Customer Reviews

Best Short Stories: A Dual-Language Book (Dover Dual Language German)

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This edition offers a sample of Kafka's best short stories with the original German and English translation on facing pages. It is a wonderful sort of "training wheels" for those who are ready to tackle German literature in the original.

The stories themselves are highly challenging. Kafka is regarded as a profit of modern alienation, but that doesn't capture the complexity of his thought. His masterpiece, The Metamorphosis, is here. In it Gregor Samsa awakes one morning to find he has turned into a giant bug. With that simple, but startling device, Kafka has a vehicle for exploring the inner dynamic of a family, and the mix of selfishness and altruism which informs our relationships with one another. On the surface, it would seem that Kafka is affirming the increasingly common notion that all altruism is really disguised selfishness - yet the story's bleakness suggests that Kafka himself knows that the vision is incomplete. This is the truth, he says. But is it the whole truth?

In another great story, In the Penalty Colony, Kafka presents us with a society that was once ordered around a great torturing device. The society is in the process of moving away from the torture device, and that would seem to be a good thing. But Kafka is more challenging than that. Does a vision of the world which imagines no role for suffering really speak to our deepest selves? We are repulsed by the old order, but the new order seems to be missing something.

So in one neat package, you can learn some German and struggle with a challenging vision of the world. That's a bargain, in my book!

I am not a huge fan of Kafka's style of writing but I did enjoy reading this book due to the side by side english and german wording. I found myself hopping back and forth to see how the German was translated into English. And, since my German is not perfect and Kafka writes with a complex sentence structure, the dual set up was perfect for me. These are some of Kafka's best stories, particularly the Metamorphisis.

I have used this book at our university in a German class (Introduction to German Literature) and in a Literature in Translation class. Students appreciated the duel langauge format. For my students of German, the facing translation aids in setting the context so that they can deal mor quickly with the German text. I would recommend this book for those with some German who are interested in Kafka's short fiction. I would have liked having the " Hunger Artist" in the collection as well as a German vocabulary section (as one finds in other Dover texts), but otherwise I found the book most helpful. The entire series offers excellent books at wonderful prices!

The most enjoyable aspect of language learning, for me, is the experience of reading literary masterpieces in the original. The side-by-side format is perfect for those intermediate students of German who would like something more substantial than the usual textbook fare. I would like to have seen more stories printed, or perhaps a second volume, but I do appreciate the variety available in this edition. The English translations tend to be more literal and wooden than the better all-English versions in print, but that is all the better. Once you've read Kafka in the original, you won't want to go back.

Let's face it.

Whether you're a native German speaker or an Anglophone reading a translation, slogging through some of Franz Kafka's work is like wading through a swamp: great for your "language muscles" but leaving you with a sense of unease over what the journey was all about. Kafka loved to write l-o-n-g sentences full of circumlocutions, and was especially unkind to verbs, which he far too often relegated to the very end of his weighty sentences. Add to that a truly tortured psyche, an occasional double entendre, and one story which is a single much-too-long paragraph relieved only by semi-colons, and you have, well, a translator's nightmare.

Mr. Appelbaum rises masterfully to the occasion. His renderings of Kafka's old-fashioned, intricate word structures are modern, stylistically deft, and easier to read than the original. His very brief introduction makes it clear he knows a lot more about Kafka than he's letting on. A translator this good deserved a bio somewhere in the book but, regretably, the publisher (Dover) provides none. I was left wondering almost as much about him as about Kafka. That's not nice.

The typographers deserved some recognition too, which they did not receive. The reader can nearly always run his finger straight from the words on the left (German) page to the right (English translation). I really don't know how they accomplished this feat, since German invariably takes an hour to say what English says in half that time.

Nice job!

Gave it as a gift for someone enthused about learning German. They didn't get much use out of it. I can't offer more than that, sorry.