This study is a part of the research project “The Practices of Textual Scholarship: Towards Application for Cultural Preservation and Literary Education” (PI: K. Myojo, FY: 2016–2022), which is supported by MEXT / JSPS, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A) (grant number JP16H01921). This article is a revised version of a paper given at the 17th Annual Conference of the European Society for Textual Scholarship, “Histories of the Holograph from Ancient to Modern Manuscripts and Beyond”, University of Oxford, U.K., March 2022.
- 1 In this article, all the translations of Japanese and German texts into English are my own, unless (...)
1In Japan, a small paperback book has been sold as the official translation of the historical-critical edition of Der Process [The Trial] since 2009 (Kafka 2009a). But how is it possible that the official translation of the historical-critical edition is such a small paperback book? Textual scholars will immediately realize how strange and impossible that is. However, in Japan, few people have any conception of the true state of affairs. The back cover of the book states the following: “This is a radical new translation that delivers Kafka’s text as it is, based on the latest historical-critical edition that is fully faithful to the manuscripts”.1 As any Kafka researcher knows, the historical-critical edition of Der Process, published in 1997, as part of Franz Kafka-Ausgabe, or FKA, is a large, heavy box containing seventeen booklets (Kafka 1997). Its appearance bears no resemblance to this little paperback book at all. What’s more, this little book contains a simple, easy-to-read text without any textual notes, while the FKA provides no reading text, but only facsimiles of the manuscripts and their diplomatic transcription. The simple Japanese text is just a translation of the reading text of the critical edition, not the historical-critical edition. So, to put it bluntly, the blurb of the paperback book uses the academic term “historical-critical edition” for hype alone.
- 2 See the advertisement of the end of the book (Kafka 2001).
2The official translation of the critical edition of Der Process published in 1990 (Kafka 1990b, 1990a) has also been sold in Japan since 2001 (Kafka 2001). This book has been accompanied by the following description: “People have long awaited a critical edition presenting Kafka’s manuscripts faithfully. Finally, the epoch-making version has emerged that is as close as possible to what Kafka himself wrote, eliminating all the parts that were modified by people other than Kafka”.2 Here once again you can see that the academic term “critical edition” is used as a promotional phrase. It is again dubious as to whether the book can live up to the blurb, and really be called a translation of the critical edition. Kafka’s critical edition, known as Kritische Kafka-Ausgabe, or KKA, is a two-volume set comprising the “Textband” and the “Apparatband”. Nevertheless, the Japanese version forms just one single volume in which only the reading text of the “Textband” is translated. Almost none of the variants found in the “Apparatband” are presented. These Japanese translations of the scholarly editions indicate that Japanese scholars are not familiar with Western textual theories. This is a very serious structural issue in the world of Japanese literary research, but I would prefer to leave this issue for a future article.
3In Japan, Kafka is a very popular writer. Besides the previously described versions, there are also at least eight different translations of the edition of Der Process, edited by Max Brod. Two of these eight (Kafka 1953, 1966) are still selling as well as the translations of the two new editions mentioned above. Now let me emphasize the following: the Japanese translations of Der Process have been giving the reader the false impression that the issue of the reading text is largely resolved.
- 3 I have already discussed the details of the Japanese translation situation of Kafka’s texts and poi (...)
4All these translations, not just the translations of the Brod edition (which was first published in 1925) provide a simple, easy-to-read text, which further strengthens this impression. However, how to correctly determine Kafka’s text is, so to speak, an aporia, for which no definitive resolution has been found. That is why FKA, which goes to the other extreme, has finally emerged. As mentioned above, FKA presents only facsimiles of the manuscripts and their diplomatic transcriptions containing no definitive text. That is why this supposedly official Japanese translation of FKA is so egregious in its simplicity. And this is the reason why there is such a large perception gap between scholars of Kafka and general readers in Japan about what Kafka actually wrote.3
- 4 See e.g., (Pasley 1995; Schütterle 2002; Battegay, Christen, and Groddeck 2010; Kleinwort 2013).
