Translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers
1
Reading is a secretly collective act: it intervenes in our memories and makes the future possible. Borges believed that Kafka had created his own precursors; that is, he’d managed to influence the past. Maybe that’s why stories like “An Imperial Message,” published when Borges was still young and unknown, feel as if they could have been written thirty years later—by Borges himself, translating and rewriting his teacher. Today, Kafka’s impact still triggers inverse phenomena. It’s not that his work explains the era we’re called to resist, but that reality itself insists on becoming more and more Kafkaesque: a mimesis dark as a cockroach. By plagiarizing his logic, the world exploits Kafka.
Oscillating between apparent indifference and extreme vulnerability, his sensitive intelligence ultimately refutes or parodies the superman of his time, protagonist of its politics and poetics. Susceptible, reticent, and halting, subsumed in a state of incurable uncertainty, Kafka may feel a century closer to us than the histrionics of Hemingway or Henry Miller, to mention just two of his antitheses. “My doubts stand in a circle around every word,” he confesses in his diary; “I see them before I see the word.”[1] These doubts are the ghost that haunts his entire body of work—in which even ghosts question their own existence.
Faced with the impossibility of any certitude, Kafka’s displaced identity, forged from superimposed minorities, plays a crucial role: he was too Jewish for the German canon of the interwar period (let’s not forget that his three sisters, like Milena, died in concentration camps), too Germanophone for the Czech national tradition, too inconvenient for the Soviet future of his native Prague, too different from his own father. Maybe that’s why he so emphatically belongs to no one—and why he’s so utterly ours. Traveling through tunnels in “A Visit to a Mine,” we read: “We have to give way… even where there is no room for us to make way.”[2] His correspondent and Czech translator Milena Jesenská perfectly summarized this attitude in an obituary that could have been his epitaph: he was “too clairvoyant, too intelligent to be capable of living, and too weak to fight”; one of those people whose “submission only shames the victor.”[3]
2
Among the infinite takes on Samsa’s transformation is an especially modest and physical one: he’s a worker consumed by his efforts. Writing in his diary several years before the publication of “The Metamorphosis,” Kafka laments something that echoes the famous beginning of his novella: “When I tried to get out of bed today I simply collapsed. There’s a very simple reason for it, I am completely overworked.” His fiction crackles with an energy both political and elusive, tenaciously averse to both naïveté and propaganda. War, for instance, operates in his work more as siege than assault, constantly exerting an implicit pressure on his characters.
When we consider Kafka’s style, we tend to exaggerate its parabolic qualities. Yet as soon as we open his first collection of stories, Contemplation, we’re enveloped in the sensory: sounds, temperatures, visual stimuli. Kafka was less an author of abstractions than of nudes, vulnerable bodies sustained by little but their own helpless materiality. “I write this most definitely out of despair over my body and over the future with this body,” he declares in his diary. His profession, evaluating workplace accidents and injuries, feels relevant to this obsession. We might understand his consistent physical and figurative preoccupation with the neck (in one of his letters, his describes himself as a being-grabbed-by-the-collar[4] as his search for a connection between mind and anatomy, thinking and pain.
3
Like hunger artists—fasters whose identity is defined by subtraction—short-story writers engage in a practice of sacrifice. They must remember that devouring a plot will weaken their text; displaying its extremities will prompt a fatal dispersion of its strength. “To have the feeling of being bound and at the same time the other,” Kafka writes in his diary, “that if one were unbound it would be even worse.”
These concepts, both anatomical and aesthetic, are captured in a motionless scene in his notebooks: “There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone.”[5] It’s an unmistakably Kafkan marvel that these words can be read—with equal conviction—in the key of irony, revelation, or lament.
Kafka trains his vision, both radical and clear, on a serene source of horror: senselessness. Which unleashes the desperate search for possible meanings that always drove his work. His writing dares to convey so little that it confronts us with the true chasm of ellipsis: maybe, if we pay enough attention, we’ll discover that it’s telling us everything. That’s where its magnetism lies. “From a certain point on, there is no more turning back,” he writes in one of his aphorisms, dictated by tuberculosis. “That is the point that must be reached.”[6]
Andrés Neuman was born in Buenos Aires, where he spent his childhood. The son of Argentine émigré musicians, he grew up and lives in Granada, Spain. He was selected as one of Granta’s “Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists.” His novel Traveler of the Century (FSG) won the Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics Prize. It was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and received a Special Commendation from the jury of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. His novel Talking to Ourselves (FSG) was longlisted for the 2015 Best Translated Book Award and shortlisted for the 2015 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. His collection of short stories The Things We Don’t Do (Open Letter) won the 2016 Firecracker Award for fiction, granted by the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses with the American Booksellers Association. His most recent titles translated into English are the novels Fracture (FSG), Bariloche (Open Letter), and Once Upon Argentina (Open Letter), as well as a work of praise of noncanonical bodies, Sensitive Anatomy (Open Letter).
Robin Myers is a poet and translator. Recent and forthcoming translations include We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara; Death Takes Me by Cristina Rivera Garza (co-translated with Sarah Booker); Bariloche and Love Training by Andrés Neuman; and In Vitro by Isabel Zapata, among many other works of poetry and prose from across Latin America.
[1] This and all other quotes from Kafka’s diaries are drawn from The Diaries, translated by Ross Benjamin (Penguin Classics, 2024).
[2] From The Complete Stories, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir et al. (Schocken Books, 1971).
[3] From Letters to Milena, translated by Philip Boehm (Schocken Books, 1990).
[4] From Letters to Milena.
[5] The Blue Octavo Notebooks, translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (Exact Change, 1991).
[6] Aphorisms, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir and by Michael Hofmann (Schocken Books, 2015).
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