Re: 'the author's text'

Hi Kim,

I was wondering if someone would mention this. Thank you. Yes, I agree that
the text I am offering here and the text I read with my class is only
"Kafka's" in a limited and problematic sense and is also, quite clearly, his
translator's. In fact, even the title, in German in the original, poses
something more of a problem in it's original language than it does in
English, since, as I understand it, it may pose more of a question of
proximity both in space and time. Even the title, that is, may be a slight
problem for translation: *Vor dem Gesetz.*

I cannot read Kafka in German. I do not even try. I willingly acknowledge
that the text my students and I read is, quite simply, a different one than
the one he wrote. Still, it is his, it is marked by his signature in many
ways, and I do believe some important things remain. In neither version, to
offer only a single instance, do we know who or what the Law (or *das
Gesetz*) is.

But with Kafka this is even more complicated, since he did not even write in
his own national language. His texts had to be translated (by Milena) back
into Czech from the German in which he wrote (even as his father spoke to him
often in still another, more "sacred" language, and the theater he visited
performed plays in still another language -- Yiddish). So he himself was
removed, especially at night, when he was alone and writing in German, from
the languages of his own country and the language in which he did his own
daily work and from the languages of his own family. Add to this being a
working Jew in Prague, as it changed regimes, in the first decades of the
20th century and you can see why questions of Law and authority and desire
and justice and interpretation and meaning and truth and language and the
problems that accompany all of these might interest him. They certainly
interest me when I read his work, although no doubt for very different
reasons and in very different ways.

All of this is important to share with those who are reading with you, who
are studying this little parable (in English) with you and working through
all of the valuable and provocative readings that are produced during any
given discussion. None of it, of course, offers any "key" to what the
parable means in any final sense (in any language) or to precisely what Kafka
was thinking at the moment he created this amazing little page. But it all
helps fuel the discussion of the words on the page and the readings of those
with whom you are sharing the experience. And the experience of reading
"Before the Law" -- the experience of reading literature -- for me, remains
similar to the experience of the man from the country and of Joseph K. as he
listens to the priest in the cathedral in *The Trial.*

*Das Gericht will nichts von dir. Es nimmt dich auf, wenn du kommst, und es
entlasst dich , wenn du gest.*

"The court makes no claims upon you. It receives you when you come and it
relinquishes you when you go."

All the best,

--John

-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
Received on Thu Mar 6 19:17:27 2003