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The Diaries of Franz Kafka
- liquid153 3y agoNot Apache Kafka RTFM
- vcg3rd 3y agoAnother First Things reader on HN. Nice!
- thsksbd 3y ago[dead]
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- quercusa 3y agoThe translation must have been a labor both of love and of Hercules. There are 1,403 endnotes for 564 pages of text—that is to say, 2.4836252 endnotes per page—to inform us of every literary allusion, and every geographical location mentioned, down to the number of a street: an admirable thoroughness that I should be tempted to call Teutonic if stereotyping were not so frowned upon these days.
- ftxbro 3y ago> "an admirable thoroughness that I should be tempted to call Teutonic if stereotyping were not so frowned upon these days." weaponized teutism
- xhevahir 3y agoI read an article a few years ago that convinced me that Kafka's peculiar quality--the famous "Kafkaesque"--isn't due to his experience with Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy, or his being a German-speaking Jew surrounded by Czech-speaking Catholics, or any of the other reasons commonly suggested--it was mostly his autism. (The author was an obscure, independent scholar named Jerry Stuger, although I don't remember the title.)
- beezlewax 3y agoBit weird to posthumously diagnose someone with autism. At best it would be an interesting hypothesis.
- snotrockets 3y ago[flagged]
- xhevahir 3y agoYes, he's dead. So, for that matter, are Newton and Einstein, whose autistic traits have been discerned by none other than the world's leading expert in the field: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3676-einstein-and-newton-showed-signs-of-autism https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3676-einstein-and-new... .
- snotrockets 3y agoA person can have autistic traits without being autistic. The diagnosis is how the symptoms affect the person as a whole, and if “Symptoms cause clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of current functioning” (which is why it's so hard to diagnose adults, because many undiagnosed autistics learned to mask their difficulties). That's why you don't diagnose based on rumors or historical records. It's unscientific and unethical. And as Glenn Elliott is quoted in the link you shared: “One can imagine geniuses who are socially inept and yet not remotely autistic, impatience with the intellectual slowness of others, narcissism and passion for one’s mission in life might combine to make such an individuals isolative and difficult.” Baron-Cohen himself is very much proponent of Asperger abelist view of autism: an ouccrance of some super-intelligent boys with social deficiencies. That definition isn't much accepted nowdays, when we know autism doesn't necessarily cohabitates with better cofnitive abilities, or being AMAB.
- kieselguhr_kid 3y ago> In his introduction to an edition of Metamorphosis, the novelist Adam Thirlwell suggests that we have misunderstood Kafka much as Magarshack said we had misunderstood Chekhov, and that Kafka is much more playful than we have hitherto given him credit for. When I was 17, I read Kafka for the first time and was put off by what I saw as the dour and oppressive atmosphere. I had the same insight as Thirlwell when I reread him ~10 years later: Kafka's works have a sort of deadpan and absurdist humor to them and shouldn't be treated as seriously as they often are. I wonder how much of that humor is lost in translation.
- stewbrew 3y agoWhile "In the Penal Colony" actually is really funny and readable, I don't think much humor could have been lost.
- bena 3y agoThere's something to this. When I read The Trial, I was struck by the sheer absurdity of it all. Josef is never charged with a crime, is never coerced into any action, yet at every step remains a willing participant in his own punishment. Up to his own death. It's as if his real crime was not refusing to go along with the farce.
- dang 3y agoKafka's friend, Max Brod, talked of how Kafka found humour in his dark works - especially the chilling "The Trial", which he thought a hoot, laughing so hard while reading the first chapter aloud, that he repeatedly had to stop to collect himself. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2008/jul/03/post26 https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2008/jul/03/post...
- MichaelMoser123 3y agomaybe he was rationalizing his own fate, like Rubashov in Koestlers "Darkness at noon". A common response by those arrested during Stalin's purges is said to have been "this is a all a mistake, it will be sorted out soon"...
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