Almost more than action and gesture is the emphasis on blocking, grouping, distance, movement, positioning. It’s thus less like a playscript (one in which the dialogue, admittedly, is half-concealed in endless paragraphs – another thing Brod did was break up these prose blocks, exactly as a British editor would have done) than a director’s notes. Often the effect is absurd: the movements – and one’s awareness of them – are as artificial and elaborate as the speech itself, and quite often at variance with it: Karl ‘repeatedly pushing down a little pair of scales, for sheer delight’, Robinson and Delamarche ‘clinking glasses and keeping them touching in mid-air awhile’. In addition to its dramatic aspect, there is lyricism in the way the prose will sometimes strike an almost random note that reverberates powerfully in the reader’s mind. Cruelty, sex and homesickness are most often sounded, but there are also moments of dense, almost inexplicable peace:

In the empty lanes one occasionally saw a policeman on a horse, motionless, or the carriers of flags and banners spanning the whole street, or a workers’ leader surrounded by colleagues and shop stewards or an electric tramcar, which hadn’t managed to flee in time, and was now standing there dark and empty, with the driver and conductor sitting on the platform.

America, when Kafka wrote about it, was a mythical place, a promised land to Europeans. Joseph Roth has a character called Zwonimir in his early novel, Hotel Savoy (1924): ‘He loved America. When a billet was good he said “America”. When a position had been well fortified he said “America”. Of a “fine” lieutenant he would say “America”, and because I was a good shot he would say “America” when I scored bullseyes.’ Karl May’s tremendously popular cowboy stories of the 1880s were written without his having been there (his Wild West peopled by Indians and Saxons is oddly like Kafka’s America, an exploded Bohemia). The youthful Brecht’s frontier ballads likewise. The Man Who Disappeared was written at the height of the immigration from Eastern Europe. Some of Kafka’s relatives had gone to the new world – one had helped build the Panama Canal – and had gone into family lore (see Anthony Northey’s book, Kafka’s Relatives: Their Lives and His Writing). The cult of American speed, scale, novelty, machinery and brutality had entered European consciousness. But even beyond that, Kafka tried to make his book up to the minute, with its telephones and gramophones, electric bells and electric torches, lifts, the Brooklyn Bridge (now misnamed again, but only completed in 1910), an early reference to Coca-Cola perhaps (available in Europe since 1892). But then Kafka already had to his credit the first description of aeroplanes in German literature in ‘Aeroplane in Brescia’ in 1907.

One of the harmless incidental sidelines of translating the book was doing much of it in America. To be thinking of Kafka in a jumbo jet banking over Ellis Island, or while watching ten tiny aeroplanes flying round and round a 100,000 seater sports stadium in the middle of nowhere, all towing banners for pizzas, for judges or for true love; to be spiralled round the immigration hall at La Guardia with an Italian delegation already in cowboy boots, string ties and ten-gallon hats, or visiting Dean and Deluca on Broadway with its pressed tin ceilings, wires, strings and pipes; or be listening to an NPR report on the case of a 340 lb. Louisiana woman who used to bring her own chair into the local cinema because she couldn’t fit into a cinema chair, bursting into tears when the manager told her it was a fire hazard. I mention these things not because there is any distinction in them, but precisely the opposite, because there is none.

MICHAEL HOFMANN

London, July 1995

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hartmut Binder: Kafka Kommentar, Munich, 1976.

Max Brod: Über Franz Kafka, Frankfurt, 1974.

Jiri Grusa: Franz Kafka of Prague, London, 1983.

Franz Kafka: Tagebücher, Frankfurt, 1948.

Franz Kafka: Amerika, translated with an introduction by Edwin Muir and a postscript by Max Brod, London, 1928.

Gustav Janouch: Conversations with Kafka, London, 1953.

Anthony Northey: Kafka’s Relatives: Their Lives and His Writing, London, 1991.

THE MAN WHO DISAPPEARED (AMERIKA)

1

THE STOKER

As the seventeen-year-old Karl Rossmann, who had been sent to America by his unfortunate parents because a maid had seduced him and had a child by him, sailed slowly into New York harbour, he suddenly saw the Statue of Liberty, which had already been in view for some time, as though in an intenser sunlight. The sword in her hand seemed only just to have been raised aloft, and the unchained winds blew about her form.

‘So high,’ he said to himself, and quite forgetting to disembark, he found himself gradually pushed up against the railing by the massing throng of porters.

A young man with whom he had struck up a slight acquaintance during the crossing said to him in passing: ‘Well, don’t you want to get off yet?’ ‘I’m all ready,’ said Karl laughing to him, and in his exuberance and because he was a strong lad, he raised his suitcase on to his shoulder. But as he watched his acquaintance disappearing along with the others, swinging a cane, he realized that he had left his umbrella down in the ship. So he hurriedly asked his acquaintance, who seemed less than overjoyed about it, to be so good as to wait by his suitcase for a moment, took a quick look around for his subsequent orientation, and hurried off. Below deck, he found to his annoyance that a passage that would have considerably shortened the way for him was for the first time barred, probably something to do with the fact that all the passengers were disembarking, and so he was forced instead to make his way through numerous little rooms, along continually curving passages and down tiny flights of stairs, one after the other, and then through an empty room with an abandoned desk in it until, eventually, only ever having gone this way once or twice previously, and then in the company of others, he found that he was totally and utterly lost. Not knowing what to do, not seeing anyone, and hearing only the scraping of thousands of human feet overhead and the last, faraway wheezings of the engine, which had already been turned off, he began without thinking to knock at the little door to which he had come on his wanderings. ‘I’s open!’ came a voice from within, and Karl felt real relief as he opened the door. ‘Why are you banging about on the door like a madman?’ asked an enormous man, barely looking at Karl. Through some kind of overhead light-shaft, a dim light, long since used up in the higher reaches of the ship, fell into the wretched cabin, in which a bed, a wardrobe, a chair and the man were all standing close together, as though in storage. ‘I’ve lost my way,’ said Karl. ‘I never quite realized on the crossing what a terribly big ship this is.’ ‘Well, you’re right about that,’ said the man with some pride, and carried on tinkering with the lock of a small suitcase, repeatedly shutting it with both hands to listen to the sound of the lock as it snapped shut. ‘Why don’t you come in,’ the man went on, ‘don’t stand around outside.’ ‘Aren’t I bothering you?’ asked Karl. ‘Pah, how could you bother me?’ ‘Are you German?’ Karl asked to reassure himself, as he’d heard a lot about the dangers for new arrivals in America, especially coming from Irishmen.