Kafka's Translator
Translation: Kristin Addis
Abstract
What if Franz Kafka didn't die in 1924 in Vienna, as everyone believes, but twenty years later, in a Palestine still under British rule? This is the story old man Aaron tells Ernst, at the end of the latter's stay on a kibbutz near Tel Aviv in the early 1990s: the Czech writer, possessed by the very literary desire to disappear, had no choice but to feign that his tuberculosis was more serious than the doctors had diagnosed, or even to fake it completely, in order to then simulate his death and emigrate. Nevertheless, Kafka could not escape literature entirely and during his stay on the kibbutz wrote some prose pieces that no modern specialist is willing to recognize as his work. Paradoxically, translation may become a way of authenticating texts that the narrator, at first, can only believe to be counterfeits.
