Thread of Max Brod Hate

the castle is really funny!

i'm bleak tho

It wasn't very conciously done as a result of my stance in this thread -- more part of me reading/re-reading/trying to find more German Lit this year -- but I got around re-reading/more Kafka than I had in the past. I re-read The Trial (in a diff translation from the Muir), and then the letters to Felice and Milena, as well as the Diary, fo the first time.

All pretty incredible, anything this guy committed to paper was literature. Amazing to think of the conditions -- mental and physical at which much of this must've been written -- he transmit those to you, its the source of its power, but only one of many. The Diary is of such rigour. I only got to understand the points aero was making after reading it. He was incredibly hard on himself -- like an insight to what an artist with a capital A is really thinking. Its not so much whether Brod was his friend or not, its whether Brod understod him or not. If he had then you could see a burning. He didn't though = he did not understand his friend. And of course we all have friends we often don't understand.

There is a volume that collects the writing that Kafka published in his lifetime, tr. on Penguin by Michael Hofmann, and I suppose that + the letters to Felice - which he left no instructions for I suppose - would've been enough. I've been reading Buchner, and its about 300 pages worth of material there. I suppose my fear was that Kafka would've been wiped from history had Brod carried out his wish. It was silly to think so.

But in the end, no, you could never burn The Trial.

Probably fine to burn America as its first chapter was published during his lifetime.

Will get round to reading The Castle before the end of the year so I'll pass sentence then.

(slightly dull response to that post but)
how do you rate other translations vs the Muirs? (Me, I like them, but have spent very little time with other versions. )

(at least someone has read my post thanks)
The answer to that is I don't know (must've read the Muir a decade ago). According to J.P.Stern (in the intro to the Scott/Waller translation) the Muirs broke up some of Kafka's sentence structures, at times.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/terry-pratchetts-unpublished-work-has-been-destroyed-j-1798633413

https://www.thenation.com/article/who-owns-kafka/

New Directions is bringing out a volume of "lost" works, though they weren't lost, just untranslated -- here's an interview with their EIC about them, and one of the stories is in this month's NYer.

Was thinking about this thread while reading all that yesterday.