The Burrow pdf Franz Kafka Free Download

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was a Czech-born German-speaking insurance clerk who despised his job, preferring to spend his time writing. Nevertheless, Kafka published little during his lifetime, and ordered his closest friend to burn the mass of unpublished manuscripts – now familiar to us as some of the most influential novels and short stories of the modern era – after his death. Kafka’s novels, all available in Penguin Modern Classics, are The Trial, The Castle and Amerika. The short stories are split between those published during his lifetime, Metamorphosis and Other Stories, and those rescued by Brod and published posthumously, The Burrow.

Michael Hofmann is the author of several books of poems and the translator of many modern and contemporary German authors. Penguin publishes his translations of Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin, A Small Circus and Tales from the Underworld, Kafka’s Amerika and Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel, Irmgard Keun’s Child of All Nations and Jakob Wassermann’s My First Wife.

A Note on the Text

The present translations were made from the volume Die Erzählungen und andere ausgewählte Prosa (S. Fischer, 1996), edited by Roger Hermes; the texts are from the 1982 manuscript edition, prepared by Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley and Jost Schillemeit.

Because the emphasis is on stories, some early work (‘Wedding Preparations in the Country’, ‘Description of a Struggle’, ‘The First Long Train Journey’ (towards ‘Richard and Samuel’, co-written with Max Brod)), playlets (‘The Warden of the Tomb’) and aphorisms (the ‘Collected’ or ‘Zürau’ aphorisms from 1917 and the 1920 sequence known as ‘He’) are not included. The order attempts the chronological.

Only a few of the pieces were given titles by Kafka; the rest, mostly Brod’s, are those in square brackets on the Contents page. A number of the pieces end rather abruptly, in mid-sentence or mid-punctuation. Again, Brod sought to smooth these out; in the present edition, they are left as they were, rough.

M. H.

Foreword

With few, brief, circumstantial exceptions (illness, Christmas, visits to rustic spas and sanatoria), Kafka worked in the daytime and wrote at night (see the little piece bearing that name: ‘Night’). He devised for himself a life that was largely disagreeable, inflexible and inescapable, and tried to make it productive. Never remotely trusting himself to write for a living, he held down a demanding and increasingly responsible job for the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia, from 1908 to 1922, almost his entire adult life. Unable to commit himself to a wife in spite of three engagements – to Felice Bauer in June 1914 and again in July 1917, and to Julie Wohryzek in summer 1919 – and a few not-so-near Misses, he lived, for the most part, with his unsympathetic parents, in the difficult city of Prague, an ageing bachelor of habits both confirmed and challenging (see the stories ‘Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor’ and ‘The Married Couple’, but also those like ‘Hunter Gracchus’ and ‘Visiting the Dead’ about an indeterminate condition half-alive, half-dead, that may well be a version of bachelordom). There was never anything in Kafka’s life that approached the categorical importance of writing (it would, in his word, capsize anything else he did), but just for that it had to wait its turn:

from 8 to 2 or 2.30 in the office, then lunch till 3 or 3.30, after that sleep in bed (usually only attempts …) till 7.30, then ten minutes of exercises, naked at the open window, then an hour’s walk – alone, with Max, or with another friend, then dinner with my family (I have three sisters, one married, one engaged; the single one, without prejudicing my affection for the others, is easily my favourite); then at 10.30 (but often not till 11.30) I sit down to write, and I go on, depending on my strength, inclination and luck, until 1, 2, or 3 o’clock, once even until 6 in the morning. Then again exercises, as above, but of course avoiding all exertions, a wash, and then, usually with a slight pain in my heart and twitching stomach muscles, to bed. (Letters to Felice, Schocken Books, 1988, p. 22, letter of 1 November 1912).

he wrote, wooingly, or perhaps in lieu of wooing, to Felice. The complacencies of Pepys it isn’t. At the same time, though, it is clear that Kafka understands that anything (independence, moving house, marriage) undertaken, in thought or deed, in opposition to such a routine will be seen primarily as an attack on – of all things – his writing (which is the thing that is under attack from everything else). The upstream dam threatens not just the river, but the boulder under the river. You can feel the defensive bristle of the arrangement – not least as the writing is so intricately, almost magically circumstantial, profoundly depending on such scanty outward events in Kafka’s uneventful life as correspondence, engagements and house moves (the always representative story ‘The Judgement’ was written two nights after Felice replied to his first letter; Elias Canetti’s book Kafka’s Other Trial: The Letters to Felice maps in fascinating detail the way the vicissitudes of the novel follow the vicissitudes of their first engagement). Writing hid, trembling, and awaited the pleasure of force majeure, which came, ultimately, in the form of Kafka’s fatal (though also, he wrote, ‘beckoned to’) illness, which announced itself in 1917, when he suffered the pulmonary haemorrhage that was the first sure indication of his tuberculosis.

Kafka’s writing dramatizes a continual dialectic of strength and weakness, usually in unexpected forms and with unexpected outcomes. Instability is all. The helmsman is straightforwardly overwhelmed by a rival; the crew lets it happen. The messenger in ‘A Message from the Emperor’ is described as ‘a strong man, tireless, a champion swimmer’ but he has no chance of even making it out of the imperial palace. The whole of China is ruled by one man, though he may have been dead for hundreds of years. The god Poseidon hates his public image – salt spray, chest-hair and trident – and dreams of a break and a cruise. Out of fear, anxiety and calamity, writing is spun that is as supple and cogent and unbroken as one would imagine only an expression of radiant triumphalism and certitude could be. Throughout his life, Kafka thought of himself as weak.

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The Burrow Read Online

Franz Kafka

The Burrow

Posthumously Published Short Fiction

Contents

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

The Burrow

A Note on the Text

Foreword

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