5Kafka is a very important writer in modern literature. Many people working in the humanities, not just literary scholars, refer to his work. In Japan, those scholars who cannot read German, and students who study the humanities, all learn from Japanese translations of Kafka’s work. But are they really reading what Kafka wrote? What is the essence of Kafka literature? It is already well recognized that it is significant to read the deletions, additions, and corrections in his manuscript, in order to fully comprehend and appreciate the Kafka text.4 One should read Kafka’s mysterious works not as something static and complete, but rather as a dynamic “écriture”, which provides an insight as to why most of his works are incomplete, and as a hint for unlocking the mystery behind their incompleteness. That is why, in the critical edition, all “Entstehungsvarianten” [genetic variants] are shown in the “Apparatband” (see Kafka 1990a, 161–350). For the same reason, the facsimile edition has also been published. If so, it is no exaggeration to say that Kafka’s texts cannot be fully understood without reading the revision process on Kafka’s manuscripts.
6So how can we bridge that perception gap between scholars of Kafka and other readers? While I have been trying for years to achieve this goal by pointing out the significance of the fragmentary, dynamic aspects of Kafka’s texts in my books and essays (e.g., Myojo 2002), only literary scholars have taken note of these observations, not general readers. Despite being disappointed with this situation, I could not help but ask myself the following: if they do realize the discrepancy, but cannot read German, what should they read? And gradually, I began to think that I should translate it myself in order to directly present the essence of Kafka’s fragmented writings and reach a wider audience. You may have noticed that I have subtly shifted my discussion of the target audience of my future book from “general reader” to “a wider audience”. That is because I realized that it does not make sense to create a comprehensive Japanese text for a very general audience. I mentioned earlier that Kafka is popular in Japan, but he is not so famous that everyone knows about him. Furthermore, in terms of expanding the readership base for Kafka, the existing, simple Japanese translations work well as introductory, gateway-like books that direct people’s attention to him. My potential book should target those who have already been attracted to Kafka’s texts by these existing books and want to go one step further and understand them better. So by the term “a wider audience”, I do not wish to imply those general readers, but rather the intellectually curious readers with an interest in the humanities, and readers who have already read the popular translations that are currently available. In other words, I wish to address those who endeavor to delve further into Kafka’s writing and thought process, but who are not equipped to jump straight into the complexity of the scholarly editions.
7Thus, I started thinking about editing Der Process in order to produce an alternative translation. Why should I work on editing first, and not translating? This is because there is no appropriate base text that can be translated into Japanese. The two existing scholarly editions cannot be the basis of translation for several reasons. First, given the major differences between the Japanese and German writing systems, it is next to impossible to faithfully replace FKA’s diplomatic transcription with Japanese. Secondly, it is also impossible to faithfully reproduce the German variants, lemmatically presented in the separate volume, in Japanese. Furthermore, even if it were possible linguistically, I think it would be better not to adopt a method like KKA, that separates text and variants, as I believe that this makes the book very challenging to read and appreciate, and thus may exclude that “wider audience” that my edition is aiming for. Unless you are a researcher, you rarely read two books simultaneously — such as comparing the “master” volume to the alternative variants presented in the other. So, if I want to show the work-in-progress aspect of Kafka’s writing, one of the problems I have to consider is how to incorporate the “Entstehungsvarianten” into the text. This is a big hurdle that is very difficult to overcome, which requires complicated work. First, from the huge number of variants presented in KKA and FKA, I have to select the ones that have been recognized as important in terms of interpretation and/or the ones that are reproducible in Japanese from the viewpoint of the linguistic system. Of course, the requirements to define the selection criteria of which variants to include, and which to exclude, is another hornet’s nest entirely.
8And, once that minefield is cleared, I then have to decide on a presentation method for these variants. That is, how should I illustrate the functional differences in these amendments (i.e., which words have been deleted and which words have been added) when incorporating them into the base text? What kind of expression method should be used?
