Amerika (Michael Hofmann 1996 Translation)

✍ Scribed by Franz Kafka

• Publisher: Penguin, Random House
• Year: 1927
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 183 KB
• Edition: Penguin Books (2007)
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 0141188383

✦ Synopsis

{ Oct 2020 - Verified ebook }
Paperback, 218 pages
Published 1927
Penguin Books (2007)
Translation and Introduction by: Michael Hofmann (1996)
aka: Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared)
Michael Hofmann's startlingly visceral and immediate translation revives Kafka's great comedy, and captures a new Kafka, free from Prague and loose in the new world, a Kafka shot through with light in this highly charged and enormously nuanced translation. Kafka began the first of his three novels in 1911, but like the others, Amerika remained unfinished, and perhaps, as Klaus Mann suggested, "necessarily endless."
Karl Rossman, the youthful hero of the novel, "a poor boy of seventeen," has been banished by his parents to America, following a scandal. There, with unquenchable optimism, he throws himself into adventure after misadventure, and experiences multiply as he makes his way into the heart of the country, to The Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma. In creating this new translation, Hofmann, as he explains in his introduction, returned to the manuscript version of the book, restoring matters of substance and detail. Fragments which have never before been presented in English are now reinstated including the book's original "ending."