Stanley Corngold is a professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at Princeton. He has published widely on modern German writers and thinkers (Nietzsche, Musil, Kraus, Mann, Benjamin, Adorno, among others), but for the most part he has been translating and writing on the work of Franz Kafka. In 2011 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
“Kafka’s survey of the insectile situation of young Jews in inner
Bohemia can hardly be improved upon: ‘With their posterior legs
they were still glued to their father’s Jewishness and with their
wavering anterior legs they found no new ground.’ There is a sense
in which Kafka’s Jewish question (‘What have I in common with
Jews?’) has become everybody’s question, Jewish alienation the
template for all our doubts. What is Muslimness? What is
femaleness? What is Polishness? These days we all find our anterior
legs flailing before us. We’re all insects, all Ungeziefer,
now.”
—Zadie Smith
“Kafka engaged in no technical experiments whatsoever; without in
any way changing the German language, he stripped it of its
involved constructions until it became clear and simple, like
everyday speech purified of slang and negligence. The common
experience of Kafka’s readers is one of general and vague
fascination, even in stories they fail to understand, a precise
recollection of strange and seemingly absurd images and
descriptions—until one day the hidden meaning reveals itself to
them with the sudden evidence of a truth simple and
incontestable.”
—Hannah Arendt
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