Stop Trying to Understand Kafka

The rabbis of the Talmud taught in parables, fanciful tales meant to illustrate moral principles. To what may a parable be compared? one of them once asked, that being the form of most rabbinical questions. To a cheap candle used by a king to find a gold coin. With just one modest anecdote, you may fathom the Torah!

Jesus taught in parables too—which is not surprising, given that he was also a rabbi of sorts. Why do you speak to the people in parables? his disciples ask him in Matthew 13:10–17, after he has just preached one to large crowds. Because they don’t understand them, he responds, offering one of the most mystifying explanations in the Gospels: Seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear. But you disciples, Jesus says, addressing his loyal followers, rank among the initiated and know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, so you do understand my parables, and can learn from them: To he who has, more will be given, but from he who has not, more will be taken.

Franz Kafka wasn’t a rabbi, exactly, but he is the high priest of 20th-century literature, and he also wrote in parables. In a brief one called “On Parables,” he asks, in effect, what they’re good for. Why do sages feel obliged to illustrate their principles with tales, requiring their listeners to, as he puts it, “go over” to another world? Kafka answers: The sages don’t mean that we should go to “some actual place,” but rather to “some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something too that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the least.” In short, even the sage can’t articulate the meaning of his own parables, and so they’re useless to us. “All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible.”

The rabbis say that parables teach Torah. Jesus says that only the seeker for truth can understand parables. Kafka says no one can. It’s a strange claim for a storyteller to make. To what may Kafka’s pessimism be compared? To his parable “An Imperial Message.” A dying emperor entrusts a messenger with a message meant for you and you alone. The man is strong; he clears a path easily through the gathered throng. But the crowds and the courtyards multiply: “He is still pressing through the chambers of the innermost palace; never will he prevail; and were he to succeed at this, nothing would have been gained: he would have to fight his way down the steps; and were he to succeed at this, nothing would be gained.” And so it goes for thousands of years. And you? You “sit at your window and dream” of the message that never comes.

Kafka died a century ago this year at the age of 40, and since then a mighty industry has arisen to deliver all of the messages that Kafka said would never be delivered. Interpretation requires context, and so the enigmatic missives that he sent from his alternate universe are always being claimed by one tradition or other. Many German writers, including Thomas Mann, greatly admired Kafka’s prose; Kurt Tucholsky, Weimar Germany’s leading political commentator and cultural critic, called it “the best classical German of our time.” This was a high honor for a Czech writer, and the German Literature Archive fought to acquire a trove of his manuscripts on the grounds that he was a great German writer. Kafka’s first English-language translators, Edwin and Willa Muir, theologized him as a Christian pilgrim in search of salvation. John Updike praised him for escaping narrow sectarianism: “Kafka, however unmistakable the ethnic source of his ‘liveliness’ and alienation, avoided Jewish parochialism.” Nonsense, Cynthia Ozick retorted: “Nothing could be more wrong-headed than this parched Protestant misapprehension of Mitteleuropa’s tormented Jewish psyche.”

[From the September 2018 issue: Adam Kirsch on who gets to claim Kafka]

On the whole, Ozick is right. Kafka couldn’t have avoided his Jewish parochialism had he wanted to, which he didn’t. The bourgeois Jewish Prague he was born into aspired to assimilation but couldn’t pull it off, defeated by a rising roar of Czech anti-Semitism. His parents never quashed the traces of their shtetl childhood. Kafka himself had no formal Jewish education, but in his 20s, he developed a passion for Jewish culture. He embraced Yiddish theater, moved in a circle of Zionist intellectuals, steeped himself in Jewish classical texts—Bible, Talmud, Kabbalah—and Hasidic folklore. By the end of his life, he had a decent command of Hebrew.

But Ozick is also wrong. Kafka is universalist in his particularism. His themes—alienation, shame, exile, tradition and the lack thereof, revelation and the lack thereof, the crushing power of the law—are both very Jewish and post-theological, the leitmotifs of our time. Kafka’s stories are Jewish the way the Old Testament is Jewish. That is, it’s also Christian, and it speaks even more generally to the human condition, and to a great deal besides that. Both Kafka and the Bible are inexhaustible sources of meaning because they overflow any box we build around them. They exist on a plane of Western consciousness so formative of ours today that they seem to come from everywhere and nowhere.

As it happens, Kafka writes in a biblical manner. The Hebrew Bible’s authors exerted a subtractive force on him. His protagonists are not flat, exactly, but not round, either. Like Joseph, Moses, the patriarchs and matriarchs, they don’t engage in introspection, which is not to say that they lack interiority, just that we don’t hear about it. And Kafka starves his prose until it is as stark as scripture. He uses a limited vocabulary, abstains from metaphor, and stints on the random details that create what the literary theorist Roland Barthes called the “reality effect.”

