Literary centenaries are supposed to close the ledger, to tidy up a writer’s unruly afterlife. Franz Kafka’s 2024 centenary did nothing of the kind. Once the exhibitions were dismantled and the anniversary essays filed away, his sentences went on circulating like summonses slipped under the door. That persistence has less to do with memorial culture than with migration. Kafka survives not by commemoration but by transmission: by passing from hand to hand, language to language, into histories he did not live to see.
In Maïa Hruska’s Kafkaesque: Ten Great Writers Translate the Twentieth Century, itself translated from French by Sam Taylor, Kafka is kept in motion by translators who recognised in his estranged German a literature already half in exile. In their own hours of emergency, they felt he was needed elsewhere.
Hruska’s opening correction is brisk: “The crucial event of the year 1924 was not Kafka’s death,” she writes, “which was met with almost total indifference. It was the fact that, in the aftermath of his death, ten writers around the world felt a new sense of mission: to translate him.” Hruska shifts the light from the author to the emissaries. Her cast of translator-protagonists includes anonymous Soviet samizdat hands; Eugene Jolas (English); Jorge Luis Borges (Spanish); Paul Celan (Romanian); Melech Ravitch (Yiddish); Primo Levi (Italian); Alexandre Vialatte (French); Bruno Schulz (Polish); the makers of Hebrew Kafka; and Milena Jesenská, Kafka’s lover and first intermediary into Czech. Kafka’s first translators, Hruska says, were his “discoverers”, his “prophets”, his “messengers”. Her interest lies in first encounters, those early acts of importation which remain, in her phrase, “impregnable to criticism”. Hruska is drawn, too, to the dark rhyme between Kafka’s fate (he succumbed to tuberculosis at age 40) and that of his first carriers, who were “swept along by Kafka’s words before their life was swept away by something else”: blindness (Borges), exile (Jolas), murder (Schulz), the concentration camp (Levi and Jesenská) or suicide (Celan).
In Hruska’s hands, these early translations feel less like dutiful conveyance than collisions. Her book shows how a writer’s solitude became, through the hands of others, a worldwide vernacular. Its most compelling chapter is the one on Jorge Luis Borges, who translated 18 Kafka texts into Spanish. Borges loved unfinishedness. Kafka’s novels, Hruska writes, were “literally endless”, not only incomplete but inexhaustible in their possible interpretations, and “the infinite is the central preoccupation of the Borgesian imagination”. In his essays on Joyce and the One Thousand and One Nights, the Argentine writer proposed that original and translation meet as two incompletions, endlessly perfectible and without any automatic hierarchy of birth. No primogeniture in literature.
In 1983, speaking on the centenary of Kafka’s birth, Borges said that in youth he had dreamed not of resembling Kafka but of being him. His story “The Library of Babel”, he confessed, was an attempt to do just that. The attraction lay in a shared suspicion of finality. If Kafka’s novels had not uttered their last word, translation could continue them by other means. A translation too faithful to the original, Hruska adds, would be fidelity unto death. Better a version that settles on the original like a new geological layer, preserving it by changing it. Great translations do not carry over “content” as if in buckets; they discover in another language an answering mode of meaning.
Borges gives Hruska her most layered chapter, an episode of labyrinths and literary afterlives. With Primo Levi, Kafka’s unfinishedness loses its metaphysical shimmer and acquires moral weight. The question is no longer how a text can remain open, but how a human being endures when judgement comes without cause. Hruska resists the vulgar formula that Kafka “predicted” Auschwitz. Prediction is for astrologers.
Kafka earned his authority elsewhere, in the anatomy of helplessness, in the exactitude with which he describes accusation and guilt. Levi’s translation of The Trial passed through a mind trained by chemistry and catastrophe alike. His sentence from Auschwitz sounds as if it had wandered in from Kafka: “Hier ist kein Warum.” There is no why here. Josef K wants an explanation and is denied one. Levi, Hruska writes, found himself “implicated in the character of Josef K”.
