#kafka letters

[frenchnewwaves]

“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones.”

-Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

[lttledog]

Letter to Oskar Pollak, written by Franz Kafka, 27 January 1904.

[amtskind]

franz kafka and the nameless cat

a long time ago i stumbled upon this 12-year old blog-entry, which tells the story about kafka's mouse-plague and his encounter with a cat. so i decided to translate it into english and added the original german letters mentioned after the cut:

As Franz Kafka himself confessed in a letter to Felix Weltsch on November 15, 1917, he had "always secretly hated cats". However, when he stayed with his sister for a vacation in the Bohemian village of Zürau in September of that year, he was so plagued by mice in his room that he felt compelled to take the house cat into his room, which actually gave him peace and quiet. Although he couldn't stand it when the cat jumped on his lap while he was writing, he had to admit in a letter to Max Brod that it was "an extremely good, childlike animal". The cat, whose name he doesn't mention, was not house-trained at first. Kafka described in detail the calamity that developed for him as a result:

"So how does the cat do it? It chooses a place that is dark, for example, which proves its attachment to me. Seen from the human side, this place happens to be the inside of my slipper."

Kafka consoled himself with the following insight:

"Cats drive away mice by their mere presence, perhaps even by their mere filth, which is why they are not to be entirely despised."

Kafka slowly got used to the cat, he even "carried it home every evening across the Ringplatz 'warm in his arms'". At the beginning of December, he proudly and happily reported to his friend Max Brod on the results of his educational efforts in terms of hygiene:

"It's wonderful when you've come to an agreement with an animal. Like a well-behaved child, it goes to the box in the evening after it has had its milk, climbs in, humps itself because the box is too small, and does what it has to do."

And he wrote to another friend that he had "declaimed your poem to my little sleeping cat". So Kafka, who hated cats, had slowly become accustomed to them and had probably grown fond of them by the time he left Zürau in the spring of 1918. Perhaps Kafka had this nameless cat in mind when he wrote his only literary text about a cat two years later: "A Little Fable":

"Alas", said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I am running into." "You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.

[hiyutekivigil]

[franz kafka] to max brod, end of july 1922

[maihonhassan]

When Kafka Wrote:

"My sole wish is to lay my head in your lap, feel your hand on my head, and stay that way through all eternity."

And When Faiz Said:

"Kabhi to shab sar-e-kakul se mushk-bar chale"

[virgin-martyr]

It occurs to me that I really can't remember your face in any precise detail. Only the way you walked away through the tables in the cafe, your figure, your dress, that I still see.

Franz Kafka in a letter to Frau Milena, April 1920

[vampir3-jack]

(how it always goes.)

[m1ssnovember]

I met the humans of my life today

"This summer, somewhere in June, July you’ll be travelling around the country, around the lakes. Will you be able to name then? Will you be able to tell the number of tears in them. Do you know all mine, fill all the waters you’ll be passing. Do you then know that the names of the lakes on the maps aren’t really their names. The dates where I’ve had to bid you farewell a longer time are with waves, what they respond to. The eye contact that I never held, despite you being the prettiest to see, look for it in the water’s reflection."

[lunamonchtuna]

— Franz Kafka, from Letters to Milena (via lumamonchtuna)

[dailykafka]

— October 11, 1916 / Letters to Felice

[flowerytale]

Franz Kafka, from Letters to Felice

[metamorphesque]

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. 

Carl Jung, “Memories, Dreams, Reflections”

I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. 

Franz Kafka, “Letters to Milena”

[mournfulroses]

Franz Kafka, referring to Milena Jesenská in a letter to Max Brod featured in "Kafka: The Tremendous World I Have Inside my Head,"

[hiyutekivigil]

[franz kafka] to max brod, october 25, 1923

[littlegaywolf]

afterall, feeling understood is the greatest form of love.

[virgin-martyr]

In any case the first thing is to lie down in a garden and extract as much sweetness as possible from the ailment, especially if it's not a genuine disease. There's a lot of sweetness in that.

Franz Kafka in a letter to Frau Milena, April 1920