Franz Kafka - Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared (New Restored Text Translation)

Translated with an Introduction by

MICHAEL HOFMANN

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This translation and Introduction first published as The Man who Disappeared (Amerika) 1996
Published in Penguin Books under the current title 2007
2

Translation and Introduction copyright Michael Hofmann, 1996
All rights reserved

The moral right of the translator has been asserted

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EISBN : 9780141911311

Der Verschollene (The Man Who Disappeared), is the Cinderella among Kafkas three novels: the earliest begun and earliest abandoned; the last to achieve posthumous publication (as Amerika), edited by Max Brod, in 1927; the least read, the least written about and the least Kafka. That said, I agree with Edwin Muir, whose English translation first came out in 1928, that it is the most purely delightful of Kafkas books, and there is a weightier case to be made for it as well not that delight should be lost sight of in the search for meaning.

It seems that Kafka worked on a version (which is now lost) of Der Verschollene from 1911 into the summer of 1912. It went slowly, and he was never happy with it. Then, following the writing of Das Urteil (The Judgement) in a single night (223 September 1912), he embarked on a second version, which went swimmingly. Brod reports on his friends progress:

I quote from my diary notes of the time. 29 September: Kafka in ecstasy, writing all night. A novel set in America. 1 October: Kafka in incredible ecstasy. 2 October: Kafka, continuing very inspired. A chapter finished. I am happy for him. 3 October: Kafka doing well. On the 6 October he read me The Judgement and The Stoker.

By 17 November he had completed six chapters and thought he could finish the novel by Christmas, when he had a week off. In the event, things happened differently. For three weeks, he was distracted by Metamorphosis, experienced increasing difficulties with the novel, and finally put it aside on 24 January 1913. In June, the first chapter, The Stoker, was published as a fragment by Kurt Wolff, and there was some talk of putting it out in another volume, along with The Judgement and Metamorphosis, to be called perhaps Die Shne (The Sons) a suggestion of how Kafka expected to be read. When his copy of The Stoker arrived, Kafka read it aloud to his parents and noted:

Exuberance, because I liked The Stoker so much. In the evening I read it to my parents, there is no better critic than myself, reading aloud to my most reluctantly listening father. Many shallows, in amongst obviously inaccessible depths.

Kafka didnt take up the manuscript again until October 1914, when he completed the Up, up! cried Robinson section (from This was most unfair), and worked on the two final fragments before finally giving up, this time for good. Some of his subsequent judgements were spectacularly harsh as with all his work but he never actually destroyed The Man Who Disappeared, and the time came when he thought his revulsion came from incapacity, and it turned on himself: strength apparently (already) beyond me today. In 1920, reading Milena Jesensks translation of The Stoker into Czech, he approved of her rendition of in his exuberance, and because he was a strong lad, while suggesting she should leave it out altogether, so little sympathy did he have left for his strikingly young, forthright, cheerful and brave hero. Not only did Kafka expect his writing to reflect himself (and to be better than himself), but to go on doing so.

The version that Brod published in 1927 differs from the present one in at least one matter of substance, and many of detail if there is such a thing as a detail with Kafka. The substance is the section Up! Up, cried Robinson and the first of the fragments, Bruneldas Departure, never previously presented in English. The details range from the title of the book which, though he may have spoken to Brod about his American novel, is only twice referred to in writing, both times as