Kafkaesque

'A book to underline endlessly, to dog-ear, to carry around until battered, and then to tell all your friends to buy because you're too reluctant to give up your own copy. A wonderâ Polly Barton âDazzling ⦠one fine day, you open a book by an unknown writer, and a charge of pure talent blows you awayâ La Tribune ________________________________ What happens to a writer's work when it's translated â" specifically, what happens if his name is Franz Kafka? After Kafka died young and unknown, a German-speaking Jew in Prague, ten writers rescued him from oblivion. For years, long before he became a much misused adjective, Kafka existed mostly through their wildly different readings of his words. Many of his first translators would later be counted among the greatest thinkers and writers of the twentieth century â" and they all found in Kafkaâs writing a guiding light through the dark of their own tumultuous lives. Primo Levi translated Kafka into Italian from the German he had learned in Auschwitz; Milena Jesensk¡ lovingly into Czech before she too was deported to the camps; Bruno Schulz into Polish before being shot by an SS officer; and Jorge Luis Borges into Spanish as he slowly went blind. Vladimir Nabokov annotated The Metamorphosis in exile, having undergone his own transformation from native to foreigner, while Kafkaâs translators back in Russia were condemned to perpetual anonymity by the Soviet censor. With inventiveness, spirit and wit, Ma¯a Hruska has written a celebration of the impossible art of translation, and a portrait of the tragic, absurd twentieth century that Kafka so presciently described. 'An elegant reflection on how the act of translation itself brings about Kafkaesque diversions' TLS