Aphorisms (The Schocken Kafka Library)

My favorite collection of prose by Franz Kafka.

A bit on the light side, not amusing, nor memorial. The novels are much better.

As important as anything Kafka wrote.

Great quotes, some of them very deep.

While some of the aphorisms collected here are thought-provoking, as a whole the book isn't as compelling as Kafka's novels or stories, and he doesn't hold up to more famous aphorists like Nietzsche or Schopenhauer.

Great

How can such a prestigious publishing house as Schocken put out such a horrible edition? I could write a long essay enumerating all the mistakes and omissions but I will limit myself to a few of them not to waste my and your time and to convince you to stay away from this edition. Obviously we are not going to be speaking about the wonders of Kafka, rather about the foreword and translation. Let's start at the beginning. I guess when you want to sound smart you will throw in Greek except when you make mistakes. So immediately in the first line of the foreword a wrong Greek declination for the infinitive coupled with wrong Greek letters. Next the etymology of οριζειυ (another grammatical mistake) is certainly dubious. But then on page XII again Greek and again wrong twice misspelled a simple word ηθοσ ανρωπωι without θ and in the second instance a wrong grammatical ending. It should be ήθος ανθρώπω δαίμων (And ανρώπω again without a θ). So I guess Mr. Frank is not too much of a classical guy. But then comes a big surprise on page XI, paragraph V you read Kafka's aphorism "The world is only ever a constructed world." Aphorism (54) and then again quoted (62) "The fact that the only world is a constructed world takes away hope and gives us certainty" So Kafka was into construction business, I guess? Well then you go and check what it really says: Es gibt nichts anderes als eine geistige Welt (54) and later the same Die Tatsache, daß es nichts anderes gibt als eine geistige Welt, nimmt uns die Hoffnung und gibt uns die Gewißheit." GEISTIGE! is spiritual! So now you go and take a look who translated such nonsense! And you read Willa and Edwin Muir and by Michael Hofmann. Mr. Hofmann, aren't you at least a little bit ashamed of such "translation"? Willa and Edwin Muir translated correctly Geistige as spiritual, as anyone can check in their translation. So here we have Mr. Hofmann who wasn't even in the world when Muir's did their translation correcting them without any sign that this is what he is doing. horrible simply put. as Kafka would say "dumm und fantastisch" Many more mistakes are unfortunately in this edition. But as well many editing omissions for example aphorism 7 was crossed out by Kafka but in this edition this is not indicated etc. etc. etc. Stay away. Schocken Kafka deserves better!

Kafka was grasping at straws on a few of these aphorisms. This was clearly something he wrote as a pastime and it was published posthumously for a reason. I agree with some of the other reviews that Kafka's better at storytelling, and that far-superior philosophical works exist out there. (I do like the cover though, so that's a plus!)