Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared: The New Translation by Michael Hofmann

Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared: The New Translation by Michael Hofmann by Franz Kafka. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780811215138.

Newly restored to the original text: Franz Kafkas Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared at last has the translator it deserves. Michael Hofmanns startlingly visceral and immediate translation revives Kafkas 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 books original "ending."