I. Landstreicher and Landvermesser
K. arrives in the village at night. He crosses a wooden bridge and finds an inn to spend the night. He carries with him a small backpack and a knotty wooden walking stick. His appearance is ragged.
A man named Schwarzer discovers K. asleep on a straw mattress on the floor of the inn’s pub. This is K.’s first encounter with the castle authorities, even if the relationship between Schwarzer and the castle is far from clear. After a short discussion with K. about the protocol required of strangers arriving in the village, Schwarzer loses his temper and cries out to K. amid the surrounding onlookers, “The manners of a tramp … I demand respect for the count’s authorities.”
“Enough of this farce,” K. responds to Schwarzer, “… otherwise be advised that I am the landsurveyor summoned by the count.”
Schwarzer is skeptical of K.’s announcement and calls the central office to inquire about the truthfulness of K.’s claim. An official in the office, Mr. Fritz, tells Schwarzer he needs to ask around. When he calls back, Fritz contradicts K.’s assertion, which prompts Schwarzer to shout, “As I said … there’s no trace of a landsurveyor, a common lying tramp, probably something worse.”
K. pulls his blanket over himself in a feeble attempt to hide. Just when his plight seems impossibly bleak, the phone rings again and Schwarzer is informed that, indeed, the castle authorities have recognized K. as surveyor.
This is the opening scene of Franz Kafka’s The Castle. In these first pages one of the novel’s core problems is dramatized: the identity of the character K. The English “tramp” doesn’t capture either the humor and playfulness in the scene or the stakes of Schwarzer’s accusation. The German term Kafka uses is Landstreicher, which can be translated as tramp, vagabond, or vagrant. The German term for landsurveyor is Landvermesser.
Is K. a Landstreicher or a Landvermesser? Or is he both? Or neither? Much depends on the reader’s decision, though there is nothing to indicate the “correct” choice.
In just about every way the Landstreicher and Landvermesser are opposite figures. The Landstreicher stands beyond civilization, on the edges of culture. He recognizes no authority. He violates the sanctity of private property — he trespasses. The Landstreicher is stateless, nomadic, anarchic, and his presence indicates chaos and disorder — a fundamental challenge to social and political structures. This is why Landstreicherei (vagabondage) was criminalized by law and anathematized by custom. Throughout central Europe, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the German Empire, in the post-WWI Austrian state, in Weimar and Nazi Germany, and so on, the Landstreicher, a wandering man who lacked professional expertise, who failed to hold the required identity papers, who evaded work, who idled, who begged for money, food, and shelter, was a criminal. Punishments for Landstreicherei differed in places and over time, but the main ways of dealing with these vagabonds were by jailing them, sending them to workhouses for periods of forced labor, or by expelling them from a town or village back onto the country roads, the Landstrassen.
The figure of the Landvermesser is in most respects the inverse of the vagabond. He represents civilization. He applies his expertise to establish clear order. He measures. He draws. He maps. He creates boundaries. He clarifies relationships. He codifies private property ownership. He is an agent of bureaucratic rule. Without the Landvermesser, there is no state.
There is one way in which the Landstreicher is similar to the Landvermesser: both pose a threat to the village’s status quo. The arrival of either a Landstreicher or a Landvermesser can be read as a social, cultural, and even a political crisis, and by imagining K. combining Landstreicher and Landvermesser into a composite threat, one both anarchic and statist or imperious, the reader might glimpse the profound challenge K. represents to the existing order, the existing world. K. is Krise (crisis).
II. The Map Room
I was at a crossroads when the opportunity arose in 2005 to co-translate Das Schloss into English for a small Prague-based publisher, which wanted to sell copies of the book throughout the city to exploit the Czech capital’s large Kafka-oriented tourist market. It seemed like a strange and rather pointless thing to do (there were excellent translations available), but I’d been deeply immersed in Kafka’s texts, especially The Castle, for years by that point and couldn’t pass up the offer.