9This is also an important problem, but in the case of Der Process, there is a more primary and fundamental issue than those regarding the presentation of the revision process, namely that of compressing the materials into one book. As mentioned earlier, the facsimile edition of Der Process no longer forms a single book, but rather sixteen booklets containing facsimiles and transcripts of the manuscripts and one of commentary in a single box. This mode of presentation reveals the consensus that there is no single “correct” way to order the parts of Der Process. Kafka left behind more than a dozen bundles of loose-leaf notes, each demarcated in their own covers, but with little sense of order beyond that. Brod, when editing the unfinished work after Kafka’s death, considered each of those bundles as a “chapter” and arranged them in the order of the story he inferred. As is well known to Kafka researchers, the chapter arrangement of Der Process has been repeatedly discussed and disputed since the 1950s. The chapter arrangement used in the critical edition, which was issued about forty years after the discussion began, was severely criticized for its lack of differentiation from the Brod edition. It seemed we had eschewed any progress in this regard and returned full circle. Thus, the solution provided by FKA to give up establishing the chapter arrangement was regarded as, at least, an objectively correct one.
10It should be noted here that, with the exception of the facsimile edition, all past discussions of the chapter arrangement, so far, have been made in terms of maintaining the consistency of the story. The Brod edition and the critical edition follow the narrative principle. They prioritize the construction of a resolved story. On the other hand, the facsimile edition follows another policy, the so-called “Schriftträgerprinzip”. This principle privileges fidelity to the source materials, and foregoes any assumptions pertaining to order. In terms of materiality, those stacks of paper should be regarded as parts, not chapters, with no definitive order.
11So, what is an alternative to the existing two methodologies? The conclusion I came up with, after much reflection, was to put these “parts” in the chronological order in which Kafka wrote them, i.e., in the order in which the texts were generated. As mentioned earlier, the importance of understanding Kafka’s writing process is well recognized, and is part of the reason we delve so deeply into his works. And so, by presenting the work in this form, we can provide a great illustration of his unique “écriture”.
12Forty years ago, Gerhard Neumann summarized the legitimacy of any editing policy of Kafka’s work as follows:
Die editorische Entscheidung kann in jenem Fall nur einer der beiden Möglichkeiten gerecht werden. Entweder wird sie sich auf die Wiedergabe und Rekonstruktion der “écriture” als eines potentiell unendlichen Selbstverfertigungsprozesses eines sich im Schreiben erarbeitenden Subjekts konzentrieren; oder aber sie muß sich, als zweite Möglichkeit editorischer Entscheidung, die Herauspräparierung eines definitiven “Werks” im Sinne der ästhetischen Kanonbildung zur Aufgabe machen, eines Werks, das einen Trümmerhaufen mißratener Ansätze und verworfener Varianten unter sich begräbt.
(Neumann 1981, 161; emphasis in original)
[In that case, the editorial decision can only do justice to one of the two possibilities. Either it will focus on the reproduction and reconstruction of “écriture” as a potentially endless process of self-production by a subject establishing himself through writing; or, as a second possibility for an editorial decision, it must set itself the task of preparing a definitive “œuvre” in the sense of the formation of an aesthetic canon — an œuvre that buries under itself a heap of ruins of failed approaches and discarded variants.]
13Neumann talks about the case of Kafka’s “Oktavhefte”, but this view applies to all of Kafka’s writing. Both the Brod and critical editions are based on the latter kind of editorial judgment. The facsimile edition, on the other hand, seems to be based on the former principle. However, it is a faithful reproduction of the physical material, not the “écriture”. So, one could say that the editorial possibilities of this former type have yet to be explored. Thus I have chosen, as my elusive third option, to delve into that very exploration.
14If the policy of the arrangement is to reproduce the writing process, the first thing to work on is to determine, to the best of our ability, the order in which the texts are written.
15Both the KKA editor Malcolm Pasley, and the FKA editor Roland Reuß share the same view on the following point: Kafka firstly wrote the “Verhaftung” [Arrest] part and the “Ende” [End] part, which are, according to Pasley, “in großer zeitlicher Nähe zueinander” [close to each other in terms of time] (Pasley 1990, 111).
