Kafkaesque: From Jorge Luis Borges to Primo Levi, Ten Writers Who Translated Kafka and Transformed Twentieth-Century Literature - Hardcover

Hruska, Maļa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0063486245 ISBN 13: 9780063486249

Publisher: Ecco, 2026

Synopsis

A lively inquiry into a literary genius, the translators who immortalized him, and what it means to cultivate a rich inner life in turbulent times

"What happens to a writer's work when it is translated–specifically, what happens if his name is Franz Kafka?"

In Kafkaesque, Maļa Hruska traces the strange, shape-shifting legacy of one of literature’s most elusive figures—not through traditional biography but through the lives of his earliest and most influential translators. With rigor and élan, she shows us how our understanding of Kafka is inevitably filtered through these voices, many of whom were, or would become, major writers and thinkers in their own right.

Jorge Luis Borges rendered Kafka into Spanish, recognizing in him a fellow architect of the infinite. Primo Levi used the German he acquired in a concentration camp to bring The Trial into Italian despite the “psychoanalytic repulsion” he felt toward Kafka. Bruno Schulz published his Polish edition of the same novel before being shot by a Nazi officer. Vladimir Nabokov annotated The Metamorphosis in exile, having undergone his own transformation–from native to foreigner. Milena Jesenskį, Kafka’s great love, translated him into Czech, a language he was both surrounded by and estranged from.

What emerges across these essays isn’t just a portrait of a legendary writer and his translators but also a portrait of the twentieth century itself—its fractures and displacements, its aesthetic revolutions, its ethical crises. Part cultural history, part group biography, Kafkaesque is a dazzling meditation on language, identity, and the irreducible strangeness of reading and being read.

About this title

About the Author

Born to a Czech-French family in 1991, Maļa Hruska was raised in Germany and now lives in London, working in publishing as the head of legal at the Wylie Agency. She’s fluent in Czech, French, German, and English. Kafkaesque is her first book.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0063486245
• ISBN 13: 9780063486249
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272