I worked on The Castle with Jon Calame, now a close friend of mine — at the beginning of the process a stranger. It is a peculiar aspect of our friendship that it first took root and then grew out of the translation process. The first months of work were solitary. I was responsible for transmuting the German text into the English rough draft. Some days were easier, and I could glide along the sentences without much trouble. Other days were torturous. Words, phrases, and sentences evaded me. They resisted me. They were puzzles I couldn’t solve but had to solve to move on. Imperfection — the translation process became a process of reconciling with imperfection.
After I completed the initial draft of the translation, Jon and I met at night in his wife’s art studio to work through the text line by line. The studio was inside a defunct industrial building in Portland, Maine, called The Portland Company. At its nineteenth-century height, The Portland Company built machines: locomotive engines, motors for warships used in the Civil War, narrow-gauge railway cars. The part of the structure occupied by the studio was called the “map room” — a fitting space in which to seek orientation in text, in life.
Jon and I would convene around eight in the evening and work until two or three in the morning. I’d be up early the next day, preparing the text for the next session by cross-checking my draft against the German. I had a monotonous day job at the time and spent my lunch breaks sleeping under the desk in my cubicle. The pre-dawn cross-checking might have been a tedious and exhausting process, but it created the perfect juxtaposition to the magical and ecstatic nighttime sessions with Jon. Our discussions fluctuated from the hyper-specific to the universal, from the mundane to the mystical.
Like a medieval religious scholar with the Biblical text, by the end of the translation process I could recite The Castle by heart — every word, every line, and behind these words and lines, the myriad other options Jon and I had considered and discussed, and beyond those options, the German original. One might think that such an intimate relationship with a novel would bring the translator closer to the novel’s meaning, its essence. The opposite occurred. Interpretive paths took unexpected detours or ran into dead ends. Rather than coming together like a puzzle, The Castle underwent a process of disintegration, the fortress on the hill transforming into an agglomeration of ruins.
Instead of folding into meaning, The Castle opened itself to the encounter — and to encounter Kafka’s novel, for me, meant erasing boundaries between my fictional world and Kafka’s. It meant trespassing.
III. Cain
“I believed,” Cain said to his brother Abel, “that the world was created through goodness, but I see that good deeds bear no fruit. God rules the world with arbitrary power, else why had He respect unto thy offering, and not unto mine also?”
The Book of Moonlight
Years ago, while living alone in Berlin, I discovered a reference to a work called The Book of Moonlight in an autobiographical text by the social theorist Nathan Gutman. Gutman, a Jewish intellectual in Berlin in the 1930s — and a member of various radical anarchist associations — was incarcerated in 1935 by Nazi authorities in the city’s Charité Hospital on grounds that he had schizophrenia of the hereditary type (the real reason, of course, was his combination of religious and political affiliations). As his case proceeded through the Hereditary Health Court, Gutman shared a room with a young man named Isaac Friedl, who’d arrived in Berlin from a small town on the outskirts of Kyiv just before a wave of deadly pogroms wiped out his family, killing his parents, sister, and fiancée — the details of which were catalogued, Gutman wrote, by an international Red Cross investigation team.
Friedl, a poet, spent much of the daylight hours during those months with Gutman standing on top of his desk or chair writing something in faint pencil on the ceiling. When Gutman asked him what it was he was writing there, Friedl told him it was an exact letter-for-letter copy of a work he’d recently acquired and memorized while living in an Auguststrasse boarding house, a work called The Book of Moonlight. Try as he might, Gutman could make out no sentences, words, or even letters. He could barely detect a mark. “Not to worry,” Friedl told him. “When I’m finished, when the last word is written and final period is set in place, everything will become visible, but only in the darkest hours of night, only as the letters fill with the blue-green luminescence sent down to the world by the breath of God.”