16This makes it difficult to arrange the parts and to reconstruct the chronology of his writing. Which part was written first, “Verhaftung” or “Ende”? Pasley indicates that “Verhaftung” would have been written earlier by citing some features on the manuscript as evidence of this. Reuß questions Pasley’s view, and speculates that those two parts would have been written “gleichzeitig” [at the same time] (Reuß 1997, 6). As those two parts were written in separate notebooks, it makes sense to infer as such. Pasley probably thinks so as well, as far as I can ascertain from his writing, although he does not explicitly mention it. As Reuß himself notes when using the expression “gleichzeitig”, it is impossible for these parts to have been literally written simultaneously. More precisely, we should think of it as a zigzag movement back and forth between the two pieces: writing some sentences of one, then switching to the other. So there is a need to infer the order of this zigzag writing from the state of the handwritten manuscript.
- 5 At the time of writing this article (spring of 2022), I was still focusing on traditional methods f (...)
17I have already considered this issue and published the results in a Japanese paper (see Myojo, Nito, and Moribayashi 2021). In this paper I’ve provided some speculation about how the zigzag writing was done, and presented in what order those parts would be arranged in my future edition. Note that the “parts” I have used at this time have different boundaries from those bundles in the facsimile edition. And they are also demarcated differently from the chapters in the critical edition. I will continue to provide further updates on my progress in this matter,5 but will leave that for a future paper, as there is a more important and fundamental issue to address: the beginning of the writing process.
18It’s not just the chapter unit that is newly demarcated in my edition. What constitutes the entire story of Der Process is also demarcated. Like Pasley and Reuß, I also infer that “Verhaftung” and “Ende” were written at the same time, but probably “Verhaftung” first. If so, will the arrest scene be the beginning of my edition of Der Process? No. A better question would be: should my edition limit itself to the texts that are currently subsumed under the title of Der Process, or should it include other texts as well?
19I ask this question for the following reason: in the past, when specialists have discussed chapter arrangement, they have also discussed a text that is not included in the Brod edition, KKA, or FKA. This text is a work known by the title of “Ein Traum” [A Dream]. It is a small piece published in the collection of short stories Ein Landarzt [A Country Doctor] while Kafka was still alive. The name of the main character in the work is “Josef K.” Some specialists have argued that “Ein Traum” should be considered as part of Der Process (e.g., Binder 1976), and, as such, this differs from the traditional view proposed by the editors mentioned above.
20It is clear why the facsimile edition, FKA, doesn’t include this text: it was edited using the “Schriftträgerprinzip”. The extant “Schriftträger” of Der Process is a set of folios kept in the German Literature Archive (DLA) in Marbach. It is the group of folios that Kafka himself handed over to Brod before his death. This set does not include the manuscript of “Ein Traum”, as it had already been lost in the process of its previous publication.
21So why doesn’t the Brod edition include the text of “Ein Traum”? Brod himself claims that “Ein Traum” is not essentially related to the plot of Der Process in the postscript of the first edition of the work.
Die unvollendeten [Kapitel] lasse ich für den Schlußband der Nachlaßausgabe zurück, sie enthalten nichts für den Gang der Handlung Wesentliches. Eines dieser Fragmente wurde vom Dichter selbst unter dem Titel “Ein Traum” in den Band “Ein Landarzt” aufgenommen.
(Kafka 1946, 323)
[I leave the unfinished [chapters] for the final volume of the posthumous edition, they contain nothing essential for the course of the plot. One of these fragments was included by the poet himself in the volume “A Country Doctor” under the title “A Dream”.]
22The reason why KKA doesn’t include that text is similar. Pasley claims in the “Apparatband” of the critical edition that Kafka himself does not associate the two works.
Auch der handschriftlich nicht überlieferte Text “Ein Traum”, den Kafka 1916 veröffentlicht hat, hat einen Protagonisten mit dem Namen “Josef K.” . Kafka bringt das kleine Prosastück — wie er es in einem Brief an Felice Bauer […] nennt — jedoch weder hier noch irgendwo sonst mit dem “Proceß”-Roman in Verbindung.
(Pasley 1990, 73)
[The text that has not survived in manuscript, “Ein Traum”, which Kafka published in 1916, also has a protagonist named “Josef K.” However, Kafka does not link the small piece of prose — as he calls it in a letter to Felice Bauer […] — either here or anywhere else with the “Proceß” novel.]
23But their claims are highly contestable. Whether or not the texts are related to each other should be judged by interpretation. And the past debate about the chapter arrangement shows that interpretations differing from Brod and Pasley can also be valid.
