First published in its English translation during World War II in 1944, the first part of this book is composed of lectures originally delivered (in German) during the pre-war period, whilst the second part of the book represents author Franz Werfel’s present point of view, arriving at the difficult conclusion that “complete human detachment is the first psychological symptom of spirituality...” “The outstanding contribution of this book is its frank rejection of the materialistic philosophy and an emphasis in favor of the spiritual interpretation of life. There are beautiful passages written with characteristic artistry.”—Kirkus Review
This story is about a long suppressed love triangle between Leonidas Tachezy, a high-level Austrian career bureaucrat, his younger, trophy wife Amelie, and a Jewish woman from his past, Vera Wormser, with whom he'd fallen in love when she was fourteen. After his marriage, Leonidas encounters Vera in a German university town where she is studying philosophy. He makes a promise that implies marriage, but drops out of her life entirely to return to a comfortable existence until one day when a letter arrives, addressed with Vera's unmistakable handwriting in pale blue ink. Like Humbert Humbert in Lolita, Leonidas explains his "crime" against Vera to an imaginary courtroom in a way that anticipates Nabokov.
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh is Franz Werfel's masterpiece that brought him international acclaim in 1933, drawing the world's attention to the Armenian genocide. This is the story of how the people of several Armenian villages in the mountains along the coast of present-day Turkey and Syria chose not to obey the deportation order of the Turkish government. Instead, they fortified a plateau on the slopes of Musa Dagh"€"Mount Moses"€"and repelled Turkish soldiers and military police during the summer of 1915 while holding out hope for the warships of the Allies to save them. The original English translation by Geoffrey Dunlop has been revised and expanded by translator James Reidel and scholar Violet Lutz. The Dunlop translation, had excised approximately 25% of the original two-volume text to accommodate the Book-of-the-Month club and to streamline the novel for film adaptation. The restoration of these passages and their new translation gives a fuller picture of the extensive inner lives of the characters, especially the hero Gabriel Bagradian, his wife Juliette, their son Stephan"€"and Iskuhi Tomasian, the damaged, nineteen-year-old Armenian woman whom the older Bagradian loves. What is more apparent now is the personal story that Werfel tells, informed by events and people in his own life, a device he often used in his other novels as well, in which the author, his wife Alma, his stepdaughter Manon Gropius, and others in his circle are reinvented. Reidel has also revised the existing translation to free Werfel's stronger usages from Dunlop's softening of meaning, his effective censoring of the novel in order to fit the mores and commercial contingencies of the mid-1930s. In bringing The Forty Days of Musa Dagh back into print and revising the English translation, we aim to make this new Verba Mundi edition more faithful to the book Thomas Mann read "with pleasure and profit" in German.
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • An essential new translation of the author’s complete, uncensored diaries—a revelation of the idiosyncrasies and rough edges of one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers. “An invaluable addition to Kafka’s oeuvre.”—The New York Times An essential new translation of Franz Kafka’s complete, uncensored diaries—a revelation of the idiosyncrasies and rough edges of one of the twentieth century’s most important, influential, and visionary writers Dating from 1909 to 1923, Franz Kafka’s Diaries contains a broad array of writing, including accounts of daily events, assorted reflections and observations, literary sketches, drafts of letters, records of dreams, and unrevised texts of stories. This volume makes available for the first time in English a comprehensive reconstruction of Kafka’s handwritten diary entries and provides substantial new content, restoring all the material omitted from previous publications—notably, names of people and undisguised details about them, a number of literary writings, and passages of a sexual nature, some of them with homoerotic overtones. By faithfully reproducing the diaries’ distinctive— and often surprisingly unpolished—writing as it appeared in Kafka’s notebooks, translator Ross Benjamin brings to light not only the author’s use of the diaries for literary invention and unsparing self-examination but also their value as a work of genius in and of themselves.
„Jurnalul lui Kafka mă cutremură și mă urmărește și-n somn." Mircea Cărtărescu „Urăsc tot ceea ce nu se referă la literatură; mă plictisește faptul de a purta discuții (chiar dacă ele au subiect literar); mă plictisește să fac vizite, iar bucuriile și suferințele rudelor mele mă plictisesc până-n adâncul sufletului. Când fac conversație, tot ceea ce gândesc își pierde din importanță, din seriozitate și din autenticitate. Spaima de a avea o relație, teama că mă voi revărsa în partea cealaltă. Atunci nu voi mai fi niciodată singur." Jurnalul lui Franz Kafka reprezintă lumea interioara a unui om care s-a simțit toata viața un proscris: tot ceea ce Kafka a încercat să ascundă în literatura lui este aici asumat. „Jurnalul este capodopera literară a lui Kafka." The New Yorker „În cazul meu se poate recunoaște foarte bine o concentrare asupra scrisului. După ce mi-am dat seama că, din punct de vedere organic, scrisul reprezintă cea mai fertilă orientare a ființei mele, totul s-a precipitat în această direcție, lăsând fără preocupare toate aptitudinile ce vizau plăcerile sexului, plăcerea de a mânca și de a bea, bucuria meditației filosofice și a muzicii. Mi-am pierdut vlaga în toate aceste direcții. A fost un lucru necesar, pentru că energiile mele, în ansamblul lor, erau atât de reduse, încât numai concentrate la un loc puteau sluji, într-o oarecare măsură, scopului de a scrie." Franz Kafka
More than two decades of letters from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century—the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial—to the people in his life, from his years as a student in Prague in the early 1900s to his final months in the sanatorium near Vienna where he died in 1924. Sometimes surprisingly humorous, sometimes wrenchingly sad, these letters, collected after Kafka's death by his friend and literary executor Max Brod, include charming notes to school friends; fascinating accounts to Brod about his work in its various stages of publication; correspondence with his publisher, Kurt Wolff, about manuscripts in progress, suggested book titles, type design, and late royalty statements; revealing exchanges with other young writers of the day, including Martin Buber and Felix Weltsch, on life, literature, and girls; and heartbreaking reports to his parents, sisters, and friends on the declining state of his health in the last months of his life.
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