5. "In the Penal Colony" by Franz Kafka: An elaborate torture and execution device that carves a sentence into a prisoners skin before death is at the center of this famous short story by Kafka.
Text*
Audio version. Recommended.
Cliff notes
I knew that there would come to be a few stories that I fail to grasp (or 'like' is the perhaps the better word), and this is the first of them. This is almost a novella length short story, which is a big jump from previous entries in the list. And for the first time, I felt like I was trying to force myself to read, but like I will mention later, I did find a solution. In fact it may just be reader fatigue, rather then the story it self.
It brought to the fore the issue of translation for the first time. Take the characters' names for example. I say names, but this story names no one, only the positions they play. In the original German, the Explorer (as referred to in the printed publication) is referred to as "der Forschungsreisender,"which is closer in translation to traveler/researcher/voyageror simply as "der Reisende", which is what Ian Johnston, went with in the free translation above. Ambiguous German terms, the German style of placing verbs at the end of sentences, and even lengthy sentences in some of his works are difficult to
translate into English.
My issue with the story is it's deadpan narrative. I tried getting into it a few times, before I sought out an audio version, to get how it was to be read. And I lucked out, in that Librivox had Yearsley, who was dead on with his narrative. I enjoyed the story a lot more.
The criticism that has followed this popular Kafka story, is to be honest, all of over the place. The more I looked, the more obtuse it got. As a general rule of thumb, the more solutions and theories there are (like a cure for hiccups), the less likely each is to be true.
One thing that most of them are in agreement with, as am I, is the allegory of religion; specifically, between old and new testament. For me specifically, I notice the clash between polar cultures. I must admit, I was quite impervious to the description of torture, and gruesome medieval-esque torture. Either my imagination fails me, or the Internet and the modern age has desensitised me to such things.
I actually moved on much to much quickly on the things that interested me, and led me to wiki-jumping for an afternoon or two.
Penal Colonies, which led me to read up on deporting convicts by the British Empire to the USA, and Australia; which then led me to read up on
Guantanamo Bay.
I was going to link three or four crits and essays, but in the end, I've decided to leave it up to you to see how this story affects you.
*This one breaks the story up into pages. The original webpage is just a huge
10,000+ wall of text, which may have made things harder to digest. And this is a better font. Props to Ian Johnston for the free translation, and Peter Yearsley, for reading it like it was supposed to be read. If I ever meet you, then a drink or two perhaps, on me.
Five down. 45 to go.
The girls tend to not want to get wet either. Might make for some cool nature shots. My lens is weather sealed, but the camera isn't. Maybe I can get a plastic bag to wrap around it.
