Kafka

from NYReview of Books

Kafka’s ‘A Message from the Emperor’: A New Translation

September 29, 2011

Franz Kafka, translated and with an introduction by Mark Harman

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Franz Kafka; drawing by Tullio Pericoli

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

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