The Sons Read Free Page B

Judgment.” “If not, please give it to him to read,” he requested. And in the “Letter to His Father” he also admits the inherently epistolary origin of his literary texts: “My writing was all about you; all I did there, after all, was to bemoan what I could not bemoan upon your breast. It was an intentionally long and drawn-out leave-taking from you.…”
    It is no coincidence that
The Sons
abound in letters and scenes of letter-writing. Letters mark turning points in the stories, written means of mediating effectively in human relations. 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.
    M ARK A NDERSON
    * 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