Cuốn này quái quá, một nửa dành cho Kafka, một nửa, cho Langer, bạn của Kafka.
Gấu thú thực chưa từng nghe đến tên của tác giả này. Phần thơ & nhạc, song ngữ [tiếng Hebreu]
Phần Kafka, bản dịch mới

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Kafka & Langer: An Unusually Complex Friendship

IN FRONT OF THE LAW
 

IN FRONT OF the Law stands a doorman. A man from the country comes to this doorman and asks to be admitted to the Law, but the doorman says that he can't allow him to enter. The man reflects on this and then asks if he can assume that he'll be allowed to enter later. "It's possible," says the doorman, "but not now." Since the gate to the Law remains open and the doorman steps to the side, the man bends down to look through the gate into the interior. When the doorman notices this, he laughs and says, "If it tempts you so much, try to get in despite my warning. But know this: I'm powerful, and I'm only the lowliest doorman. In every chamber stands another doorman, each more powerful than the one before. Though powerful myself, the very gaze of the third is more than I can endure." The man from the country hadn't anticipated such difficulties; the Law is supposedly accessible to anyone at any time, he thinks, but now, as he looks at the doorman in his fur coat more carefully, at his large, pointed nose, the long, thick, black Cossack beard, he decides to continue waiting until he receives permission to enter. The doorman gives him a stool and lets him sit down to the side of the door. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be admitted and wears out the doorman with his pleas. The doorman often subjects him to a series of questions, asks him about his home and many other things, but they're questions posed in a detached way, the sort that great lords pose, and in the end he always repeats that he still can't grant him entry. The man, who had fully equipped himself for his journey, uses everything he has, no matter how valuable, to bribe the doorman. The latter accepts everything but says at the same time: "I'm only accepting this so that you won't think that you've overlooked something." Over the many years the man watches the doorman almost constantly. He forgets about the other doormen, and this first one seems to him to be the only obstacle between him and access to the Law. He curses his bad luck, in the first years recklessly and loudly; later, as he grows old, he continues only to grumble to himself quietly. He becomes like a child, and since in his perennial observations of the doorman he has come to know even the fleas in the collar of his fur coat, he even asks the fleas to help him change the doorman's mind. Finally, his vision becomes weak, and he doesn't know whether it's getting darker around him or his eyes are only deceiving him. But now he recognizes in the darkness a brilliance which radiates inextinguishably from the door of the Law. He doesn't have much longer to live now. As he's near the end, all of his experiences of the entire time culminate in a question that he hasn't yet asked the doorman. Since he can no longer raise his stiffening body, he motions to him. The doorman must bend very low for him since their difference in height has changed much to the latter's disadvantage. "What do you want to know now?" asks the doorman. "You're insatiable." "Everyone strives for the Law," says the man. "How is it that in these many years no one except me has asked to be admitted?" The doorman realizes that the man is already near the end, and to reach his failing ears he roars at him: "No one else could be admitted here because this entrance was for you alone. I'll now go and close it."

 

TRANSLATOR'S NOTES 

Like the work of any other seminal figure in world literature, Franz Kafka's writing defies any attempt at a tidy categorization. One can look for antecedents in his writing, one can compare his writing with that of his contemporaries, and one can trace the Nachleben of his writings and their influence on later writers, but all of this is doomed to remain an ill-considered construct, a theoretical crowbar used to wrench him willfully into an arbitrary context of some kind. What to do with Franz Kafka? This question is best left to literary scholars to ponder, but I can't help but think that Kafka himself would only react with his typically bemused smile at their ongoing efforts to define him.

