Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared
Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared
By Franz Kafka
New Translation by Michael Hofmann
"A stirring, singular work, now restored to its original beauty."—John Ashbery
"Michael Hofmann’s magnificent new translation restores its rightful place as one of Kafka’s most delightful and most memorable works."—Charles Simic
Newly restored to the original text: for this new translation, Hofmann returned to Kafka’s manuscripts, restoring matters of substance and detail, and even the book’s original ending.
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."
Paperback
218 pages
New Directions Publishing, 2004
Originally published in 1927
5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
ISBN 9780811215695
Fiction