Book description
Franz Kafka spent eight months at his sister's house in Zürau
between September 1917 and April 1918, enduring the onset of
tuberculosis. Illness paradoxically set him free to write, in a series
of philosophical fragments, his settling of accounts with life,
marriage, his family, guilt and man's condition. These aphorisms have
appeared with minor revisions in various posthumous works since his
death in1924. By chance, Roberto Calasso rediscovered Kafka's two
original notebooks in Oxford's Bodleian Library.
The notebooks, freshly translated and laid out as Kafka intended,
are a distillation of Kafka at his most powerful and enigmatic. This
lost jewel provides the reader with a fresh perspective on the work of
a genius.
Born in Florence, Roberto Calasso lives in Milan, where he
is publisher of Adelphi. He is the author amongst other titles of
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, which was the winner of
the Prix Veillon and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, Ka,
and K.
Michael Hofmann is a poet and critic, and the translator of
many German and Austrian authors, including Elias Canetti, Ernst
Junger, Wolfgang Koeppen, Thomas Bernhard and Joseph Roth.
Geoffrey Brock received the PEN Center USA Translation Award
and the MLA's Lois Roth Award for his translation of Cesare Pavese's
Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950. He is also the translator of
Roberto Calasso's K.
