Praise
Konundrum’s prescient vision of identity mediated, controlled, and distorted via the gaze of popular trend and opinion makes it relevant, if not required, reading. Readers will doubtlessly continue to identify with and apply their own multilayered re-contextualizations to Wortsman’s accessible rendition of Kafkaesque individual and collective self-obsession, paranoia, and unreality.
— Christine Cheon, The Brooklyn Rail
The translator Peter Wortsman’s excellent and bracing new selection of Kafka’s stories, Konundrum: Selected Prose of Franz Kafka . . . brings the author’s peculiar rhetoric to glorious life.
— Morten Høi Jensen, Los Angeles Review of Books
Many editions of Kafka's work exist. Worstman's edition should the be the basic Kafka edition for all readers. His translation is smooth and simple, like the language Kafka intended. Also, his selection from letters and diary entries preludes the essential stories, novellas, short novels, prose (for Kafka categories are not simple). Kafka basically lived to write literature and to become literature. Worstman honors such intention.
— Antonio Delgado, Goodreads review
Not only does the excellence of the translations in Peter Wortsman's Konundrum: Selected Prose of Franz Kafka delight, but he wisely decided to mix-and-match a number of Kafka’s texts, fiction and non-fiction. Not only are the oft-printed stories (“In the Penal Colony,” “The Hunger Artist”) here, but diary entires, parables, and excepts from letters. The result is a distinctive vision of the writer—not the “patron saint of neurotics” beloved by the 20th century, but a black comic absurdist who seems particularly apt for the 21st century.
— Bill Marx, The Arts Fuse
Wortsman’s selection of what he considers to be the very best of Kafka’s short prose, whether it’s a story, a letter, a journal entry, a parable, or an aphorism distinguishes Konundrum from the other new translations . . . In his afterword, Wortsman remarks on how fresh and alive Kafka’s prose still is today and I can only agree . . . Wortsman does an excellent job of maintaining the long, looping run-on sentences essential to German grammar, while at the same time keeping a rhythm and readability for the English speaking reader.
— Eric Andrew Newman, Cleaver Magazine
The translation is superb and it seems as though Kafka himself has written in English. This is a book you can dip into, read a couple of stories at a time. But be warned—it is addictive. It is also not conducive to a good night’s sleep—too many weird and wonderful fancies start to rattle around in your brain. Konundrum is a real literary treat and will hopefully bring the exquisite prose of Kafka the acclaim in the English speaking world that it fully deserves.
— Rosemary Standeven, Waterstones
Based on this collection, I’d like to see more of Wortsman’s work. His afterword was good as well, particularly when he compared retranslating a beloved old text to covering a classic tune . . . Kafka is the vegemite of high-brow literature. You either hate it, love it, or hate it and then realize you love it. Konundrum is an excellent starting place to try his stuff out.
— Peter Kelly, Super Novel
There is a sense in which Kafka's Jewish question (“What have I in common with Jews?”) has become everybody's question, Jewish alienation the template for all our doubts. What is Muslimness? What is femaleness? What is Polishness? These days we all find our anterior legs flailing before us. We're all insects, all Ungeziefer, now.
— Zadie Smith
The common experience of Kafka's readers is one of general and vague fascination, even in stories they fail to understand, a precise recollection of strange and seemingly absurd images and descriptions—until one day the hidden meaning reveals itself to them with the sudden evidence of a truth simple and incontestable.
— Hannah Arendt
Now Peter Wortsman . . . has given us a collection that delivers the unexpected joy of reading Kafka as if for the first time . . . It’s the perfect reacquaintance; before you know it, you have read twenty pages.
— Gary Kern, Amazon book review
I have always enjoyed the flow of language that is unique to Kafka. As with some of his longer works, these excerpts and short stories flow through your mind like a neighborhood creek, little ripples here and there and a first sense of destination . . . All were beautifully written and translated to maintain that Kafka flow. Thank you, Peter Wortsman, for that.
— Bonnye Reed, Goodreads review
Composed of short, black comic parables, fables, fairy tales, and reflections, Konundrum also includes classic stories like "In the Penal Colony," Kafka's prescient foreshadowing of the nightmare of the twentieth century, refreshing the writer's mythic storytelling powers for a new generation of readers.
— Jewish Book Council
Wortsman’s Konundrum stands out among Kafka collections for its editorial practices, even more than for its translation choices . . . His attention to the shorter short works reveals a turn that appreciation seems currently to be taking: if Kafka’s novels dominated the 20th century, space and desire may exist now for a different, shorter Kafka, the one of Konundrum . . . Wortsman’s collection has much to offer the Kafka scholar as well as a first-time Kafka reader.
— Saskia Elizabeth Ziolkowski, Public Books
Extras
Franz Kafka has been notoriously difficult to translate. Here’s Susan Bernofsky in The New Yorker on the challenges of translating just The Metamorphosis, and Open Culture has posted some of Vladimir Nabokov’s tweaks to the Muir translation.
Read an interview between Peter Wortsman and The Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx here about Konundrum and the timelessness of Kafka.
Listen to an interview between Peter Wortsman and Leonard Schwartz on his radio show “Cross-Cultural Poetics” here.
Read Peter Wortsman’s essay about his love affair with Vienna in the The Paris Review.