking out the window at the river, the bridge, and the hills on the farther bank with their tender green.

He was thinking about this friend, who years before had simply run off to Russia, dissatisfied with his prospects at home. Now he was running a business in St. Petersburg, which at first had flourished but more recently seemed to be going downhill, as the friend always complained on his increasingly rare visits. So there he was, wearing himself out to no purpose in a foreign country; the exotic-looking beard he wore did not quite conceal the face Georg had known so well since childhood, and the jaundice color his skin had begun to take on seemed to signal the onset of some disease. By his own account he had no real contact with the colony of his fellow countrymen there and almost no social connection with Russian families, so that he was resigning himself to life as a confirmed bachelor.

What could one write to such a man, who had obviously gone badly astray, a man one could be sorry for but not help? Should one perhaps advise him to come home, to reestablish
himself here and take up his old friendships again—there was certainly nothing to stand in the way of that—and in general to rely on the help of his friends? But that was as good as telling him—and the more kindly it was done the more he would take offense—that all his previous efforts had miscarried, that he should finally give up, come back home, and be gaped at by everyone as a returned prodigal, that only his friends knew what was what, and that he himself was nothing more than a big child and should follow the example of his friends who had stayed at home and become successful. And besides, was it certain that all the pain they would necessarily inflict on him would serve any purpose? Perhaps it would not even be possible to get him to come home at all—he said himself that he was now out of touch with business conditions in his native country—and then he would still be left an alien in an alien land, embittered by his friends’ advice and more than ever estranged from them. But if he did follow their advice and even then didn’t fit in at home—not because of the malice of others, of course, but through sheer force of circumstances—if he couldn’t get on with his friends or without them, felt humiliated, couldn’t really be said to have either friends or a country of his own any longer, wouldn’t it be better for him to go on living abroad just as he was? Taking all this into account, how could one expect that he would make a success of life back here?

For such reasons, assuming one wanted to keep up any correspondence with him at all, one could not send him the sort of real news one could frankly tell the most casual acquaintances. It had been more than three years since his last visit, and for this he offered the lame excuse that the political situation in Russia was too uncertain and apparently would not permit even the briefest absence of a small businessman, though it allowed hundreds of thousands of Russians to travel the globe in perfect safety. But during
these same three years Georg’s own position in life had changed considerably. Two years ago his mother had died and since then he and his father had shared the household together; and his friend had, of course, been informed of that and had expressed his sympathy in a letter phrased so dryly that the grief normally caused by such an event, one had to conclude, could not be comprehended so far away from home. Since that time, however, Georg had applied himself with greater determination to his business as well as to everything else. Perhaps it was his father’s insistence on having everything his own way in the business that had prevented him, during his mother’s lifetime, from pursuing any real projects of his own; perhaps since her death his father had become less aggressive, although he was still active in the business; perhaps it was mostly due to an accidental run of good fortune—that was very probable indeed—but, at any rate, during those two years the business had prospered most unexpectedly, the staff had to be doubled, the volume was five times as great; no doubt about it, further progress lay just ahead.

But Georg’s friend had no inkling of these changes. In earlier years, perhaps for the last time in that letter of condolence, he had tried to persuade Georg to emigrate to Russia and had enlarged upon the prospects of success in St. Petersburg for precisely Georg’s line of business. The figures quoted were microscopic by comparison with Georg’s present operations. Yet he shrank from letting his friend know about his business success, and if he were to do so now—retrospectively—that certainly would look peculiar.

So Georg confined himself to giving his friend unimportant items of gossip such as rise at random in the memory when one is idly thinking things over on a quiet Sunday. All he desired was to leave undisturbed the image of the hometown which his friend had most likely built up and accepted during his long absence. And thus it happened that three
times in three fairly widely separated letters Georg had told his friend about the engagement of some insignificant man to an equally insignificant girl, until, quite contrary to Georg’s intentions, his friend actually began to show some interest in this notable event.

