“Ottomar Starke is going to do the drawing for the cover of The Transformation. It has occurred to me that he might want to draw the insect himself. “Not that, please, not that!” Franz Kafka pleaded in a letter to Georg Heinrich, from the publisher Kurt Wolff, concerned about the possibility that a beetle would illustrate the cover of one of his best-known works.
The letter has been cited several times, regarding The Metamorphosis, since that is also how the work is known, but it is now that the reader will be able to read it in its entirety in Spanish. Galaxia Gutenberg will bring to bookstores on May 22 the second of the three volumes that make up the complete edition of Kafka’s Letters in Spanish, which includes more than 150 unpublished letters from the author in this language, arranged chronologically, and which It is based on the German critical edition of Hans-Gerd Koch, one of the writer’s greatest experts.
“The transformation was read with surprise and admiration by contemporaries who managed to do it, and it contributed to Kafka’s prestige,” Ignacio Echevarría, in charge of the Spanish edition, directed by Jordi Llovet, explains to La Vanguardia, which focuses on “ one of his most interesting periods, not only because of the context of the world war, but because it is when he was diagnosed with the tuberculosis that would end his life.”
Although Kafka feels “the blow of death,” he ends up admitting to his friends that the illness “has brought me more good things than bad.” To his bosom friend, Max Brod, whom he would ask years later to destroy his entire work – something that, fortunately, he did not do -, he even told in his first months that “he barely I feel. I have come to think that tuberculosis, as I suffer from it, is not a special disease, but only a reinforcement of the general germ of death.
Echevarría explains that the diagnosis “was a liberation,” as it served as an excuse for “his work commitments and his love relationship with Felice,” whom he accuses of causing “insomnia, tension and headaches, which ended up leading to the disease.” . Kafka took advantage of tuberculosis to end his courtship. That did not exempt him from dating other women, such as Julie Wohryzek, whom he met during a stay at the Schlesen sanatorium; or Milena Jesenská, another of his great loves, although he ends up assuming that the relationship cannot progress any further because she is married.
“I do not fight for you with your husband, the fight only takes place within you. If the issue depended on a fight between your husband and me, everything would have been decided long ago. In the atmosphere of your life together with him, I am truly nothing more than the mouse in the ‘big house’, who, at most once a year, is allowed to cross the carpet diagonally,” he laments in the letter. that closes the book. The next volume, expected to be released in German in November, will focus more on this particular courtship and the final years before he died.
“One of the things that is most evident in this volume is that Kafka cared more about writing than publishing. He was interested, however, in the details relating to the typographical characteristics of his publications. But, above all, his obsession was writing, not being a writer,” says Echevarría. So much so that, when the millionaire writer Carl Sternheim wanted to give him the full amount of the renowned Fontane prize, which he had just won, the author did not understand: “I have written to Sternheim. It is not at all easy to write to someone from whom you have not had direct news to thank them without knowing exactly what,” he confessed to the editor Heinrich Meyer, who advised him to thank him for the gesture.
The anecdote is nothing more than another proof of the reputation that Kafka enjoyed during his lifetime in certain circles, which allowed magazines and publishers to end up disputing him, as they were aware of his talent. “But he boycotted himself, because he never finished any novel, although he did publish several books. He was very demanding and, at the same time, he was in no hurry to publish,” according to Echevarría. Although yes for writing. Any detail, no matter how minute it seemed, was likely to appear in his writings, such as the plague of mice on his sister’s Zürau farm, which occupied many lines in his letters and which ended up being the germ of Josefina the singer or the town. of the mice, his last short story.
Far from what it may seem, due to the constant presence of rodents and his recent diagnosis, his five-month stay in Zürau was one of the happiest periods in his life. He feels freed from his possession as a writer and from his bonds. And it is in that context when he writes Aphorisms of Zürau, which are philosophical pearls in which he reconsiders his relationship with life, death, sin or guilt. It is not literature per se, but it is high philosophy,” argues the editor.
Whether he was aware of it or not, what a large part of the letters make clear is that, for one reason or another, everyone around him applauded both his empathy and his know-how. Including the directors of the Work Accident Insurance Institute, his employer, who exempted him from going to the front because he was considered an “essential” employee.