Kafka’s friend Max Brod once regaled him with the overwrought language of a supernatural tale he was reading, and he replied with a line of poetry that expressed his idea of beauty: “The smell of wet stones in a hallway.” (That’s from Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “The Conversation About Poems,” 1903.) Over the years, Kafka’s settings became ever more generic and abstract—figurative deserts, as it were. So when Kafka homes in on some striking particular, such as the fleas on the doorkeeper’s collar in the story “Before the Law,” the absence of other details makes that one radiant with meaning.

A curious feature of Kafka’s prose is that, pared down though its lexicon may be, it resists translation. There’s a good reason for that. Dictionaries supply more definitions for basic words than for those of greater complexity because simpler ones are the roots of vast family trees of words; plain language signifies promiscuously. How, as a translator, do you convey a multitude of implications as well as a narrow contextual meaning at the same time?

The Czech novelist Milan Kundera gave a famously dyspeptic answer to that question: The translator should translate humbly. In a 1993 essay, he berates those who try to liven up Kafka’s deceptively dull, repetitive prose to conform to conventions of literary excellence. “Every author of some value transgresses against ‘good style’ and in that transgression lies the originality (and hence the raison d’être) of his art,” Kundera writes. Translators don’t want to sound colorless, so they’re willfully colorful; Kundera disdainfully calls this “synonymizing.”

Mark Harman, who has translated Kafka’s Amerika: The Missing Person, The Castle, and now a new collection of selected stories, does not synonymize. The most consequential simplification in the volume is a small fix. He changes the title of the novella we know as The Metamorphosis to The Transformation, a literal translation of the German title Die Verwandlung. Transformation is one of the story’s important repetitions. Kafka uses it again in the very first sentence: “One morning when Gregor Samsa awoke in his bed from restless dreams he found himself transformed into a monstrous insect.”

Putting transformation back into the title opens up new dimensions in the story—new, that is, to English-language readers. Metamorphosis doesn’t just mean change; it means a change in form or structure. It carries an echo of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, whose characters undergo bodily transmutations into things, animals, and plants. By getting rid of the morphological implication, Harman reveals less concrete transformations. Before Gregor Samsa woke up as a beetle-like creature, he supported his family, which must now become self-sufficient because he can no longer work. His sweet, sheltered sister gets a job at a shop and gains the confidence to adopt a forceful tone with her parents. His father, a defeated man since his business failed, goes to work as a factotum in a bank, wearing a blue uniform with gold buttons. The uniform instills in him a quasi-military pride. The stronger the family gets, the more it neglects the monstrous Gregor; his sister grows actively hostile toward him. As Gregor’s situation declines, the family’s improves. There is not one transformation, but many.

The unspecificity of transformation also retains a crucial mystery: What exactly does Gregor turn into? Kafka insisted that the question go unanswered. Fearing that an illustrator might propose to draw Gregor, Kafka wrote to his publisher, “Not that, please not that! … The insect itself cannot be depicted. It cannot even be shown from a distance.” If the title no longer tells us that Gregor has taken a new shape, we can’t be sure that he really has, as opposed to, say, that he is suffering a hallucinatory dysmorphia or the misfortune of having been thrust into some other, abhorrent, hybrid reality. Perhaps we all have an insect nature. We’re talking about an animal fable here.

Another challenge for a translator is Ungeziefer, the unrepresentable creature that Gregor turns into. How to convey the correct shade of meaning, and set up a later ironic reversal? Ungeziefer means “vermin.” That’s an insult, not an entomological term. It refers to any living thing deemed loathsome—bugs, yes, but also mice (which terrified Kafka) and people. Some German Bibles use Ungeziefer for the creatures that swarm Pharaoh’s palace during the fourth plague. Hitler used it for Jews. (Kafka was mercifully dead by then.) Various translators have used vermin—“a monstrous vermin,” “some sort of monstrous vermin”—but somehow the phrase is always awkward. The difficulty, in English, is that vermin is primarily a collective noun; you can’t really say that Gregor woke up as “a vermin.”

[From the July/August 2013 issue: Is Franz Kafka overrated?]

Harman offers “insect,” because Kafka called Gregor that in his letter to his publisher. Insect is vague but not vague enough; it leaves out the element of revulsion and makes the new Gregor too identifiable. The poet and translator Michael Hofmann settled on “cockroach”—a mistake. Vladimir Nabokov, who knew his arthropods, demonstrated conclusively that Gregor could not have been a cockroach: “A cockroach is an insect that is flat in shape with large legs, and Gregor is anything but flat: he is convex on both sides, belly and back, and his legs are small.” There is no perfect solution.

