Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared

Description

Michael Hofmann’s startlingly visceral and immediate translation revives Kafka’s great comedy, and captures a new Kafka, free from Prague and loose in the new world, a Kafka shot through with light in this highly charged and enormously nuanced translation. Kafka began the first of his three novels in 1911, but like the others, Amerika remained unfinished, and perhaps, as Klaus Mann suggested, “necessarily endless.” Karl Rossman, the youthful hero of the novel, “a poor boy of seventeen,” has been banished by his parents to America, following a scandal. There, with unquenchable optimism, he throws himself into adventure after misadventure, and experiences multiply as he makes his way into the heart of the country, to The Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma. In creating this new translation, Hofmann, as he explains in his introduction, returned to the manuscript version of the book, restoring matters of substance and detail. Fragments which have never before been presented in English are now reinstated including the book’s original “ending.”

The San Francisco Chronicle said Hofmann’s “sleek translation does a wonderful job” and The New York Times concurred: “Anything by Kafka is worth reading again, especially in the hands of such a gifted translator as Hofmann.”
Binding Type: Paperback
Contributors: Franz Kafka,Michael Hofmann (Translator),Horace Gregory (Afterword by)
Published: 05/17/2004
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
ISBN: 9780811215695
Pages: 216
Weight: 0.50lbs
Size: 0.66″ H x 8.01″ L x 5.22″ W

About the Author
Kafka, Franz: – Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His major novels include The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika.Gregory, Horace: – Horace Gregory was born and grew up in Milwaukee. He was a poet, critic, essayist, translator and biographer, who taught at Sarah Lawrence College for 26 years. He was a member of the National Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters and received the Bollingen Prize for poetry in 1965.Hofmann, Michael: – The award-winning translator Michael Hofmann has also translated works by Jenny Erpenbeck, Gert Hofmann, Franz Kafka, Heinrich von Kleist, and Joseph Roth for New Directions. His translation of Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck was awarded the International Booker Prize in 2024.