For the most part—except where it would interfere with the reader’s full understanding of the text—I have maintained Kafka’s sentence length and paragraph structure in this translation, as I feel that both are strategic elements of his writing style. At the same time I have tried to alleviate those difficulties within his sentence structure that arise merely because normal German and English word order are substantially different. I didn’t find it necessary to sacrifice the rhythm and length of Kafka’s sentences for the sake of clarity.
Once the structural dilemmas have been resolved in English, the stories speak for themselves, but when Kafka does use a particular storytelling device I have tried to incorporate it into the English translation. In “The Metamorphosis,” for example, Kafka first—and almost continually thereafter—refers to Gregor’s parents and sister as “the mother,” “the father,” and “the sister.” Other translators have employed personal pronouns here (i.e., “his mother,” etc.), probably because it seemed less formal and awkward in English. But it is awkward in the German text, and meant to be. It is an intentional device, serving to make immediately apparent Gregor’s alienation from his family. And it soon comes to seem—under Kafka’s skillful guidance—appropriate. At one point later in the story, however, it is “his father” who kicks Gregor into the room; this usage is also intentional and is introduced because Gregor had previously seen his father as pathetic—it was due to his father’s business failure that Gregor had to work as a traveling salesman—and his own father is now the very personal cause of his being banished from the family instead of their helping him, something he could not feel impersonal about.
Similarly, it is the abrupt switch to the present tense that catapults the story “A Country Doctor” forward. From the moment when the groom attacks the maid, the doctor is uncontrollably propelled through the story in the present tense, until he attempts to take matters into his own hands and leaves the patient’s house, at which point the tense reverts to the past. While my first priority in this translation has been to maintain clarity for the English reader, I felt it was imperative not to lose sight—as many other translators of this story have—of an author’s device that is there for the purpose of enhancing the narrative.
There are also moments when Kafka seems so caught up in the narrative drive of a story that some of its continuity gets lost. In “The Stoker,” the maid that Karl impregnates is later referred to as the cook. This may have been an oversight that Kafka would have corrected in future revisions (he planned to include “The Stoker” as the first chapter in a novel he did not complete, post-humously published under the title Amerika), but this translation remains faithful to the text. I have not corrected these lapses or reconciled such minor inconsistencies, as they may be of interest to the reader. They are, however, footnoted in the text itself.
Despite the common conception of Kafka as a spurt writer periodically driven by the white heat of inspiration—perhaps the result of the well-known anecdote of Kafka’s writing his breakthrough story “The Judgment” in one all-night session in 1912—it would seem that he worked and reworked his stories and, in some cases, held a clear picture of what he planned to write well in advance of the first draft. In 1906 he wrote a story about a man who splits into an insect and a man, the insect self going off to work and the man staying home in bed. This precursor to “The Metamorphosis” was never published. He also wrote in a letter to his friend and publisher Kurt Wolff that he wished to include “The Judgment,” “The Stoker,” and “The Metamorphosis” in one volume under the title The Sons. This letter is dated April 4, 1913—well before he had written either “The Stoker” or “The Metamorphosis.” For whatever reasons, the stories were never published together under that title while Kafka was alive. Kafka’s wish that these three stories be published together has in part formed the basis of this collection. All of the stories included, of course, have become classics, but it has been a special pleasure for me that by including “Josephine the Singer” along with “The Judgment,” this collection contains both the last and the first stories that Kafka saw published in his lifetime.