- 6 I have touched upon the subject of the relationship between “Ein Traum” and Der Process in several (...)
24I believe that “Ein Traum” is related to Der Process and thus I will include it in my future edition.6 This means that I will redefine the work of Der Process itself.
25What is Der Process? As mentioned above, I am trying to edit it not as “Werk” [work], but “Schrift” [writing]. In other words, I am working on what is, again according to Neumann, “die Wiedergabe und Rekonstruktion der ‘écriture’ als eines potentiell unendlichen Selbstverfertigungsprozesses eines sich im Schreiben erarbeitenden Subjekts” [the reproduction and reconstruction of “écriture” as a potentially endless process of self-production by a subject establishing himself through writing] (Neumann 1981, 161).
26If I consider Der Process to be “Schrift” rather than “Werk”, then the most important factor in determining its frame is the timeframe. This means that I first have to tackle the following issue: Which period of “écriture” that is “potentiell unendlich”, in Neumann’s reasonable expression, can be regarded as the Der Process period? That is, where is the beginning of my edition of Der Process to be located without sticking to the conventional frame? It is well known that the name “Josef K.” appears for the first time in a fragment written on July 29, 1914. This fragment is found in the volume of Tagebücher, not in Der Process, in the critical edition. Also, of course, it is not included in the facsimile edition of Der Process. The text is as follows:
Josef K., der Sohn eines reichen Kaufmanns, ging eines abends nach einem großen Streit den er mit seinem Vater gehabt hatte — der Vater hatte ihm sein liederliches Leben vorgeworfen und dessen sofortige Einstellung verlangt — ohne eine bestimmte Absicht nur in vollständiger Unsicherheit und Müdigkeit in das Haus der Kaufmannschaft, das von allen Seiten frei in der Nähe des Hafens stand. Der Türhüter verneigte sich tief. Josef sah ihn ohne Gruß flüchtig an. “Diese stummen untergeordneten Personen machen alles, was man von ihnen vorausetzt” dachte er. “Denke ich, daß er mich mit unpassenden Blicken beobachtet so tut er es wirklich.” Und er drehte sich nochmals wieder ohne Gruß nach dem Türhüter um; dieser wandte sich zur Straße und sah zum wolkenbedeckten Himmel auf.
(Kafka 1990c, 666–67)
[Joseph K., the son of a rich merchant, one evening after a violent quarrel with his father — his father had reproached him for his dissipated life and demanded that he put an immediate stop to it — went, with no definite purpose but only because he was tired and completely at a loss, to the house of the corporation of merchants which stood all by itself near the harbour. The doorkeeper made a deep bow, Joseph looked casually at him without a word of greeting. “These silent underlings do everything one supposes them to be doing,” he thought. “If I imagine that he is looking at me insolently, then he really is.” And he once more turned to the doorkeeper, again without a word of greeting; the latter turned towards the street and looked up at the overcast sky.]
(Kafka 1975, 257)
27In this fragment, a man named Josef K. appears as the main character, which is clearly regarded as the beginning of a story. The appearance of this man is quite different from that of Josef K. of Der Process. The Josef K. of this fragment is an idle son who lives with his father, a wealthy merchant, while Josef K. of Der Process is a man living alone who works at a bank. However, the fragment also features the “Türhüter” [gatekeeper], an important figure that appears in Der Process. In the “Apparatband” of the critical edition, you can find the following passage by Pasley:
Im gleichen Tagebuchheft […] findet sich unter dem Datum des 29. Juli, als erstes Zeugnis der neuen Schaffensperiode, das Erzählfragment “Josef K. […] Himmel auf” (KKAT 666f.), das abgesehen von der Namenidentität auch gewisse thematische Beziehungen zum Anfang des Romans aufweist. Der Name “Josef K.” wird hier durch die Korrektur (Hans Gorre > Josef K.) zum erstenmal eingeführt.
(Pasley 1990, 73)
[In the same diary notebook […] dated July 29, the first testimony of the new creative period is found in the narrative fragment “Josef K. […] Himmel auf” (KKAT 666f.), which apart from the identity of the name also contains certain themes related to the beginning of the novel. The name “Josef K.” is introduced here for the first time through a correction of names (Hans Gorre > Josef K.).]
