Literary Translation: Kafka’s Contemplation (1912)
Translated from the original German into English by Audrey Leong.The Sudden Walk
When you seem to have finally settled on staying home for the evening, have pulled on your
nightgown and sat down at your dimly lit desk after dinner; when you have done every chore or
played every game after which you typically go to bed; when the weather outside is unfriendly,
which makes staying at home seem sensible; when you have held still for so long that leaving
would surely spark complete astonishment; when even the stairwell is dark and the gate outside
locked, and when you in spite of all this get up in a sudden surge of restlessness, change your
shirt, immediately appear dressed to leave, explain that you must go out, and after a brief
farewell have actually gone out, believing, depending on the haste with which you slam the front
door shut, to have more or less left your troubles behind, when you find yourself on the street
again, with limbs that respond with remarkable agility to the unexpected freedom that they have
been granted, when you, through this one decision, feel all your resolve gathered within you,
when you finally understand that you clearly have more strength than needed to cause and
endure these sudden changes, and when you rush through the streets like so, ―then you have, for
this one evening completely escaped your family, which drifts away into the insubstantial, while
you yourself, boldly traced in black, running on air, lift yourself up to your true form.
All this will only be strengthened when you seek a friend out at this late hour, just to see how he
is getting along.
Clothes
Often, when I see dresses with many pleats, ruffles, and linings that drape beautifully over
beautiful bodies, I can’t help but think that they won’t stay that way for long, that they will
instead collect wrinkles impossible to smooth out, that dirt will accumulate so thick in its
adornment it can no longer be brushed off, and that no one would be so sad and foolish as to
want to don the same lavish gowns every single morning, just to take them off at night.
Yet still I see young women, beautiful indeed with their charming smiles and slight frames and
tight skin and masses of fine hair, appearing day after day in this ordinary masquerade, always
resting the same chin in the same hands and letting the same face reflect from their mirror.
Only some evenings, when they come home late from a party, do their reflections seem worn out,
bloated, dusty― now seen by all and hardly wearable.
Wish to Become an Indian
If only we were Indians, restless and ready, on the galloping horses, leaning into the wind, and
trembling over the quaking ground again and again, until we lost our spurs, for there were no
spurs, until we threw the reins away, for there were no reins, and barely saw the expanse of land
before us as bare, open plains, already void of horse neck and horse head.
The Trees
For we are like tree trunks lying in the snow. We seem to rest lightly, just a slight nudge could
push us away. No, it couldn’t, we are fixed firmly to the ground, but look; even this is just a false
impression.
Translator’s Note
Kafka’s first publication, Contemplations, is a collection of short prose sketches, each
documenting reality from the perspective of a strangely indeterminate self as it navigates the
triviality of everyday life. From convoluted evening walks to the brightest yet briefest of dreams,
each fragment is written in a distinct lyrical language that captures the narrator’s immediate
moods, contradictions, and tangents more than the moments themselves. This all contributes to
the volatility of the narrating self, who in an attempt to define itself within these contemplations,
questions reality to the point of losing itself.
Revealing the progression of this unreliable thought process to the reader became my
main focus throughout the translation. What ties the stories together in the original language is a
deliberate manipulation of conventional language rules, including the tense build-up of
conditional clauses and the many variations on classic idioms, all there to disorient the reader
and draw them into a headspace free of linear time.
Disassembling these German structures eventually led to a manipulation of English’s own
rules during the reassembly, from the addition of semicolons in “The Sudden Walk” to guide the
reader’s pace, to the choice of translating the purely physical “spurred on from behind” to the
more emotionally driven “running on air” to note the narrator’s state of both racing excitement
and hidden elation. Similarly, the choice to keep the term “Indian” is to signify a Western
idealized dream rather than a true representation of Native Americans, a mindset prefaced by the
phrase “if only.”
As with the original, all of this is done to place the reader into an equally disorienting and
quick-shifting contemplation of a concurrently experienced reality.