Free Quarrel & Quandary by Cynthia Ozick

health retreats, once to a nudist spa. He fell into a stormy, fitfully interrupted but protracted engagement to Felice Bauer, a pragmatic manufacturing executive in Berlin; when he withdrew from it he felt like a felon before a tribunal. His job at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute (where he was a token Jew) instructed him in the whims of contingency and in the mazy machinery of bureaucracy. When his lungs became infected, he referred to his spasms of cough as “the animal.” In his last hours, pleading with his doctor for morphine, he said, “Kill me, or else you are a murderer”—a final conflagration of Kafkan irony.
    Below all this travail, some of it self-inflicted, lay the indefatigable clawings of language. In a letter to Max Brod, Kafka described Jews who wrote in German (he could hardly exclude himself) as trapped beasts: “Their hind legs were still stuck in parental Judaism while their forelegs found no purchase on new ground.” They lived, he said, with three impossibilities: “the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing German, the impossibility of writing differently. You could add,” he concluded, “a fourth impossibility, the impossibility of writing.”
    The impossibility of writing
German
? Kafka’s German—his mother tongue—is spare, somber, comic, lucid, pure; formal without being stilted. It has the almost platonic purity of a language unintruded on by fads or slang or the street, geographically distanced from the tumultuous bruisings of the mean vernacular. The Hebrew poetry written by the Jews of medieval Spain was similarly immaculate; its capital city was not Córdoba or Granada but the Bible. In the same way Kafka’s linguistic capital was not German-speaking Prague on the margins of empire, but European literature itself. Language was the engineand chief motive of his life: hence “the impossibility of not writing.” “I’ve often thought,” he ruminated to Felice Bauer, “that the best way of life for me would be to have writing materials and a lamp in the innermost room of a spacious locked cellar.” When he spoke of the impossibility of writing German, he never meant that he was not master of the language; his wish was to be consecrated to it, like a monk with his beads. His fear was that he was not entitled to German—not that the language did not belong to him, but that he did not belong to it. German was both hospitable and inhospitable. He did not feel innocently—uncomplicatedly, unself-consciously—German. Put it that Kafka wrote German with the passion of an ingenious yet stealthy translator, always aware of the space, however minute, between his fear, or call it his idea of himself, and the deep ease of at-homeness that is every language’s consolation.
Mutter
, the German word for “mother,” was, he said, alien to him: so much for the taken-for-granted intimacy and trust of
die Muttersprache
, the mother tongue. This crevice of separation, no thicker than a hair, may underlie the estrangement and enfeebling distortions that shock and ultimately disorient every reader of Kafka.
    But if there is, in fact, a crevice—or a crisis—of separation between the psyche and its articulation in Kafka himself, what of the crevice that opens between Kafka and his translators? If Kafka deemed it impossible to be Kafka, what chance can a translator have to snare a mind so elusive that it escapes even the comprehension of its own sensibility? “I really am like rock, like my own tombstone,” Kafka mourned. He believed himself to be “apathetic, witless, fearful,” and also “servile, sly, irrelevant, unsympathetic, untrue … from some ultimate diseased tendency.” He vowed that “every day at least one line shall be directed against myself.” “I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable,” he wrote. “Basically it is nothing other than … fearspread to everything, fear of the