28Pasley regards the date on which that fragment was written as the beginning of the “neue Schaffensperiode”, and considered it to be related to Der Process. The FKA editor Reuß also pays attention to the fragment:
Am 29. Juli führte Kafka in ihm in einem Erzählansatz den Namen “Josef K.” (als Änderung eines zuerst erwogenen “Hans Gorre”) ein. Thematische Überschneidungen dieses Entwurfs mit dem “Process”-Kontext sind allenfalls vage vorgezeichnet, so daß man diesen Erzählansatz kaum als Vorarbeit zum “Process” auffassen kann.
(Reuß 1997, 4)
[On July 29, Kafka introduced the name “Josef K.” (as a modification of an initially considered “Hans Gorre”) in a narrative approach. The thematic overlaps of this draft with the “Process” context are at most vaguely sketched out, so that this narrative sentence can hardly be understood as a preparatory work for the “Process”.]
29Reuß also acknowledges the possibility of “Thematische Überschneidungen”, although he considers the relevance to be “allenfalls vage”. I believe this fragment has a strong connection to Der Process and, like Pasley, regard it as a sign of the start of Kafka’s new creative period. Therefore, I am going to make it the beginning of my future edition. This conviction has been further strengthened since I saw the handwritten manuscript of this fragment stored in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. This fragment starts from the top left of folio 16r in “MS Kafka 9”, that is, from the top of the new page. At the bottom of the page just before that, namely, at the bottom of folio 15v, a thick and dark horizontal line is drawn, which makes us feel the writer’s intention to make a clear break. From such an aspect of the manuscript, it seems to me that Kafka decided on something and then, pausing his writing so far, tried to start a new story.
30This alternative brings a new approach to the reading comprehension of the work. Immediately after that fragment in Kafka’s manuscript, we find another fragment that I believe is also connected to Der Process. This fragment as a printed version can be read in the Tagebücher volume of KKA.
Ich war ganz ratlos. Noch vor einem Weilchen hatte ich gewußt, was zu tun war. Der Chef hatte mich mit ausgestreckter Hand bis zur Tür des Geschäftes gedrängt. Hinter den zwei Pulten standen meine Kollegen, angebliche Freunde, die grauen Gesichter ins Dunkel gesenkt, um den Gesichtsausdruck zu verbergen. “Hinaus” rief der Chef, “Dieb! Hinaus! Ich sage: Hinaus!” “Es ist nicht wahr” rief ich zum hundertsten mal “ich habe nicht gestohlen! Es ist ein Irrtum oder eine Verläumdung! Rühren Sie mich nicht an! Ich werde Sie klagen! Es gibt noch Gerichte! Ich gehe nicht! Fünf Jahre habe ich Ihnen gedient wie ein Sohn und jetzt werde ich als Dieb behandelt. Ich habe nicht gestohlen, ich habe nicht gestohlen, hören Sie doch um Himmelswillen, ich habe nicht gestohlen.”
(Kafka 1990c, 667)
[I was in great perplexity. Only a moment ago I had known what to do. With his arm held out before him the boss had pushed me to the door of the store. Behind the two counters stood my fellow clerks, supposedly my friends, their grey faces lowered in the darkness to conceal their expressions. “Get out!” the boss shouted. “Thief! Get out! Get out, I say!” “It’s not true,” I shouted for the hundredth time; “I didn’t steal! It’s a mistake or a slander! Don’t you touch me! I’ll sue you! There are still courts here! I won’t go! For five years, I slaved for you like a son and now you treat me like a thief. I didn’t steal; for God’s sake, listen to me, I didn’t steal.”]
