Franz Kafka
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883 – June 3, 1924) was one of the major German-language fiction writers of the 20th century. A middle-class Jew based in Prague, his unique body of writing — many incomplete and most published posthumously — has become amongst the most influential in Western literature.
Kafka's works – including the stories Das Urteil (1913, "The Judgement"), In der Strafkolonie (1920, "In the Penal Colony"); the novella Die Verwandlung ("The Metamorphosis"); and unfinished novels Der Prozess ("The Trial") and Das Schloß ("The Castle") – have come to embody the blend of absurd, surreal and mundane which gave rise to the adjective "kafkaesque".
Translations
There are two primary sources for the translations based on the two German editions. The earliest English translations were by Edwin and Willa Muir and published by Alfred A. Knopf. These editions were widely published and spurred the late-1940s surge in Kafka's popularity in the United States. Later editions (notably the 1954 editions) had the addition of the deleted text translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. These are known as "Definitive Editions." They translated both The Trial, Definitive and The Castle, Definitive among other writings. Definitive Editions are generally accepted to have a number of biases and to be dated in interpretation.
After Pasley and Schillemeit completed their recompilation of the German text, the new translations were completed and published – The Castle, Critical by Mark Harman (Schocken Books, 1998), The Trial, Critical by Breon Mitchell (Schocken Books, 1998) and Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared by Michael Hoffman (New Directions Publishing, 2004). These editions are often noted as being based on the restored text.
Literature
- Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote a short story called "A Friend of Kafka," which was about a Yiddish actor called Jacques Kohn who said he knew Franz Kafka. In this story, according to Jacques Kohn, Kafka believed in the Golem, a legendary creature from Jewish folklore.
- Kafka Americana by Jonathan Lethem and Carter Scholz is a collection of stories based on Kafka's life and works.
- Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
- Kafka was the Rage, a Greenwich Village Memoir by Anatole Broyard
- Kafka's Curse by Achmat Dangor
- The Kafka Effekt by American bizarro author D. Harlan Wilson, who relates his take on the irrealism genre of literature to that of Franz Kafka, and to that of William S. Burroughs.
- Criminal (comics) by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips contains, within a re-occuring comic strip seen in characters newspapers, the adventures of 'Franz Kafka PI'. The 4th story arc of the book also involves the creator of the strip. There is talk of a spin off series written by Matt Fraction.