It was a strange story, a puzzling story. My attempts to find the records of Gutman’s and Friedl’s cases were only partially successful. I found Gutman’s file in the Bundesarchiv, Case #277 of the Hereditary Health Court. Gutman, the file confirmed, was sentenced to mandatory sterilization to prevent “further pollution of the German blood.” He was released after the procedure on November 1, 1937. Friedl’s file could not be located, and I was therefore unable to corroborate Gutman’s claim that the young man died of sepsis two months before Gutman’s procedure.
Some years later, again digging around in my rather aimless research style, I happened upon a translation of the Book of Ordinances of the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam. The text contained the edict of excommunication for the philosopher Spinoza, issued on July 27, 1656. To my surprise, on the previous day, July 26, the community’s governing body promulgated an even harsher curse against a man named Jacob Rodriga for circulating a heretical book called O Livro do Luar — The Book of Moonlight. O Livro do Luar, I discovered, was itself a reproduction of a collection of heterodox religious texts — far from exclusively Jewish — compiled in Florence by the great Renaissance scribes the brothers Ibn Zvi. According to Yohanan Alemanno, kabbalist teacher of Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, many of these texts centered on Jacob’s dream of the ladder, some describing the frightful scene of a human army climbing the ladder and laying waste to the heavens, killing God’s legion of angels, and forcing God to withdraw into distant regions of the divine space, where reaching Him through prayer or otherwise had become impossible. The Ibn Zvis’ bound manuscript was sold to the Vatican Library, where it might still exist today.
It was fifteen years after I first read Gutman’s story that I discovered, while reading about Sy Kirschbaum’s translation of Jan Horák’s Blue, Red, Gray, that a man named Sidney Keter had completed a translation of The Book of Moonlight into English and had published it with the Workmen’s Circle publishing house in New York. To my mind, there were two possible ways Keter could have obtained the text. Either he copied it from the ceiling of the Charité Hospital’s Nervenklinik in Berlin — his dates at the Auguststrasse boarding house overlap with Friedl’s stay — or he got it from the book dealer Avram Daud. The latter seems more plausible, as the title The Book of Moonlight appears on a January 1937 list of rare books purchased from Daud by the British collector Benjamin Stein, though the volume is nowhere to be found among the works of the famous Stein Collection bequeathed to the Bodleian Library. Keter could have stolen it from Daud in Berlin as the bookseller was en route from Baghdad to London.
This brings me to Julia Negri, a historian formerly at the University of Rome. While working on my book Thin Rising Vapors, which is a kind of Cain and Abel story, I came across her March 2013 article entitled “Cain’s Innocence: the History of a Heretical Accusation against God” in the academic journal Religion. In the article, Negri talks at length about The Book of Moonlight, which, she writes, contains hundreds of pieces, spanning centuries, related to the biblical figure of Cain. These pieces elaborate on and often refute or contradict the common understanding of the story. The Book of Moonlight, she relates in a long opening footnote, did not originate in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, as was previously thought; rather it was conveyed by Jacob and Julia Rodriga from Girona to Modena in the sixteenth century, before the couple carried the book with them on their journey to Prague. There, according to Julia’s footnote, the Rodrigas deposited the book in the famous library of the Strahov Monastery. The Strahov’s chief librarian deemed the book unfit for shelving, and it was stored in a plain wooden crate in the cellar. This is where, centuries later, Julia writes, a translator named Sy Kirschbaum discovered it. Her article is dedicated to him.
There’s one story Kirschbaum found in the cellar of the Strahov monastery that interests me most, one left out of The Book of Moonlight, a story that even Julia Negri never read. It exists as a palimpsest, as faint, ghostly marks on vellum sheets over which an early illuminated Czech version of Genesis had been written. It tells of Cain emerging from a country road. He crosses a wooden bridge and enters a village called Z. The story describes Cain attempting to find an inn by the bridge to spend the night. It tells of a castle on the hill above him: Vom Schossberg war nichts zu sehn, Nebel and Finsternis umgaben ihn, auch nicht der schwächste Lichtshein deutete das grosse Schloss an. In this piece, Cain, or Kain as it is written, is called not by his full name but by his initial. Kain is K.