(Kafka 1975, 298)
31In this fragment, the narration is from the first-person perspective, so we don’t have a character name to help us identify this character, as it is the case with Josef K. in Der Process. However, the action has an affinity to a key theme in Der Process. In the fragment, the narrator recalls an event where he is accused of stealing money by his boss, despite his pleas to the contrary. This fragment then, however, regresses through the protagonist’s state of denial and automated response mechanisms, to the acknowledgement of his own wrong doing, and it ends in the middle of his inner perplexity as follows:
Und nun war ich ratlos. Ich hatte gestohlen, hatte aus der Ladenkasse einen Fünf-Gulden-schein gezogen, um abends mit Sophie ins Teater gehen zu können. Sie wollte gar nicht ins Teater gehen, in 3 Tagen war Gehaltauszahlung, dann hätte ich eigenes Geld gehabt, außerdem hatte ich den Diebstahl unsinnig ausgeführt, bei hellem Tag, neben dem Glasfenster des Kontors, hinter dem der Chef saß und mir zusah. “Dieb!” schrie er und sprang aus dem Kontor. “Ich habe nicht gestohlen” war mein erstes Wort, aber die Fünfguldennote war in meiner Hand und die Kassa war offen.
(Kafka 1990c, 668)
[And now I was in a quandary. I had stolen, had slipped a five-gulden bill out of the till to take Sophie to the theatre that evening. But she didn’t even want to go to the theatre; payday was three days off, at that time I should have my own money; besides, I had committed the theft stupidly, in broad daylight, near the glass window of the office in which the boss sat looking at me. “Thief!” he shouted, and sprang out of the office. “I didn’t steal,” was the first thing I said, but the five-gulden bill was in my hand and the till open.]
(Kafka 1975, 298)
32This fragment was also written on July 29 1914. I will include it in my edition of Der Process, too, because it also has a strong connection with Der Process. This fragment, like Der Process, deals with the issue of sin, and awareness of sin. And they also have something in common in that the hero’s sin is committed misguidedly from the relationship with the woman he is dating. Elias Canetti has proposed the now widely accepted interpretation that the hero’s sin depicted in Der Process can be closely related to the author’s own abandonment of his engagement with Felice Bauer at the time of writing (see Canetti 1969). Kafka was engaged to her on June 1, 1914, after they had been dating (mainly by letter) for about two years. But on July 12, he ended their engagement.
33It is well known that the protagonist’s name — Josef K. — bears a strong resemblance to that of the author (Sokel 1976, 183; see also Binder 1976, 195). The suggestion of that identity was deliberately brought about by Kafka, as evidenced by the change of the name used in the manuscript. Both Pasley and Reuß brought attention to the fact that the name “Josef K.” was originally written as “Hans Gorre”. As has already been pointed out, Hans Gorre is also a possible pseudonym of the author’s (Kurze 2016, 33). The name Gorre is a cypher of Kafka in terms of the number of characters, and the arrangement of consonants and vowels. It’s the same kind of encryption that Kafka uses for the names of the protagonists in his previous novels: Samsa in Die Verwandlung [The Metamorphosis] and Bendemann in Das Urteil [The Judgement]. However, he changed Gorre to Josef K., a name more directly reminiscent of Kafka’s own name. And Josef K. is also strongly associated with Kaiser Franz Josef, the then-emperor of the Austro-Hungarian empire where Kafka lived. Again, the name Josef K. first appeared in the fragment written on July 29th. This date is important, because July 29, 1914 was a fateful day for the Habsburg Empire. On July 28 the empire declared war on Serbia, and on the 29th, Emperor Franz Josef issued a notice of the start of the war. The timing of when Franz Kafka decided to start writing the story of Josef K.’s sin correlates perfectly with the timing of Kaiser Franz Josef’s cataclysmic declaration — one that would change the course of world history. I do not think this is just a coincidence.
- 7 However, the arrest scene was not written immediately after those fragments. Estimating when it was (...)
34If we read Kafka’s writings starting from this fragment of Josef K., we will read the scene of the arrest in a completely different light. Thus, the fragment of Josef K., the son of a wealthy merchant, is immediately followed by the fragment that is narrated in the first-person (where he steals but protests innocence). Readers of my future edition of Der Process will read the following famous sentence after reading the fragments discussed above.7
Jemand musste Josef K. verleumdet haben, denn ohne dass er etwas Böses getan hätte, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet.
(Kafka 1990b, 7)
[Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.]
(Kafka 2009b, 5)
- 8 The unreliability of Kafka’s narrator has been explored in the literature, and is a significant iss (...)
