The Zurau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka

Overview

The essential philosophical writings of one of the twentieth century's most influential writers are now gathered into a single volume with an introduction and afterword by the celebrated writer and publisher Roberto Calasso.

Illness set him free to write a series of philosophical fragments: some narratives, some single images, some parables. These "aphorisms" appeared, sometimes with a few words changed, in other writings-some of them as posthumous fragments published only after Kafka's death in 1924. While working on K., his major book on Kafka, in the Bodleian Library, Roberto Calasso realized that the Zurau aphorisms, each written on a separate slip of very thin paper, numbered but unbound, represented something unique in Kafka's opus-a work whose form he had created simultaneously with its content.

The notebooks, freshly translated and laid out as Kafka had intended, are a distillation of Kafka at his most powerful and enigmatic. This lost jewel provides the reader with a fresh perspective on the collective work of a genius.

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Author Information

Bio of Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, of middle-class Jewish parents. He apparently suffered a great deal of psychological pain at a young age at the hands of his domineering father. He took a law degree at the German University of Prague, then obtained a position in the The son of a well-to-do merchant, Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 and died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium near Vienna in 1924. After earning a law degree in 1906, he worked most of his adult life at the Workers Accident Insurance Company for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague. Only a small portion of his writings were published during his lifetime; most of them, including the three unfinished novels, Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle, were published posthumously.

Bio of Geoffrey Brock

Antonia Arslan, who lives in Padua, has a degree in archaeology and was professor of modern and contemporary Italian literature at the University of Padua. This is her first novel.

Bio of Roberto Calasso

Roberto Calasso is also the author of The Forty-Nine Steps and Literature and the Gods. He lives in Milan and is the publisher of Adelphi.

Bio of Michael Hofmann

Michael Hofmann has translated Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Roth, Patrick S, Herta Mueller, and Franz Kafka. He won the Translators' Association's Schlegel-Tieck Prize twice in 1988 for his adaptation of The Double Bass by Patrick S (1987), and in 1993 for his rendering of Wolfgang Koeppen's Death in Rome (1992). In 1999 he won the PEN/Book of the Month Club Translation Prize for The String of Pearls. His translation of his father's novel The Film Explainer, by Gert Hofmann, won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 1995. He has written and translated more than 35 books, winning eight awards for his translations and his poetry.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Schocken

Filesize

463.64 KB

Number of Pages

160

eBook ISBN

9780307561398