The Castle
Franz Kafka
THE CASTLE
Translated by J. A. Underwood
With an Introduction by Idris Parry
Contents
Translator’s Note
Introduction by Idris Parry
1 Arrival
2 Barnabas
3 Frieda
4 First Conversation with the Landlady
5 At the Mayor’s
6 Second Conversation with the Landlady
7 The Schoolmaster
8 Waiting for Klamm
9 Resisting Interrogation
10 In the Street
11 At the School
12 The Assistants
13 Hans
14 Frieda’s Reproach
15 At Amalia’s
16
17 Amalia’s Secret
18 Amalia’s Punishment
19 Approaches
20 Olga’s Plans
21
22
23
24
25
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PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
THE CASTLE
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 Nevertheless, Kafka published little during his lifetime, and ordered his closest friend to burn the mass of unpublished manuscripts – now familiar to us as some of the most influential novels and short stories of the twentieth century – after his death. Kafka’s novels, all available in Penguin Modern Classics, include The Trial, Metamorphosis and Other Stories and Amerika.
Translator’s Note
Kafka never finished this book. In fact, it breaks off in the middle of a sentence. He did not finish any of his three novels; they and many of his stories remained unpublished during his lifetime. Dying of tuberculosis in 1924, he asked his writer friend Max Brod to burn his papers. Brod did not do so (nor, surely, can Kafka seriously have expected him to) but instead edited much of Kafka’s work after his death and published it bit by bit.
In this, Max Brod’s contribution was immense; without Brod, Franz Kafka might be a minor name, known only to a few specialists. In other respects, however, scholars wishing to uncover Kafka’s original intentions have had to undo a lot of what Brod did, patiently stripping away the textual adjustments and layers of interpretation that, with the best of intentions, he and those who followed him had imposed on the dead man’s prose (and that, for example, inevitably affected the way in which Kafka’s first English translators, Willa and Edwin Muir, approached their task).
A good marker for the turning-point is perhaps Erich Heller’s provocative comment (in The Disinherited Mind, 1952): ‘Kafka is the least problematic of our modern writers.’ In a sense, there is no ‘problem’ of ‘what Kafka meant’: he meant what he wrote. The original on which this translation is based is, as nearly as we can tell, The Castle as Kafka left it; I hope the translation will give English readers a glimpse of the original’s freshness.
J.A.U.
Introduction
Has there ever been so convoluted a mind revealed in utterance? Kafka believed his situation was unique. Nobody else could be so tormented by fear, the ‘secret raven’ he talks about in his diaries. Does he exaggerate? ‘I am given to exaggeration,’ he writes to Milena Jesenská, ‘but all the same I can be trusted.’
During the months from January to September 1922 when he was writing The Castle the most important person in his life was Milena Jesenská. Over this period he wrote to her constantly and without reserve. She was necessary to him. ‘To you,’ he said, ‘I can tell the truth, for your sake as well as mine, as to nobody else. Yes, it’s possible to find one’s own truth directly from you.’ In October 1921 he gave her all his diaries and never asked for them back – an almost unbelievable act of trust for such a private person. But this action was a logical consequence: in the diaries he reveals his introspective self; in the letters to Milena he exposes his fears (and therefore himself) as to no other correspondent. Nothing was to be hidden from her. His intention seemed so interlocked with her understanding that there was nothing to conceal, everything to discover. ‘I can’t listen simultaneously to the frightful voices from within and to you,’ he tells her, ‘but I can listen to those and impart them to you … to you as to nobody else in the world.’ These letters to Milena tell us about the state of mind he projects into prose as this novel. The frightful voices from within could after all be imparted to others.
This intense relationship seems to have been an attraction of opposites. Milena was further from Kafka in external circumstances than any other woman in his life. She was twelve years younger; that would hardly matter to us, but he, at thirty-eight, thought she belonged to a different generation. She was already married, but unhappily, and the marriage was breaking up. He was Jewish, she was Christian and seems to have been an extrovert. She lived in Vienna, inaccessible to the man from Prague except through complicated and baffling arrangements. There were no simple arrangements in Kafka’s life. ‘Today I saw a map of Vienna. For a moment I couldn’t understand why they built such a great city when after all you need only one room.’
His letters are charged with painful analysis of the obstacles between them.
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