The Sons

Compilation copyright © 1989 by Schocken Books Inc.
Introduction copyright © 1989 by Mark Anderson

“The Metamorphosis” and “The Judgment” English translation copyright 1948 by Schocken Books Inc. Copyright renewed 1976 by Schocken Books Inc. “The Stoker” English translation copyright 1938 by Edwin and Willa Muir. “Letter to His Father” English translation copyright 1954 by Schocken Books Inc. Copyright renewed 1982 by Schocken Books Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Schocken Books Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kafka, Franz, 1883–1924.
    The sons/by Franz Kafka; introduction by Mark Anderson.
    p.      cm.—(Schocken Kafka library)
    Contents: The metamorphosis—The judgment—
    The stoker—
    Letter to his father.
    1. Kafka, Franz, 1883–1924—Translations,
    English. I. Title. II. Series.
PT2621.A26A2 1989 833’.912 89–6379
eISBN: 978-0-307-49797-0

Jacket design by Peter Mendelsund

v3.1_r1

The publisher wishes to thank Mark Harman for bringing Franz Kafka’s wishes to our attention.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

INTRODUCTION

NOTE ON THE TRANSLATIONS

THE JUDGMENT

THE STOKER

THE METAMORPHOSIS

LETTER TO HIS FATHER

The Shocken Kafka Library

“The Judgment,” “The Stoker,” and “The Metamorphosis”
translated by Willa and Edwin Muir.

“Letter to His Father”
translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins.

All translations revised and updated by Arthur S. Wensinger.

INTRODUCTION

“I HAVE ONLY one request,” Kafka wrote to his publisher Kurt Wolff in 1913. “ ‘The Stoker,’ ‘The Metamorphosis’ … and ‘The Judgment’ belong together, both inwardly and outwardly. There is an obvious connection between the three and, even more important, a secret one, for which reason I would be reluctant to forego the chance of having them published together in a book, which might be called The Sons.” The project was never realized. Kafka was almost completely unknown at the time, his books promised scant literary success or financial return, and, upon reflection, a “secret connection” between the stories must have struck Wolff as little more than a young author’s whim, certainly not sufficient justification for republishing works that were about to be published separately. In any case the proposal disappears from their correspondence, a year later Wolff was sent to the front, and Kafka became embroiled in a personal crisis that threatened to invalidate the very “secret connection” he had wished to make public.

Now, more than seventy-five years later, The Sons have been brought together in newly revised translations under the title Kafka originally intended. Among all his writings, these three stories had for him unusual literary and personal significance. After years of unsuccessful attempts at writing, they came to him in a burst of inspiration in the fall and winter of 1912. He was never quite as happy with anything he ever wrote, for the stories seemed to him all of a piece—dramatic fictional narratives with their own powerful if somewhat bizarre logic. “The Judgment,” which he wrote at a single sitting during the night of September 22, especially struck Kafka as an example of true literary accomplishment. As he wrote to his fiancée, Felice Bauer (to whom the story is dedicated), “The Judgment” had an “inner truth,” an “indubitability” that brought tears to his eyes when he read it aloud to his sisters and a small group of friends. “The Metamorphosis,” of course, has become Kafka’s best-known story, Gregor Samsa’s transformation into a gigantic bug now generally considered one of the most noteworthy if unlikely events in modern fiction. Organized like a three-act play with a controlled narrative rise and fall, the story is perhaps Kafka’s most classical, finished work. While less famous than the other two, “The Stoker” is a masterful short work that Kafka was quite attached to; he called it a “fragment” and had Wolff publish it in 1913 as an independent piece, although it is also the first chapter of his Chaplinesque first novel Amerika.*

The title Kafka proposed emphasizes the “obvious connection” between the stories: the theme of sons singled out for cruel and unusual punishment. But to focus attention on the sons is also to imply the fathers and the problem of generational conflict common to an entire epoch. A note in Kafka’s diary, in reference to “The Judgment,” reads: “Thoughts about Freud, naturally.” And indeed, Freud’s own essay on the primal struggle between fathers and sons, Totem and Taboo, was published the same year. The theme is also basic to the literary movement Kafka is most often associated with: German Expressionism.