Investigations of a Dog: And Other Creatures

by Franz Kafka, Michael Hofmann (Translator)

Overview

A masterful new translation by Michael Hofmann of some of Kafka's most fantastical and visionary short fiction

Animals, strange beasts, bureaucrats, businessmen, and nightmares populate this collection of stories by Franz Kafka. These matchless short works, all unpublished during Kafka’s lifetime, range from the gleeful dialogue between a cat and a mouse in “Little Fable” to the absurd humor of “Investigations of a Dog,” from the elaborate waking nightmare of “Building the Great Wall of China” to the creeping unease of “The Burrow,” where a nameless creature’s labyrinthine hiding place turns into a trap of fear and paranoia.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811226899
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	05/23/2017
Pages:	244
Sales rank:	513,151
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His major novels include The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika.

The award-winning translator Michael Hofmann has also translated works by Jenny Erpenbeck, Gert Hofmann, Franz Kafka, Heinrich von Kleist, and Joseph Roth for New Directions.

Date of Birth:

July 3, 1883

Date of Death:

June 3, 1924

Place of Birth:

Prague, Austria-Hungary

Place of Death:

Vienna, Austria

Education:

German elementary and secondary schools. Graduated from German Charles-Ferdinand University of Prague.

Editorial Reviews

"Anything by Kafka is worth reading again, especially in the hands of such a gifted translator as Hofmann."

The New York Times Book Review

"Compare this to any previous translation, and you’ll see, for a start, that there is no dilly-dallying with style; the prose is swift, direct and without obfuscation, as, one presumes, Kafka intended. He has cut through literary pretension to seek out the heart of Kafka’s work—the very ‘particles’ of his writing, as they have been called. His translation shows Kafka as a modern writer whose work was beyond that of anything written at that time. Mr. Hofmann, in his many excellent translations from the German, always makes brave choices."

What Goes Into a Great Translation? - The Guardian - Lee Rourke

"Hofmann’s translation is invaluable—it achieves what translations are supposedly unable to do: it is at once ‘loyal’ and ‘beautiful.’"

New Republic

"Hofmann and Kafka...provide one with rich intellectual companionship."

Summer Books 2017 - The Times Literary Supplement - Franz Kafka

"Kafka spoke for millions in their new unease; a century after his birth, he seems the last holy writer and the supreme fabulist of modern man’s cosmic predicament."

John Updike

"Of course I owe much to Kafka. I admire him, as I suppose all reasonable people do."

Jorge Luis Borges

"This New Directions release of Investigations of a Dog provides an opportunity to reconsider many of Kafka’s greatest stories in a new book, with beautiful cover design, and to reexamine how a brilliant mind performed under spiritually backbreaking circumstances."

Los Angeles Review of Books

★ 2017-03-07
A freshly translated collection of posthumously published work by the great master of existential angst and insectoidal transformation.Kafka did not live long, but he produced an impressive body of work, most of it written in the dark, quiet hours after midnight. Perhaps that accounts for its preternatural gloom, for no one ever cracks a smile in a Kafka story. As translator Hofmann puts it, just right, Kafka "devised for himself a life that was largely disagreeable, inflexible and inescapable, and tried to make it productive." He succeeded on all counts. Here, a number of odd themes emerge that perhaps connect to Kafka's penumbral ways: at times, for instance, the narrator holds some sort of night job that puts him in oblique contact with the bureaucrats and bosses who rule the day, as in "New Lamps," in which an official at company headquarters promises a safety-minded miner better oil lamps by which to work and instructs him to tell his fellow workers, "We won't rest until we've converted your mineshaft into a drawing room." Other stories illustrate Kafka's interest in allegories and fables, especially with an Asian coloring, as with "Building the Great Wall of China," a sketch that speaks of the power of empire to overwhelm the individual, even though the people "are where it ultimately draws its support." As with the title story, many of Kafka's stories involve animals. There, the dogs in question revel in a kind of "dogdom" or "dogness" hard won by evolving from their ancestors: "Our generation may be lost," the narrator tells us, "but it is more innocent than its predecessors." Just so, a character in another story has "taken a great interest in Elberfeld horses," that is, horses trained to think like humans—and it's a short step from there to Gregor Samsa. Beguiling, quirky stories perfectly in keeping with the rest of Kafka's work; often troubling but sometimes delightful.

Kirkus Reviews