Kafka is his stories—not in the sense that they are intentionally autobiographical but that they are spun from those thoughts and dreams that result from a horror of life as it is played out in even as safe-seeming a locale as home. His stories are an arsenal in which a pomegranate may in fact be a hand grenade. Home held a real horror for Kafka, the kind of horror that children may experience, or at least imagine, even when being lovingly tucked into bed. Part of Kafka’s genius is his keen ability to present the horrific elements of his stories from a point of view that could very well be that of a defenseless child. To wake up in a cozy bed and find oneself a vermin has the same impact and shock value as, say, Pinocchio’s discovery that he has sprouted an ass’s ears and tail. As Theodor Adorno once claimed, Kafka’s imagination was like that of the smallest schoolchild in the class. Who could make more skillful use of such an imagination than someone as profound in his intellectual and artistic maturity as Kafka proved to be?
His penetrating manner and technique in presenting existential terror with subtly tempered comic overtones, and the rush of images that his words evoke as he unfolds a gripping story, make Kafka’s works a natural for the comics. Stories such as “The Metamorphosis” develop inside carefully delineated framing constructs: rooms, windows, and doorways are essential to the telling of these stories. These series of configurations—rectangular or squarelike confines—heighten the action and drama of some of the stories, much as they do in comic book frame sequences. It is useful to point out that certain aspects of comic book art, which give a visual reading to Kafka’s works, increase the reader’s awareness of the richness of their overall value as stories—not only in terms of shock and immediacy but in terms of the truths they expose. Forceful graphic interpretations of Kafka’s stories have the potential to vastly improve the stories’ accessibility, widening their appeal far beyond the kind of audience that the author had in mind.
Robert Crumb and Peter Kuper are world-class graphic artists who have notably taken on the difficult task of “picturing” Kafka’s world—and they have succeeded admirably. What is often referred to as Kafka’s father-son cycle—”The Metamorphosis,” “The Judgment,” and “The Stoker”—gains an astonishing and renewed vitality in black-and-white comic book form. Far from being shortcuts to Kafka, these comic book renditions, by dint of their necessary succinctness, serve to whet one’s intellectual curiosity in a way that encourages and invites reading or rereading the printed English versions. Instead of lessening or cheapening the author’s intent and his reputation, they give them a heightened radiance. Kafka’s own pen sketches—with their lyrical, rubberlike figures that seem to bounce along the margins of his notebooks, diaries, and manuscripts—demonstrate that he was quite gifted in expressing himself in this way. Far from mere doodlings, these drawings have a definite, finished air about them, demonstrating that their execution, swift though it may have been, was the result of considerable preparation of thought and purposeful intention. Some were undoubtedly “guides”—visual links to the verbal—that helped him to develop his stories.
Intensifying many of the surprising images that lie in store for the reader of Kafka’s works is his singular use of language. Written in German, which allows for rambling nonstop sentences that are capable of possessing an entire page, Kafka’s stories often pack an unexpected punch just before the period—that punch being the finalizing verb that gives the breathless intricate sentence a fixed meaning and focus. The reader discovers what Gregor Samsa has become, thanks to the past participle that precedes the period, verwandelt (transformed). Such vertiginous constructions are not, of course, duplicable in English. So it is up to the translator, in an English version that still fully respects the original text, to provide the reader with that element of surprise, so cunningly positioned in the original. Another virtually insurmountable problem facing the translator is how to deal with the author’s intentional use of ambiguous terms or of words that have several meanings. A case in point is the German noun Verkehr employed in the final sentence of “The Judgment,” a story that Kafka dedicated to his then fiancée, Felice Bauer. Verkehr means “traffic” as well as “intercourse.” In the story, Georg Bendemann, terminating his engagement and his life, drops from the bridge to which he had been clinging; at that same moment, a stream of traffic races across that bridge. What gives added weight to the obvious double meaning of Verkehr is Kafka’s confession to his friend and biographer Max Brod that when he wrote that final line, he was thinking of “a violent ejaculation.” In English translation, of course, what can Verkehr be but “traffic”?