Gustav Janouch
CONVERSATIONS WITH KAFKA
t
In
May 1921 I wrote a sonnet which was published by
Ludwig Winder in the Sunday supplement of the
Bohemia.
Kafka said on this occasion:
"You describe the poet as a great and wonderful man whose
feet are on the ground, while his head disappears in the clouds. Of
course, that is a perfectly ordinary image drawn within the intellec–
tual framework of lower-middle-class convention.
It
is an illusion
based on wish fulfillment, which has nothing in common with reality.
In
fact, the poet is always much smaller and weaker than the social
average. Therefore he feels the burden of earthly existence much
more intensely and strongly than other men. For him personally his
song is only a scream. Art for the artist is only suffering, through
which he releases himself for further suffering. He is not a giant,
but only a more or less brightly plumaged bird in the cage of his
existence."
"You too?" I asked.
"I am a quite impossible bird," said Franz Kafka. "I am a jack–
daw-a
kavka.
The coal merchant in Teinhof has one. Have you
seen it?"
"Yes, it flies about outside his shop."
"Yes, my relative is better off than I am.
It
is true, of course,
that its wings have been clipped.
As
for me, this was not in
any
1. Excerpts from a volume of notes and reminiscences, with an introduction by
Max Brod, that will be brought out in this country later this year by Frederick
A. Praeger, Inc. The translation from the Gennan is by Goronwy Rees. Janouch,
the author of the
Conversations,
was introduced to Kafka in 1920 by his father,
who was a colleague of Kafka's at the office of the Workmen's Accident In–
surance Institution in Prague. Kafka's words were recorded by Janouch
in
a
journal with an eye to publication. The manuscript was lost ior a time and
recovered after twenty years.