Yet Georg much preferred to write about things like these rather than to confess that he himself had become engaged a month ago to a Fräulein Frieda Brandenfeld, a girl from a well-to-do family. He often spoke to his fiancée about this friend of his and the peculiar relationship that had developed between them in their correspondence. “Then he won’t be coming to our wedding,” she said, “and yet I have a right to get to know all your friends.” “I don’t want to trouble him,” answered Georg, “don’t misunderstand, he would probably come, at least I think so, but he would feel that his hand had been forced and he would be hurt, perhaps he would even envy me and certainly he’d be discontented, and without ever being able to do anything about his discontent he’d have to go away again alone. Alone—do you know what that means?” “Yes, but what if he hears about our marriage from some other source?” “I can’t prevent that, of course, but it’s unlikely, considering the way he lives.” “If you have friends like that, Georg, you shouldn’t ever have gotten engaged at all.” “Well, we’re both to blame for that; but I wouldn’t have it any other way now.” And when, breathing heavily under his kisses, she was still able to add, “All the same, it does upset me,” he thought it would not really do any harm if he were to send the news to his friend. “That’s the kind of man I am and he’ll just have to accept me or not,” he said to himself, “I can’t cut myself to another pattern that might make a more suitable friend for him.”

And, in fact, he did inform his friend about his engagement, in the long letter he had been writing that Sunday morning, with the following words: “I have saved up my
best news for last. I am now engaged to a Fräulein Frieda Brandenfeld, a girl from a well-to-do family that settled here a long time after you went away, so that it’s very unlikely you’ll know her. There will be ample opportunity to tell you more about my fiancée later, but for today let me just say that I am quite happy, and as far as our relationship is concerned, the only change will be that instead of a quite ordinary friend you will now have in me a happy friend. Besides that, you will acquire in my fiancée, who sends you her warm regards and who will soon be writing you herself, a genuine friend of the opposite sex, which is not without importance to a bachelor. I know that there are many reasons why you can’t come to pay us a visit, but wouldn’t my wedding be just the perfect occasion to put aside everything that might stand in the way? Still, however that may be, do just as seems good to you without regarding any interests but your own.”

With this letter in his hand, Georg had been sitting a long time at his desk, his face turned toward the window. He had barely acknowledged, with an absent smile, a greeting waved to him from the street below by a passing acquaintance.

At last he put the letter in his pocket and went out of his room across a small hallway into his father’s room, which he had not entered for months. There was, in fact, no particular need for him to enter it, since he saw his father daily at work and they took their midday meal together at a restaurant; in the evening, it was true, each did as he pleased, yet even then, unless Georg—as was usually the case—went out with friends or, more recently, visited his fiancée, they always sat for a while, each with his newspaper, in their common sitting room.

Georg was startled at how dark his father’s room was, even on this sunny morning. He had not remembered that it was so overshadowed by the high wall on the other side
of the narrow courtyard. His father was sitting by the window in a corner decorated with various mementos of Georg’s late mother, reading a newspaper which he held tilted to one side before his eyes in an attempt to compensate for some defect in his vision. On the table stood the remains of his breakfast, little of which seemed to have been consumed.

“Ah, Georg,” said his father, rising at once to meet him. His heavy dressing gown swung open as he walked, and its skirts fluttered around him.—My father is still a giant of a man, Georg said to himself.

“It’s unbearably dark in here,” he said aloud.

“Yes, it is dark,” answered his father.

“And you’ve shut the window, too?”

“I prefer it like that.”

“Well, it’s quite warm outside,” said Georg, as if continuing his previous remark, and sat down.

His father cleared away the breakfast dishes and set them on a chest.

“I really only wanted to tell you,” Georg went on, following the old man’s movements as if transfixed, “that I have just announced the news of my engagement to St. Petersburg.” He drew the letter a little way from his pocket and let it drop back again.

“To St. Petersburg?” asked his father.

“To my friend, of course,” said Georg, trying to meet his father’s eye.—In business hours he’s quite different, he was thinking, how solidly he sits here and folds his arms over his chest.