有谁敢说卡夫卡的德语写得不好？他的情人费丽斯
发布时间：2011-09-15 11:08
分类名称：默认分类
分类名称：默认分类
In focusing on just how perfectly German his language is, the archive joins in a long and curious tradition of praise for Kafka’s ‘pure’ German.George Steiner lauded ‘the translucency of Kafka’s German, its stainless quiet’, remarking that his ‘vocabulary and syntax are those of utmost abstention from waste’. John Updike referred to ‘the stirring purity’ of Kafka’s prose. Hannah Arendt, as well, wrote that his work ‘speaks the purest German prose of the century’. So although Kafka was certainly Czech, it seems that fact is superseded by his written German, which is apparently the most pure – or, shall we say, purified? Given the history of the valuation of ‘purity’ within German nationalism, including National Socialism, it is curious that Kafka should be made to stand for this rigorous and exclusionary norm. In what ways must Kafka’s multilingualism and his Czech origins be ‘purified’ in order to have him stand for a pure German? Is what is most remarkable or admirable about him that he seems to have purified himself, exemplifying the self-purifying capacities of the Ausländer?<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
It is interesting that these arguments about Kafka’s German are recirculating now, just as Angela Merkel has announced the failure of multiculturalism in Germany and marshalled as evidence the further claim that new immigrants, and indeed their ‘children and grandchildren’, fail to speak German correctly. She has publicly admonished such communities to rid themselves of every accent and to ‘integrate’ into the norms of the German linguistic community (a complaint quickly countered by Jürgen Habermas). Surely, Kafka could be a model of the successful immigrant, though he lived only briefly in Berlin, and clearly did not identify even with the German Jews. If Kafka’s new works are recruited to the Marbach archive, then Germany will be fortified in its effort to shift its nationalism to the level of language; the inclusion of Kafka takes place for the very same reason that less well-spoken immigrations are denounced and resisted. Is it possible that fragile Kafka could become a norm of European integration?
We find in Kafka’s correspondence with his lover Felice Bauer, who was from Berlin, that she is constantly correcting his German, suggesting that he is not fully at home in this second language. And his later lover, Milena Jesenská, who was also the translator of his works into Czech, is constantly teaching him Czech phrases he neither knows how to spell nor to pronounce, suggesting that Czech, too, is also something of a second language. In 1911, he is going to the Yiddish theatre and understanding what is said, but Yiddish is not a language he encounters very often in his family or his daily life; it remains an import from the east that is compelling and strange. So is there a first language here? And can it be argued that even the formal German in which Kafka writes – what Arendt called ‘purest’ German – bears the signs of someone entering the language from its outside? This was the argument in Deleuze and Guattari’s essay ‘Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature’.
Indeed, this quarrel seems to be an old one, one that Kafka himself invokes in a letter to Felice in October 1916 with reference to Max Brod’s essay on Jewish writers, ‘Our Writers and the Community’, published in Der Jude.
And incidentally, won’t you tell me what I really am; in the lastNeue Rundschau, ‘Metamorphosis’ is mentioned and rejected on sensible grounds, and then the writer says: ‘There is something fundamentally German about K’s narrative art.’ In Max’s article on the other hand: ‘K’s stories are among the most typically Jewish documents of our time.’
‘A difficult case,’ Kafka writes. ‘Am I a circus rider on two horses? Alas, I am no rider, but lie prostrate on the ground.’
Butler：《谁真正拥有卡夫卡？》
