Письмо из Цурау

"PS – In Zürau Kafka wrote many letters to friends in Prague, and there he wrote the famous Zürau Aphorisms."

The above postscript is a translation from Marina Eskina's original poem. This poem takes inspiration from those aphorisms, from Franz Kafka's letters to Felice Bauer, and from his fictional works. As a deep admirer of Kafka's work, from which I myself have taken inspiration, I was interested in the poem. Particular difficulties include finding rhymes that still fit close to the original meaning, translating expressions such as "сниться к чему-то" and "не станет житья от кого-то". At first, such expressions appeared simple to translate. The difficulty lay in matching them to the overall feel of the poem. For example, the word "бессилие" would usually have an English translation of "weakness" (the word is literally "without power"). After discussing this word with the author, I learned that Eskina took it from the Russian translation of the Letters to Felice. I found the word in the Russian translation, located that same letter in Kafka's original German text and discovered that Kafka used the German word "Ohnmacht", almost literally the same kind of compound word as "бессилие". Kafka uses the word with reservation to describe a feeling that is crippling for him, what we would likely call crippling depression these days. But because of the medical sense of that word, I chose "despair" as a still contemporary word with a history of crippling those who speak of it when describing their conditions. This detective work was, of course, incredibly invigorating. I believe I learned more about the poem (and about the author) in the process.