I've been working on this translation project intermittently since 1994. The inspiration came to me from the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who considered his translations of Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Verhaeren to be integral to his own development as a writer. In short, Zweig believed that becoming intimately acquainted with a foreign author's writing style is invaluable in developing one's own and that there's no better way of doing so than by translating that author's writing. Because of his immense appeal to me, Kafka was an obvious choice in my case, and I chose these two collections in particular (Ein Landarzt and Ein Hungerkunstler) because they don't tend to receive as much attention as some of Kafka's other works. In any case, Zweig's point is well taken: like James Joyce, Kafka was a consummate craftsman, and what I've learned from having so minutely examined his writing style will certainly serve me well as I return to writing my own fiction. I assert that a translator can only be defined as an arbitrary collaborator working figuratively with an absent author,' living or dead, who more often than not and for various reasons has' nothing whatsoever to do with the translation process. This was obviously true in this case, and I can describe my approach to the process in the following way:

1.
I initially subjected each German text to a painfully literal translation, set it aside for a few days, then returned to it and revised it as if I were revising English prose written by a gifted writer who wasn't a native speaker. A judicious use of idioms plays a large role in a good translation, a point that can be elaborated by providing a textbook example. There's a saying in German, Morgenstunde hat Gold im Munde, which can be translated literally as "The morning hour has gold in its mouth." Although this statement conveys a pleasant image, it isn't particularly lucid, but once it's translated idiomatically and more accurately as "The early bird catches the worm," its figurative meaning (i.e. "Opportunity awaits at an early hour") becomes more obvious. Another example will suffice. Imagine someone walking into a store and saying to the clerk: ''Acquiring footwear from you would please me." This statement is perfectly intelligible but completely unidiomatic, and a native speaker would never put it that way. Unwelcome connotations also play a role. For example, I think that the word Bodensatz near the end of "A Message from the Emperor" can be best translated as "dregs", but in this particular context that almost exclusively connotes the socially downtrodden and doesn't work for that reason. These considerations can be multiplied endlessly, and the di- lemma of a translator can therefore be summed up as follows: if the translation is too literal, it can easily become awkward or stilted, whereas a free-wheeling, highly idiomatic translation runs the risk of deviating too far from the original meaning of the text. Again, in making choices of this kind, a well-intentioned translator takes on the role of a collaborator doing his or her very best to convey both the word and the spirit of the text (to the extent, of course, to which that can be determined). In other words, it's a tight-rope act.

 

2.         With all of this and other factors in mind, including various editorial considerations (see below), I continued to subject the text to repeated revisions while referring frequently to the German as a corrective in cases where my translation wasn't clear or seemed to lack cohesion. This took time.

 

3.         At various points during the process I consulted native speakers for help in translating a few of the thornier passages. They often found these passages just as puzzling as they were to me, a fact attributable to the language of the time and to what I would call a studied ambiguity on the part of the author, a hallmark of good prose and poetry in the hands of a capable author. (After all, a poem isn't an automobile manual.) Finally, being able to refer to words and collocations accessible through various Internet search engines was also of considerable help in answering these questions.

 

This book, then, is the result of countless hours of work, with painstaking attention given to every detail. If asked, I could in fact offer a carefully reasoned argument for every single word choice, but as in the case of any translation, there will always remain a few problems, things that have been overlooked and even mistranslated. As a language teacher, for example, I've regularly presented my students with a series of translations of passages from German, Greek, and Latin authors, and there are always problems of some kind (the very purpose of the exercise, of course). That's inevitable, but in this case I'd like to think that almost 100 per cent of what you've read is what Franz Kafka intended to convey. For further thoughts on the process of translating, I would recommend Douglas Hofstadter's "Translator, Trader: An Essay on the Pleasantly Pervasive Paradoxes of Translation", co- bound with his translation of Francoise Sagan's La Chamade (Basic Books, 2009).