IV. The Impossibility of Crows
Years before Sy Kirschbaum found his way into Kafka’s village, he spent a spring and summer as a patient at a Czech sanatorium in the provinces. I’m not aware of the precise reason why Sy went to the clinic, though I believe it had to do with the combination of physical and mental exhaustion Sy faced after spending seventeen years translating one of the preeminent works of Czech Cold War dissident literature, Jan Horák’s Blue, Red, Gray. After some weeks, the clinic’s doctor, Dr. L. Hruška, known throughout Europe for his work with prominent artists, writers, and intellectuals, concluded that the core issue was not generalized fatigue. He told Kirschbaum that the boundaries of this selfhood had eroded, that his ego was on the verge of collapse.
The erosion began, Hruška told him, when the line between him and Horák started to blur. At the beginning of the translation process, Hruška said, there had been an author and there had been a translator, but after a certain number of years, and more acutely when Horák began leaving Prague for long periods for treatment at a Moravian alcohol detox center, the figure of the author and the figure of the translator started to merge. At the end of the translation process, the situation had grown acute. Horák had vanished; his novel was gone; and the central characters — foremost the painter Joseph Kostel — had migrated to Sy’s elaborate translator’s preface, a text called First, the Raven.
Among Hruška’s notes in the Kirschbaum file is a story Sy purportedly told the doctor about a night in Berlin when another one of the doctor’s patients, an American writer named Daniel Cohen, took Kirschbaum to the house on Grunewaldstrasse where Franz Kafka had lived with Dora Diamant in 1923. In the building’s basement, Sy told Hruška, they met a man named Dr. Kaesbohrer, an alter ego Kafka had abandoned when he was forced to leave Berlin and seek treatment for his deteriorating tuberculosis. Kaesbohrer, a chemist, had been working since the 1920s on a single formula: the formula expressing relationship between two antagonistic mazelike systems, two burrows, that wove around each other but never met — or met only through the medium of sound. Kaesbohrer’s completion of the formula, Sy said to Hruška, allowed him to engineer a substance, which, when ingested, would “blend the structures,” allowing that which was parallel and separate to become — while each maintained its hermetic integrity — a single system. In other words, this “antidote,” as Kaesbohrer called it, made manifest, made real, a fundamental paradox of existence — how time and space could exist simultaneously on multiple, independent tracks and yet still be part of the same physical universe. That night with Cohen, Sy Kirschbaum poured the chemist’s cloudy yellow liquid down his throat.
I couldn’t follow Sy to the village of Z., where he discovered the shell of Kafka’s abandoned world. I made it only as far as the resort town of Špindlerův Mlýn, arriving a day or two after him. To get from Špindlerův Mlýn to Z. would have required a long walk over the ridge into a neighboring valley, and unlike Sy I discovered no signpost to indicate the way. By the time I arrived in the small resort town, Sy’s footprints were covered by newly fallen snow.
It was February, and I spent my days walking through the deep snow, cross-country skiing, and sledding down the hill behind the Hotel Koruna, where I had a room on the top floor. The noise in the hotel was unbearable during the daytime and evenings. The smell of burnt frying oil drifted from the restaurant’s kitchen and hung in the air. The carpets along the hallways were frayed and emanated a faint but unmistakable scent of mold. When night fell and the vacationing children were asleep, when all was finally quiet, I would open my window and let in the biting mountain air. I sat at the writing desk. I took out my notebook and mechanical pencil. I noted the following phrases:
alone in Sp.on a deserted pathon which one constantly slips in the snow in the darka pointless pathwithout an earthly destinationTo the bridge?Why there?Not once have I reached it
Seth Rogoff is the author of five books, most recently The Kirschbaum Lectures, from Sagging Meniscus Press, and The Castle from FC2.
