After Gregor Samsa’s death, the family sits down to write letters of resignation to their employers—a new life is beginning. In “The Stoker” Karl’s true identity is suddenly established by his Uncle Jacob with a letter written by the family servant. But the best example is “The Judgment,” whose sudden composition seems to have been triggered by Kafka’s first letter to Felice Bauer. The story begins with Georg playing dreamily with a letter he has just finished to a friend in Russia, takes a decisive turn when Herr Bendemann announces that he too has been corresponding with the friend, and concludes with what is in essence Georg’s suicide letter: “Dear Parents, I have always loved you.”

This is not the place to enter into the intricate and persistent relations between Kafka’s writing and his personal biography. It is enough to note that the “secret connection” between the literary portrayal of sons also links the stories to Kafka’s own poignant letter to his father. Taking Kafka’s lead, we might consider The Sons as extended, indeed infinite letters, more revealing in their own indirect, literary way than “the longest letters of the longest lifetime.” By the same token, his extended letter to Hermann Kafka (which he showed to his mother but never sent to his father) can be read on a par with the other literary works. It tells the most moving “son story” of all, the story of a writer whose very literary identity and vision depended on his condition as a son.

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.

MARK ANDERSON

*This is the title chosen by Max Brod when he published the novel after Kafka’s death. Kafka’s title was actually Der Verschollene, or The Man Who Disappeared.

NOTE ON THE TRANSLATIONS

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.

ARTHUR S. WENSINGER

The Judgment

THE JUDGMENT

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.