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Chapter 23 - Borges and Kafka

from Part II - The Western Canon, the East, Contexts of Reception

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2020

By
Sarah Roger
Edited by
Robin Fiddian
Robin Fiddian
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

Borges was partial to Kafka’s short stories, reading forty one of them in the versions edited by Max Brod. On Kafka, he put forth a view that was largely biographical and religious. Borges saw the Book of Job as about the enigma of the universe, and he read Kafka’s stories as modern-day versions of Job: stories about stoicism, suffering, and the inscrutable character of God and the universe. Borges authored (or co-authored) translations of eighteen of Kafka’s texts, and the influence of Kafka is clearly visible in key stories of the 1940s - cf. ’The Library of Babel’, ’The Lottery in Babylon’, and ’The Secret Miracle’, the latter of these being about the relationship between man and God..

Keywords

parental authoritysubordinationhierarchiesinfinitestoicismZenoparadoxparable
Type
Chapter
Information
Jorge Luis Borges in Context , pp. 188 - 194
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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  • Borges and Kafka
  • Edited by Robin Fiddian, University of Oxford
  • Book: Jorge Luis Borges in Context
  • Online publication: 16 January 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108635981.025
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  • Borges and Kafka
  • Edited by Robin Fiddian, University of Oxford
  • Book: Jorge Luis Borges in Context
  • Online publication: 16 January 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108635981.025
Available formats
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  • Borges and Kafka
  • Edited by Robin Fiddian, University of Oxford
  • Book: Jorge Luis Borges in Context
  • Online publication: 16 January 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108635981.025
Available formats
×