
Kafka: The Rescue Will Begin in Its Own Time - mitchbob
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/29/the-rescue-will-begin-in-its-own-time
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slowmovintarget
These are four short stories from an upcoming publication of previously
untranslated works of Franz Kafka. The stories are a good read if you like
short pieces.

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craigching
Ah, The Castle has been a favorite of mine since I was in high school despite
it being unfinished. The shorter works are something I only started to enjoy
about ten years ago. I have really enjoyed rediscovering the magic of Kafka
through his shorter works so I’m really interested in these!

I’m also a big “streaming Kafka” fan, so this post was win-win for me

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ceilingcorner
For anyone that doesn’t quite ‘get’ Kafka: I recommend his short stories and
aphorisms over his novels. Metamorphosis and The Castle never quite did much
for me, whereas The Great Wall of China or In the Penal Colony are some of my
favorites.

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scarecrowbob
I'll toss "A Hunger Artist" on there, too.

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liveoneggs
this is the one I think about the most

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Celeo
Outline link: [https://outline.com/pBvgHC](https://outline.com/pBvgHC)

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libraryofbabel
Hacker News, the only place in the world where you’re equally likely to
encounter articles about Kafka, the brilliantly paranoid Bohemian writer, and
Kafka, the data streaming platform.

I couldn’t tell which one this was until I opened it up.

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canjobear
The domain name is a clue

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libraryofbabel
You’re right. I should have examined more carefully.

“Isn’t it more surprising if something succeeds than if it fails?” — a parable
for the whole business of software engineering.

~~~
jacobush
Or Life

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aerovistae
Confused, why is new Yorker publishing an old story by kafka? Or is this
something newly discovered?

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kickscondor
New Directions is publishing a collection that has some ‘fragments’ that
slipped through the cracks in English anthologies - this is one of them. Hard
to believe it could happen, given how many of his novels are painstakingly
assembled fragments.

[https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-
fiction/franz-k...](https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-
fiction/franz-kafka-06-29-20)

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remarkEon
Really hard to read Kafka, frankly, but I love the major stories of his ("The
Trial", "Metamorphosis", etc) and his many short stories so much that I've
been trying to learn German (and French, though not necessarily at the same
time) over the last year and a half. What I've learned is that I can quite
easily pick up meaning and basically understand German when I hear it, about
the same when I read it, but I still can't speak it at all - at least not
conversationally. I could get around Germany in an emergency if I ran into any
Germans that don't actually speak English, which I understand to be a rare
occurrence, but that's not really the point.

I think I've discovered I need to be way, way more fluent in German than I
expected to be able to read and enjoy (such as you can) Kafka, and I've
decided I probably need to live abroad for several years to achieve this goal.
Of course, it would be kind of crazy (but not necessarily _Kafkaesque_ ) to
live in a foreign country for several years just so you could understand one
of its authors in his original language. German was of course not his real
_original_ language, but you get my point.

~~~
tafox
I pretty much did this.

Don't forget, there are tons of other amazing German authors, just to name a
few: Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Schiller, Goethe...

I think German literature is to this day still probably the best in the world.

I also find Math in German way easier and more beautiful than in English. If
"clean code" was a thing for languages, German grammar would seem to me to be
one of the cleanest.

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remarkEon
>I also find Math in German way easier and more beautiful than in English.

Can you expand on this?

>If "clean code" was a thing for languages, German grammar would seem to me to
be one of the cleanest.

Can't agree more here.

~~~
projektfu
Style, on the other hand, leaves something to be desired.

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lsluckystar7
Does anyone know if the story is available online in German or what the
original German title is. Weiß einer ob die Kurzgeschichte im deutschen
Originell online erhæltlich ist oder wie die Titel auf deutsch heißt?

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ncrmro
A few of his books are public domain, found them for free on Apple Books.

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hprotagonist
_" Alas," said the mouse, "the world gets smaller every day. At first it was
so wide that I ran along and was happy to see walls appearing to my right and
left, but these high walls converged so quickly that I’m already in the last
room, and there in the corner is the trap into which I must run."

"But you’ve only got to run the other way," said the cat, and ate it._

Das ist komisch.

~~~
dang
Kafka is a comic writer, of course. I think Brod (his friend and editor, and
the man who refused his wish to burn his writings after he died) says
somewhere that when Kafka used to read his pieces out loud to friends he would
sometimes laugh so hard he couldn't continue.

~~~
hprotagonist
[https://harpers.org/wp-
content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-...](https://harpers.org/wp-
content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-07-0059612.pdf) is always worth a read.
And it's where i got this little snippet, of course.

~~~
dang
Ahh I thought it was a quote from the OP.

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lsluckystar7
Does anyone know whether this short story is available online in German, or
what the German title is?

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bokmalen
Does anybody know the German name of this story?

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bokmalen
Does anyone know the title in German?

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mmaunder
Social proof: The reason you’ll tolerate the first 1000 unintelligible words
in The New Yorker before the author’s idea starts congealing.

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imheretolearn
Okay, I'll bite. Except for the farmer story, I didn't understand any of the
other stories.

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pasquinelli
What do you expect to understand exactly? In the first one he progressively
sucks the drama out of a myth by taking the concept of eternity seriously. The
second one is about being in possession of something that you can't have. The
third one is a joke about a man talking to a dog about his family problems.
The last one is about two approaches to take when there's nothing you can do,
not that it makes a difference.

Do i understand these stories? I don't know. They're interesting. I just read
them tonight though. Maybe in a year i will have forgotten them, or maybe i'll
bump into them in my thoughts every so often, be reminded of them, draw
parallels between them and other things.

Each story has one thing following another in a logical progression that i'm
sure you can discern, so what more understanding are you asking for? I could
tell you all about the movie Toy Story, but do i understand it? I don't know.
It's interesting, and i bump into it every so often in my thoughts and all
that.

If i understood it, i guess i wouldn't ever need to think of it again. Which
reminds me of Twin Peaks, which i definitely don't understand.

~~~
natosaichek
I think the last is actually about a prisoner and his interrogator / torturer.

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decompiled_dev
I thought it was going to be a post about a service outage.

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masswerk
It's about the service outage being the service, or, rather, outage as a
service, which had arguably some of a success story in the last century.

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monadic2
Kafka stands on its own.

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sgt
Let's make this the most upvoted post in HN's history.