35Is the narrator telling the truth?8
36As you may have noticed, my judgment regarding the inclusion of texts means opening Pandora’s box. If the fragments that are currently classified as diary entries are included, the demarcation process will be almost out of control. My proposed criterion for inclusion is whether a text is related to Der Process. If we follow this extremely vague criterion, it could pertain to a broad range of Kafka’s writings.
37Many researchers have already pointed out that a lot of Kafka’s works, which he wrote in parallel while he was writing the story of Josef K., are closely related to Der Process and to each other. They include the short story In der Strafkolonie [In the Penal Colony], which Kafka published in his lifetime, and several novel fragments, like “Teater von Oklahama [sic]” [“Theater of Oklahama”], which is clearly regarded as a chapter for the unfinished novel Der Verschollene [The Man who Disappeared], “Erinnerungen an die Kaldabahn” [“Memories of the Kalda Railway”], which is presented in the Tagebücher volume in KKA, and “Der Unterstaatsanwalt” [“The Assistant Prosecutor”], which is presented in the Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente I [Posthumous Writings and Fragments I] volume in KKA. Christian Kurze aptly calls them “Satellitentexte” [satellite texts] of Der Process and makes a legitimate claim that they reveal what Jost Schillemeit calls “eine innere Biographie von Kafkas Schreiben” [an inner biography of Kafka’s writing] (Kurze 2016; see also Schillemeit 2004, 224). In this regard my editing attempt can be considered an attempt to make that biography readable. However, needless to say, the realization of this attempt is extremely difficult. In addition to some of the major hurdles already mentioned above, there is an even more fundamental challenge: which ones to select from the many texts related to Der Process and how to present them? If I aim at a wider audience, this choice and presentation is very important. And all the decisions concerning them have to be entirely based on my interpretation.
38You might think that what I am proposing is an edition that eschews the standard approach to scholarly editing, and you would be correct. I am trying to create a version full of my interpretations in every detail and I believe that only this can bring the essence of Kafka’s writings to Japanese readers as KKA and FKA try to convey. The text I edit is by no means academically orthodox: it is just an alternative text. However, it is a text that can only be produced by a scholar.
- 9 I have already published a Japanese paper on the concept of third-generation editing, but here I wi (...)
39I call this alternative form of scholarly editing “the third generation of editing”.9 The first generation of editing is the phase when texts aim to popularize the writer’s work in order to establish it among the general readership. In the case of Kafka, it was the time when Brod was editing his texts. The second generation is when scholarly editing produces a text as the basis of research, and in the case of Kafka, the time when KKA and FKA were produced. Third-generation editing is editing that can be performed on the assumption that texts produced in those two generations already exist. There are many possible forms of text produced in this third generation. The new type of scholarly editing that I am currently working on, with the aim of creating a base text for translation into Japanese, is just one of these possibilities.
- 10 After the submission of this article, another co-authored paper was published (see Myojo, Nito, and (...)
40Last but not least, my editing project is still in its infancy. I have invited young researchers to form a team to work on this project and we have already published four papers in Japanese on this project, including co-authored papers (see e.g., Myojo, Moribayashi, and Tomizuka 2019; Myojo, Nito, and Moribayashi 2021). There is still a long way to go.10
- 11 One example of this might be the Italian translation of Hölderlin by Luigi Reitani (Hölderlin 2001)
- 12 In Japan, a team of 11 researchers consisting of experts on Plato, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Pas (...)
41The reason why I am now writing about this project at such an early stage is that I am too keenly aware of the tremendous difficulty of achieving it. We will continue to strive towards our lofty ambition, but to be honest, in the face of the huge challenges ahead, we are afraid that it may end up as a thought experiment. Even so, I do not consider the thought experiment to be worthless. The dilemma of translating any scholarly edited “untranslatable” texts, such as Der Process, is not limited to Japan.11 I believe that creating a better framework and methodology for resolving these matters, in a way that can transcend national borders in an increasingly globalized world, is an urgent issue for us. Furthermore, I think that tackling this issue may be an opportunity to rejuvenate literary research, whose decline is currently regarded as a serious problem. Of course, no scholar can solve this task by herself. By raising this issue, I hope to invite the whole community of textual scholars to put their collective minds to the task.12