kafka

Kafka died at age forty exactly one hundred years ago today.  Here's a New Yorker piece from about twenty five years ago.

snip

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“I’ve often thought that the best way of life for me would be to have writing materials and a lamp in the innermost room of a spacious locked cellar,” he ruminated to Felice Bauer. When he spoke of the impossibility of writing German, he never meant that he was not a master of the language; his wish was to be consecrated to it, like a monk with his beads. His fear was that he was not entitled to German—not that the language did not belong to him but that he did not belong to it. German was both hospitable and inhospitable. He did not feel innocently—uncomplicatedly, unselfconsciously—German. Put it that Kafka wrote German with the passion of an ingenious yet stealthy translator, always aware of the space, however minute, between his fear, or call it his idea of himself, and the deep ease of at-homeness that is every language’s consolation. Mutter, the German word for “mother,” was, he said, alien to him: so much for the taken-for-granted intimacy and trust of die Muttersprache, the mother tongue. This crevice of separation, no thicker than a hair, may underlie the estrangement and the enfeebling distortions that shock and ultimately disorient every reader of Kafka.

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