Kafka in New York

Thu, Dec 5, 2024, 4:30 PM–8:30 PM

Symposium on Franz Kafka, New York, and translation.
The Skylight Room (9100), CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave, NYC.
Free and open to all. Registration required.

Franz Kafka has long lived in the New York imagination, from the émigré publishers who championed his work in the 1940s, to the Greenwich Village intellectuals who read him through an anti-totalitarian lens during the Cold War, to the contemporary novelists, visual artists, playwrights, translators, and composers who have continued to return to and reinterpret his life and writings in recent years. And of course, “New Jork,” as he occasionally spelled it, figured prominently in Kafka’s imagination, particularly in the posthumously published novel Amerika. In the fall of 2024, Kafka’s literary manuscripts, diaries, and letters will be on view in New York for the first time, in the exhibition “Franz Kafka” at the Morgan Library & Museum. To celebrate this historic meeting of materials and readers, we invite all to a symposium on Franz Kafka, New York, and translation.

The symposium will consist of two parts: 1) selected presentations by CUNY and SUNY students who have chosen to respond, in a variety of media, to the themes or contents of the exhibition; and 2) a roundtable with recent translators of Kafka’s diaries, stories, and aphorisms.

Just as the ape Red Peter subverts the nature of an academic talk in “A Report to an Academy,” we invite graduate students from the CUNY Graduate Center and SUNY-New Paltz to respond to the themes and materials in the exhibition in new and subversive ways. Students will give 10-minute presentations of their responses at the CUNY Graduate Center. Presentations will be followed by a chance for discussion between the presenters and Q&A with the audience.

The translators Susan Bernofsky, Ross Benjamin, and Shelley Frisch will discuss Kafka and translation, moderated by scholar Michelle Woods. The panel will address the history of translations of Kafka’s work into English and other languages, specific features of his use of language, his response to translated works as a reader, and their own experiences in their recent translations of “The Metamorphosis,” the Diaries, the Aphorisms, and Reiner Stach’s definitive three-volume biography of Kafka.

This symposium at the CUNY Graduate Center is in celebration and conjunction with the exhibition “Franz Kafka” at the Morgan Library & Museum on view November 22, 2024 through April 13, 2025. This symposium is organized and co-sponsored by the Morgan Library & Museum, the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, the Goethe-Institut, and SUNY New Paltz.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays

The Skylight Room (9100) at The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave, New York City, United States