Kafka’s ‘A Message from the Emperor’: A New Translation
September 29, 2011
Franz Kafka, translated and with an introduction by Mark Harman
Kafka’s “A Message from the Emperor” made its first appearance in the Prague Zionist journal Die Selbstwehr (Self-Defense) in September 1919, the year the thirty-six-year-old Kafka composed his famous letter to his father. Hauntingly oblique, the story weaves together childlike hopefulness and stoical resignation, metaphysical yearning and psychological insight, a seemingly Chinese tale and covert Jewish themes.
When the composer Martin Bresnick asked me for a new version that he could set to music, I was mindful of the fact that Kafka often read his stories aloud with “a rhythmic sweep, a dramatic fire, and a spontaneity such as no actor ever achieves” (Max Brod). I wanted to create a text that could be read aloud in English since the very sound of Kafka’s German and the pattern of his syntax evoke the at-first-unimpeded progress of the emperor’s messenger and then the obstacles that begin to clog his path.
—Mark Harman
more NYRB available in Literature in library use
When the composer Martin Bresnick asked me for a new version that he could set to music, I was mindful of the fact that Kafka often read his stories aloud with “a rhythmic sweep, a dramatic fire, and a spontaneity such as no actor ever achieves” (Max Brod). I wanted to create a text that could be read aloud in English since the very sound of Kafka’s German and the pattern of his syntax evoke the at-first-unimpeded progress of the emperor’s messenger and then the obstacles that begin to clog his path.
—Mark Harman
more NYRB available in Literature in library use