Table Of ContentALSO BY FRANZ KAFKA
Fiction
America
The Castle
Complete Short Stories
Metamorphosis and Other Stories
The Trial
Non-Fiction
of
The Diaries Franz Ktifka
fqi£;
Letters to
1"
Letters to Milena
The Ziirau Aphorisms
FRANZ KAFKA
H1th an Introduction and Afterword
by Roberto Calasso
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY
MICHAEL HOFMANN
,
ROBERTO CALASSO S COMMENTARY
TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY
GEOFFREY BROCK
Harvill Seeker
LONDON
Published by Harvill Seeker 2006
24681097531
English translation of Franz; Kafka's text copyright© Michael Hofinann 2006
Introduction and afterword copyright © Roberto Calasso 2004
English translation of Roberto Calasso's commentary
copyright © Geoffrey Bcock 2006
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First published with the title Aforismi Ji Zurau in 2004
by Adelphia Edizoni S.P.A., Milan
Fim published in Gteat Britain in 2006 by
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Contents
~ vii
r~ Ziirau Aphorisms
Jnld Splmdor 109
5..'1tfUS lJJ
Marginalia
~"-en~ morntng, tn Room 132 of Oxford's
~ew Bodleian Library, a severe room not
:.:.-:like a classroom, I studied the manuscript
-::- The Castle. I became accustomed to those
5-.:hoolboy notebooks, those unlined pages.
~. the first notebook, the pages were covered
:Tom one edge to the other with minute,
mgular writing, sometimes in pencil. In the
:-est. the left-hand pages had been left blank,
:eserved for corrections, which, however,
were quite rare. Every so often the title of a
new chapter was indicated on the left-hand
?age, while on the right, at the same level, the
rext continued on without even starting a
new line, the end of the chapter signaled
only by a kind of slanted j
One day I came to the folder containing
the Ziirau Aphorisms. The scenery had changed
:Jtterly. Loose pages-a hundred and three
Vll
of them-in horizontal format, measuring
14.5 by 11.5 centimeters. The pages were very
thin and pale yellow, obtained by quartering
a number of sheets of stationery. All the
fragments were numbered sequentially, in the
upper-right corner, and they varied from
single, brief sentences (such as 16, 23, 30, 44,
68, and 77) to blocks of a dozen sentences
(such as 86 and 104 ). Max Brod published
these texts for the first time in 1953, including
them in the collection of posthumous writ
ings, Preparations for a Country Wedding, and giv
ing them a now-famous title: Reflections on Sin,
Suffering, Hope, and the True Jfay.
Kafka had never before devised this sort
of layout and sequencing for one of his
texts. And though he made no surviving ref
ot
erence, either direct tl\dire~, to, the ·exis
tence of these aphorisms, one can't help but
think that he meant to publish them in a
form corresponding to the way he arranged
them on those thin slips of paper-espe
cially given the fact that nearly all the frag-
Vlll
=.:"Tits were taken, occasionally with slight
='--xhfications, from two octavo notebooks
·~:: was writing in those months: it was as if
:..~c,- had been taken out of a certain form in
:::-der to be articulated in another. Eight
.:.?!-10risms do not appear in either notebook;
~e:· were added by Kafka at a later time
:x-ssJbly in 192o-and were demarcated from
~,e aphorisms that preceded them by a quick
make of the pen, a division maintained here.
T.'1e conception of the manuscript calls
attention to its unicum nature: the Zurau Apho
-~-ns bear little resemblance to anything that
.:arne before, though there are hidden affini
oes '~most clearly perhaps to Hebbel and
Kierkegaard, the latter of whom Kafka was
reading at that time). As for the term apho
-~ms, it must be understood here as a vague
approximation, since these fragments don't
new at all to the classical form of the apho
:-tsm-as we find it represented in Karl Kraus
or in Nicolas Chamfort. Or rather: they hew
:o that form in a few cases ( 28, 62, 94• roo),
lX
but they stray far from it in many others.
How can we define fragment 4 7, for example,
if not as an apologue?
The more I studied those thin slips of
paper and their connections with the note
books and letters written in the Zurau
months, the more strongly I felt that those
texts, like shards of meteorites fallen in a
barren land, should be read in exactly the
form Kafka gave them. Strangely enough,
although these fragments have been pub
lished and translated many times, no edition
has taken this approach-a fact that con
vinced me to try it.
I later decided to append the final chapter
from my book K., which examines not only
these aphorisms but also Kafka's entire
sojourn in Zi.irauTf~d t~,e si~~.i~"\ance tt
came to have in his life.
R.C.
X