The ironic reversal that vermin makes possible hinges on repetitions of Zischen, “hiss.” It first appears on the day of Gregor’s transformation. His father, enraged that the Ungeziefer has come out of his room, drives him back into it with a walking stick and the loud hisses, Zischlaute, of a wild man or beast, ein Wilder—the wild in Wilder suggesting something feral, excluded from human society. The horrible, insistent hissing—variations on Zischen occur twice more in the scene—terrifies Gregor. Weeks later, in acute pain from an apple lodged in his back after his father threw it at him, Gregor grows furious at his family, which is squabbling violently, and hisses loudly at them. (They ignore him.) That Gregor is now hissing loudly tells us that he has been reduced to his father’s level. He has become ein Wilder too. And that raises the most important question in the novella: Who was the Ungeziefer all along—Gregor or his father?

Repetitions like hiss and transform are good examples of a biblical technique written about extensively by two of Kafka’s contemporaries, the great Jewish philosophers Martin Buber (Kafka’s friend) and Franz Rosenzweig, who rendered the Hebrew Bible into a beautifully Hebraized German. Their theory of biblical style turned on the notion of key words that were repeated, with variation, throughout a scene or across a book; when strung together, these form the basis of a “higher meaning,” as Buber put it. They must be translated very carefully, according to the philosophers, because they effectively serve as conduits from the surface of the text to a subterranean narrative, often with important spiritual undertones. Miss one, and you may miss the whole story.

Kafka’s best-known parable is probably “Before the Law,” which appears in The Trial but is sometimes also published as a stand-alone story. Harman illustrates the importance of key words—this time by negative example. Here, Harman uses the same word throughout when he should have noted a very subtle shift at the end. A doorkeeper stands before the law. A man from the country comes and asks to enter. Harman translates the request as one for “admission,” but the German word, Eintritt, is more neutral than that. It means “entry”—literally, a stepping-into. Eintritt does not anticipate the need for the doorkeeper’s explicit permission. But the doorkeeper says no, he cannot go in.

The man importunes the doorkeeper again and again. The years go by, and the man is on the verge of death. Just before he dies, he asks the doorkeeper one last question: “Everyone strives towards the law … How is it that during those many years no one except for me requested admission?” Harman’s “admission” is now a translation of Einlass, and a correct one: Einlass does indeed convey the sense of being let in, admitted, by someone—the doorkeeper in this case. In other words, a straightforward request to enter has degenerated into an abject plea for permission. By failing to register the slight yet telling shift from entry to admission, Harman glosses over the debasement of the man’s spiritual condition.

The doorkeeper then answers the man’s question with one of the most memorable paradoxes in literary history: “Nobody else could be admitted here since this entrance was intended for you alone. I shall go now and close it.” If the entrance was always meant to be his, does this mean that he had never needed to ask to enter in the first place, let alone beg for permission? One could dream up endless interpretations; in The Trial, the parable occasions a confounding display of exegetical prowess by a priest. One thing we know for sure, however, is that we will never know for sure. The messenger never arrives. The door slams. As the cultural critic Walter Benjamin wrote in an essay on Kafka, “His parables are never exhausted by what is explainable; on the contrary, he took all conceivable precautions against the interpretation of his writings.”

It would be foolish to claim that Kafka learned his metaphysical wordplay from Jewish texts alone. He read widely: Gustave Flaubert, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He admired the understated prose of Anton Chekhov and Heinrich von Kleist. He read literary magazines that published cutting-edge work, too. Still, his regular reading of the Bible—nightly, during some periods of his life—contributed a laconic quality to his classical prose that doesn’t make him anachronistic; it makes him original. From 1912 to 1924, when other modernist writers were embracing Freud, and James Joyce was experimenting with stream of consciousness, Kafka was choosing surface over depth psychology. Or, you might say, he was keeping the same tactful distance from his characters as the biblical narrator did from his.

Jews and Christians are People of the Book, preoccupied with narrative and language—with the truths they provide access to, the conversation with God they facilitate. By the time Kafka began to reach for his tradition, however, truth and God had been swamped by radical doubt. The conversation was no longer to be had. To ask was to be denied an answer: The door is closed.

Benjamin recounts a famous anecdote told by Max Brod: Kafka said to him that people are “nihilist thoughts that came into God’s head.” So is God evil? Brod asked. Not at all, Kafka said. He just has bad moods. Still, is there no hope outside this world? Kafka smiled and offered up another of his paradoxes: “Plenty of hope—for God, an infinite amount of hope—only not for us.” In other words, we’re on our own—though at least we have Kafka to tell us that. He may have turned a literary form that once bound a people to their God into a notice of his absence, but remarking on God’s absence is also a way of making him present. And we have the parables. That’s not hope, exactly, but it’s not nothing.

This article appears in the July/August 2024 print edition with the headline “Kafka’s Not Supposed to Make Sense.”