I once spoke to an Italian translator at a Goethe Institute in Germany who pointed out that there's no money to be made in translating and that, like the process involved in the creation of the very literature we translate, it's ultimately a labor of love. That's certainly true in this case, and I've often asked myself why Kafka appeals to me so much. His exquisite sense of absurdity is certainly one factor, and much of his writing (e.g. ''A Report for an Academy" in this collection) amuses me. It's Kafka's sensitivity and delicacy, however, that appeal to me more than anything else. These qualities can be clearly seen, for example, in the piece "Seated in the Gallery", in which the narrator is reduced to tears by the sheer beauty of a woman on horseback. To Kafka, the world's beauty must have been every bit as excruciating as its darker side, and I can only see his almost compulsive need to write as well as the occasionally grotesque quality of his writing as being coping mechanisms which allowed him to receive, process, and ultimately accept the many conflicting and disturbing impressions encountered in his everyday life. In the summer of 2009 I had the opportunity to visit both the house in which Kafka was born and the house in which he died of tuberculosis, and the visit to the latter (including a terse, bizarre conversation at the door with a Hausmeister who could very well have just stepped out of a Kafka narrative) moved me deeply as I viewed the handful of items displayed in a sparsely furnished room. Franz Kafka must have had a very gentle soul.

The texts used are those which appear in Paul Raabe's edition of Kafka's stories: Franz Kafka: Samtliche Erzahlungen (Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, 1970). Any changes in Kafka's sentence structure, phrasing, and punctuation have been made for the sake of clarity within the English idiom and were undertaken only after a protracted consideration of every conceivable option. Some additional comments follow:

1.   

As is true of all German prose, Kafka's paragraphs can be at times very long (as in "Josephine the Singer") or very short (as in "Jackals and Arabs"). These have in all cases been retained. Furthermore, I see the author's use of paragraphs and punctuation in general as indicating a clear form of prioritization ranging from the paragraph through the period, semi-colon and colon to the comma.

 

2.         Some of Kafka's sentences are extremely long, and their structure and tempo can be characterized in turn by varying degrees of parataxis, hypotaxis, and asyndeton. In a very small number of cases I have chosen to break up a long sentence into two shorter ones. Almost all of the incomplete sentences have been left intact.

 

3.         I have followed the convention according to which interior monologues appear in italics in order to set them apart from direct discourse and from the narrative per se.

 

4.         On occasion, Clauses have been reversed for the sake of clarity. Embedded clauses (normally involving parenthetical information) have only rarely been repositioned within the given sentence.

5.         Kafka makes abundant use of semi-colons, and his usage differs from the English usage in that it occasionally causes a subordinate clause to dangle. In general, I have chosen to leave this punctuation unaltered.

 

6.         Single dashes are used by Kafka to set off parts of sentences and paragraphs from the preceding text. These have been retained. Double dashes have been replaced by parentheses or commas so that no confusion will arise from interpreting the first dash as a colon.

 

7.         Kafka occasionally omits question marks in direct questions. I have inserted them in accordance with standard English usage.

8.         Comma splices are perfectly acceptable at all levels of written German. Where encountered, I have replaced the given comma with a colon, semi-colon, or period. (I have occasionally, though rarely, retained the comma and added a conjunction, and in one instance an appositive was formed by repeating the noun after the comma and adding a relative clause.) Comma splices and other forms of asyndeton have been occasionally retained for effect, a choice determined in each case by the given context.

 

9.         With very few exceptions (e.g. in ''A Report for an Academy"), 1 have chosen to use contractions freely throughout this translation as being reflective of the normally familiar tone used by the narrator.

 

10.       Kafka's use of the historical present (e.g. in "A Country Doctor" and "A Message from the Emperor") can seem rather abrupt at times, but the tenses have been left unaltered.

 

In closing, I wish to thank Mag. Walter Neumayr, Mag. Martha Schofbeck, Irene Augsburger, and Nils Weisensee for having helped me with some of the more difficult and enigmatic passages in the text, and my sincerest gratitude also goes to the reviewers whose comments appear below and on my website (www.thorpolson.com). Many thanks to you all.

 

In one of the tales which make up the series of the Mabinogion, two enemy kings play chess while in a nearby valley their respective armies battle and destroy each other. Messengers arrive with reports of the battle; the kings do not seem to hear them and, bent over the silver chessboard, they move the gold pieces. Gradually it becomes apparent that the vicissitudes of the battle follow the vicissitudes of the game. Toward dusk, one of the kings overturns the board because he has been checkmated, and presently a blood-spattered horseman comes to tell him: 'Your army is in flight. You have lost the kingdom.'

