The Unhappiness of Being a Single Man: Essential Stories

Translator’s Preface

IN ENGLISH, the word that usually follows ‘Kafkaesque’ is ‘nightmare’. Hardly the thing to make you think, ‘Hurray, a new translation. No Netflix for me tonight.’ And in truth, Kafka’s work is respected far more than it is loved.

Potential book buyers sense that reading one of his novels might be unpleasantly similar to appearing in it: boring and painful at the same time. Like a circle of hell reserved for bureaucracy and anxiety dreams, where you fill in meaningless forms until the end of time, and then discover the pen is actually a beetle. That feeling only gets stronger when you flick to the back of The Castle and see how many pages there are.

I can’t say I really disagree. There’s no question about how startling Kafka’s vision is, nor about how, despite the surrealism and the grotesquerie, it all feels so familiar. But are the novels a great read? I have my doubts.

Not so about the short stories. There, the ideas that can feel interminable in the novels are quick, funny, strange and sad. Some are fables, some are jokes, some seem placid at first then throw you out the window, some put pictures in your mind that no one but Kafka ever could and that will keep resurfacing for years afterwards as metaphors for your lived reality. Some you read and think, oh I see, this is Kafka, this is why Kafka was such an earthquake, this is why he’s unforgettable.

Just to be blunt: I think the short stories you hold in your hand are the best thing Kafka ever wrote, and the best of them are as good as anything ever written by anyone. If you don’t want to take my word for it, on the back of my German edition it says, “The short stories form the actual core of all Kafka’s work.”

So why are they less known than the novels? I think it’s probably because people tend to buy novels rather than short story collections, and therefore publishers tend to push them. Kafka’s short stories have often appeared in unwieldy compendia, aimed at devotees, or appended to an edition of his most famous piece, The Metamorphosis.

Translation also creates an extra cost that makes it harder for publishers to take the gamble on an unpopular form. And although Kafka has had some excellent translators, like Michael Hofmann, in many editions you see the marks left by the economics of publishing: underpaid translators work quickly and hurry to get things finished.

I hope this collection takes these short stories out from under the novels’ shadow. I haven’t put them in chronological order, or tried to showcase his different modes; my principle for inclusion has been: only the best.