This is the translation of The Castle that I mentioned in my review of J.M. Coetzee’s Stranger Shores, the first from the text as Kafka left it. The Castle was, like all Kafka’s novels, unfinished at his death, and was prepared for publication by his friend and literary executor, Max Brod. Brod’s view of Kafka’s work has clouded it in layers of biography and sainthood for decades, his approach being to smooth the rough edges of the fiction and laud the private man.
Like most people, I first read Kafka in Edwin and Willa Muir’s translations. Mark Harman praises those translations in his introduction to his own, but it’s difficult to see them as anything other than unacceptable in the light of the new text.
The Castle is probably Kafka’s most enigmatic work, and is my own favourite of his novels. In fact, I think it’s flat out one of my favourite novels, along with Ulysses, The Man Without Qualities, Anna Karenina, In Search of Lost Time and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Let me illustrate why with a few extended quotations. First, here’s the narrator musing about why the Castle’s bureaucracy is behaving the way it is:
By mostly obliging him from the start in some of the more trivial matters—and no more had been at stake until now—the few easy little victories but also of the corresponding satisfaction and the resulting well-founded confidence for other, greater battles. Instead, they let K. wander about as he wished, even if only in the village, spoiling and weakening him, barred all fighting here, and dispatched him to the extra-official, completely unclear, dull and strange life. If this went on, if he weren’t always on guard, he might one day, despite the friendly attitude of the authorities, despite his meticulous fulfilment of his exaggeratedly light official duties, be deceived by the favour seemingly granted him and lead the rest of his life so imprudently that he would fall to pieces, and the authorities, gentle and friendly as ever, would have to come, as though against their will but actually at the behest of some official ordinance of which they knew nothing, in order to clear him out of the way.
What an extraordinary piece of prose! The bureaucracy, in this interpretation, behaves in accordance with laws it does not even know about! It is ‘gentle and friendly as ever’ even though it will come ‘to clear [K.] out of the way’. This consistently strange world is entirely Kafka’s own. That block of prose could not possibly have been written by any other author.
Here’s a shorter but still extraordinary passage:
“Who cares about your father’s work? Klamm is waiting for news, but instead of rushing there head over heels, you spend your time carting dung from the cowshed.” “My father is a shoemaker,” Barnabas said, undeterred, “he had orders from Brunswick, and I am Father’s apprentice.” “Shoemaker—orders—Brunswick,” K. cried bitterly, as if trying to make each word forever unusable.
As if trying to make each word forever unusable. Again, only Kafka could have written that.
Here’s an exchange between K. and one of his two assistants (who always put me in mind of the Marx Brothers, although in Harman’s translation and, one assumes, Kafka’s text, they are far more put upon and bullied by K. than I remember):
“Threats like that don’t frighten me,” said Jeremias, “you don’t want me as an assistant, you even fear me as an assistant, you are particularly fearful of assistants, it was only out of fear that you hit dear Artur.” “Perhaps,” said K., “but did it hurt any less because of that? Perhaps I will often be able to show my fear of you in the same way. If I see that your assistantship isn’t giving you much joy, I will, despite all that fear, take the greatest pleasure in forcing you to do your duty. And indeed this time I shall make a point of getting hold of you alone, without Artur, and then I can devote special attention to you.”
What a classic Kafka touch, that one could be afraid of assistants in general, but also that K. would concede that point as a matter of course! And here’s K. doing his bit to ensure that the bureaucracy is enforced at every level; even while battling it, he adopts its own coercive procedures. This is Kafka’s unique insight into bureaucracy: that it has no controllers, but is a entity with a mysterious life of its own, one that we all participate in both as victim and as perpetrator.
One final quote:
This babble of voices from the rooms had something extremely cheerful about it. First it sounded like the jubilation of children getting ready for an excursion, then like wake-up time in a henhouse, like the joy of being in complete accord with the awakening day, somewhere there was even a gentleman imitating the crowing of a cock.
This is like the opening paragraph of Metamorphosis, where Kafka spells it out: “It was no dream.” Here there is actually a man making the sound of a crowing cock.
Passages like this are strewn throughout the dense text of The Castle. Harman’s translation retains Kafka’s eccentric punctuation and paragraphing, things which become more extreme as the novel progresses. And, faithful to Kafka’s text, it ends in mid sentence.
This is a remarkable and singular work of genius, and one of the finest pieces of writing I’ve ever come across. The translation is excellent – see Coetzee’s essay for exhaustive detail on that – and puts all the other ones I’ve read to shame. I simply can’t recommend it highly enough.
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