- EDWIN MORGAN

Một trong những truyện của chuỗi truyện Mabinogion, hai  ông vua kẻ thù ngồi chơi cờ, trong  lúc trong thung lũng kế đó, hai đạo binh của họ quần thảo, làm thịt lẫn nhau. Giao liên, thiên sứ…  liên tiếp mang tin về, họ đếch thèm nghe, chúi mũi vô mấy con cờ bằng vàng. Rõ ràng là tuồng ảo hoá bày ra ở thung lũng nhập thành một với tuồng cờ tướng. Sau cùng, vào lúc chập tối, 1 ông vua  xô đổ bàn cờ, khi bị chiếu bí, đúng lúc đó, tên kỵ sĩ từ chiến trường lao về, thưa hoàng thượng, VC lấy mẹ mất Xề Gòn  rồi!

Hà, hà!

Before the Law

Before the Law stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper there comes a man from the country and prays for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot grant admittance at the moment. The man thinks it over and then asks if he will be allowed in later. 'It is possible,' says the doorkeeper, 'but not at the moment.' Since the gate stands open, as usual, and the doorkeeper steps to one side, the man stoops to peer through the gateway into the interior. Observing that, the doorkeeper laughs and says: 'If you are so drawn to it, just try to go in despite my veto. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the least of the doorkeepers. From hall to hall there is one doorkeeper after another, each more powerful than the last. The third doorkeeper is already so terrible that even I cannot bear to look at him.' These are difficulties the man from the country has not expected; the Law, he thinks, should surely be accessible at all times and to everyone, but as he now takes a closer look at the doorkeeper in his fur coat, with his big sharp nose and long, thin, black Tartar beard, he decides that it is better to wait until he gets permission to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at one side of the door. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be admitted, and wearies the doorkeeper by his importunity. The doorkeeper frequently has little interviews with him, asking him questions about his home and many other things, but the questions are put indifferently, as great lords put them, and always finish with the statement that he cannot be let in yet. The man, who has furnished himself with many things for his journey, sacrifices all he has, however valuable, to bribe the doorkeeper. The doorkeeper accepts everything, but always with the remark: 'I am only taking it to keep you from thinking you have omitted anything.' During these many years the man fixes his attention almost continuously on the doorkeeper. He forgets the other doorkeepers, and this first one seems to him the sole obstacle preventing access to the Law. He curses his bad luck, in his early years boldly and loudly; later, as he grows old, he only grumbles to himself. He becomes childish, and since in his yearlong contemplation of the doorkeeper he has come to know even the fleas on his fur collar, he begs the fleas as well to help him and to change the doorkeeper's mind. At length his eyesight begins to fail, and he does not know whether the world is really darker or whether his eyes are only deceiving him. Yet in his darkness he is now aware of a radiance that streams inextinguishably from the gateway of the Law. Now he has not very long to live. Before he dies, all his experiences in these long years gather themselves in his head to one point, a question he has not yet asked the doorkeeper. He waves him nearer, since he can no longer raise his stiffening body. The doorkeeper has to bend low towards him, much to the man's disadvantage. 'What do you want to know now?' asks the doorkeeper; 'you are insatiable.' 'Everyone strives to reach the Law,' says the man, 'so how does it happen that for all these many years no one but myself has ever begged for admittance?' The doorkeeper recognizes that the man has reached his end, and, to let his failing senses catch the words, roars in his ear: 'No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it.'

Frank Kafka

The Book of Fantasy

Edited by Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo, A. Bloy Casares

A collection of classic fantasy stories which resulted from a chance conversation between three friends in Buenos Aires in 1937. The friends were Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares and his wife Silvina Ocampo and they decided to gather together their favourite stories.