Investigations of a Dog: And Other Creatures [Paperback]

Animals,strange beasts, bureaucrats, businessmen, and nightmares populate thiscollection of stories by Franz Kafka. These matchless short works, allunpublished during Kafkas lifetime, range from the gleeful dialogue between acat and a mouse in Little Fable to the absurd humor of Investigations of aDog, from the elaborate waking nightmare of Building the Great Wall of Chinato the creeping unease of The Burrow, where a nameless creatureslabyrinthine hiding place turns into a trap of fear and paranoia.This New Directions release of Investigations of a Dog provides an opportunity to reconsider many of Kafkas greatest stories in a new book, with beautiful cover design, and to reexamine how a brilliant mind performed under spiritually backbreaking circumstances.Hofmannstranslation is invaluableit achieves what translations are supposedly unableto do: it is at once loyal and beautiful.Compare this to any previous translation, and youll see, for a start,that there is no dilly-dallying with style; the prose is swift, directand without obfuscation, as, one presumes, Kafka intended. He has cutthrough literary pretension to seek out the heart of Kafkas workthevery particles of his writing, as they have been called. Histranslation shows Kafka as a modern writer whose work was beyond that ofanything written at that time. Mr. Hofmann, in his many excellenttranslations from the German, always makes brave choices.Anythingby Kafka is worth reading again, especially in the hands of such a giftedtranslator as Hofmann.Hofmann and Kafka...provide one with rich intellectual companionship.Kafkaspoke for millions in their new unease; a century after his birth, he seems thelast holy writer and the supreme fabulist of modern mans cosmic predicament.Ofcourse I owe much to Kafka. I admire him, as I suppose all reasonable peopledo.Amasterful new translation by Michael Hofmann of some of Kafka's most fantasticaland visionary short fiction