The most haunting section of Hruska’s book is the one on the Polish Jewish genius Bruno Schulz, though here her title, “Kafka and Bruno Schulz”, hides another presence without whom the story cannot be properly told: Schulz’s fiancée, Józefina Szelińska. Schulz met the young teacher in 1932 and they became engaged; among the ties between them was a shared love of Kafka and Rilke. Szelińska had already begun translating The Trial into Polish as a private exercise. “She translated German books the way a musician might play scales,” Hruska writes. Before Schulz helped place the book, she had already absorbed the torque of Kafka’s syntax. Schulz, by then known enough in Warsaw to influence publishers, helped bring the project to print. One of them, Rój, published it with an afterword by Schulz and with his name on the title page. Although the royalties were split equally, Szelińska’s name appeared nowhere on that first edition.
Their collaboration stands among the more revealing episodes in Hruska’s study because it exposes the intimate and unstable nature of translation itself. Here translation resembles cohabitation, sometimes courtship, sometimes quarrel, always mutual exposure. Szelińska, as Hruska’s chapter makes plain, was no amanuensis hovering at Schulz’s elbow. She was the primary labouring intelligence of the Polish Trial.
Milena Jesenská, finally, gives Hruska her most intimate chapter. Jesenská has too often been embalmed as Kafka’s beloved, the incandescent addressee of letters that later generations learned to read as the diary of a doomed passion. Hruska restores her first as a mind: a Czech journalist of quick intelligence and public nerve. When she asked to translate “The Stoker” (“Der Heizer”), she opened a passage between two estranged literary worlds. Kafka was astonished that someone on the Czech side of Prague’s divided literary world had so acutely caught the pressure of his sentences.
That Jesenská was the one translator Kafka actually knew alters the whole story. The translator enters here not after death, to manage posterity, but in the heat of composition itself, while the work is still warm and the author can answer back – plead, object, adore. The surviving correspondence, lopsided because Jesenská’s letters are lost, has the peculiar intensity of a drama conducted across an absence. Distance made the letters possible; proximity threatened to extinguish them. Hruska’s best intuition is that translation and love letters obey the same law of frustrated desire. Kafka asks Milena, “Please send me your translation – I can’t have enough of you in my hands.” Its erotic force lies in the strange traffic between page and body. The translation is the beloved’s touch at a distance.
What gives the chapter its afterglow is that Jesenská remained, even after the affair had failed, one of Kafka’s truest readers. Hruska ends with the obituary Jesenská wrote after his death in 1924, introducing him to Czech readers with a sentence of exquisite exactness: “He was an artist and a man of such anxious conscience he could hear even where others, deaf, felt themselves secure.” She had translated his words before; here she translated his sensibility.
Here Hruska brushes against the book’s deepest question. Kafka may be so transmissible across borders precisely because of the ache of his own linguistic homelessness. He is peculiarly suited to translation because he is already, in his own spare German, a writer of linguistic unease. In a diary entry, Kafka dwells on the words Mutter and Vater and confesses that they fail “to approximate” the Jewish mother and father of his lived reality. The names do not fit the bodies and obligations they are meant to name. His prose can be read as the art of someone unhoused in his own language, writing from inside the fissure between word and world. Translation, then, does not solve the problem of Kafka; it prolongs it.
We call something “Kafkaesque” and imagine we have named a condition. That adjective’s reach, Hruska reminds us, is the achievement of translators, those messengers who carried Kafka into other languages without smoothing over the fracture from which he wrote. They are the savants, not the servants, of his afterlife. Today the centenary banners are gone. Kafka’s sentences, made strange again in each new language, still slip under new doors and wait there, patient and inexorable, to be opened.
Kafkaesque: Ten Great Writers Translate the Twentieth Century
Maïa Hruska,
trs Sam Taylor William Collins, 272pp, £16.99
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[Further reading: Euphoria needs to grow up]
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This article appears in the 15 Apr 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Angry Young Women
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