Period photograph of Prague's Old Town Square looking toward the Týn Church, cobblestones wet, few pedestrians, overcast sky

Prague · the whole life inside one district

Seven addresses, walkable in an afternoon

Birth, school, the family flats, the office, the small rented house he wrote in — nearly all of it within a few hundred metres of one square. This archive is filed the way the life was: by place.

Photo: Miloš Steklý / Pexels

The route · five stops · 25 articles

Start anywhere on the walk

Each section takes an address as its starting point and works outward from what happened there.

STOP 01 Prague Staroměstské náměstí — Old Town Square — the family flats, the school, the shop. 5 articles STOP 02 The Work Zlatá ulička, No. 22 — The rented room where most of Ein Landarzt was written. 6 articles STOP 03 The Letters Na Poříčí 7 — The insurance institute, and the desk the letters were written from. 5 articles STOP 04 Translating Kafka Kurt Wolff Verlag, Leipzig — Where the books were printed, and where English begins. 4 articles STOP 05 Afterlives The papers, after 1924 — Brod, the war, the courts, the archives. 5 articles

The lead · Translating Kafka

One Sentence, Four English Versions

Four translators face the same German sentence and come back with four different Gregor Samsas.

By the Kafka Garden editorsTranslating Kafka6 min read

Read the comparison

Endpapers

The leaves at the front and back of a bound book

Presses, translators' societies, and reading rooms whose shelves carry the same restless marginalia this archive has spent years tracing.

Front endpaper

Back endpaper · first leaf

Back endpaper · second leaf

Recently added · across the archive

New on the shelf

The Work The Trial Was Never Finished Examines what it means to read a novel that Kafka left without a final order — which chapters go where, and what the incompleteness does to Josef K.'s story. By the Kafka Garden editors5 min read

Prague Old Town Square: The City He Walked Through Every Day Describes the geography of central Prague that Kafka moved through — from family apartments to the insurance office to the cafés where the writers met — using contemporary accounts and his own diary entries. By the Kafka Garden editors7 min read

Afterlives Burn Everything: The Instruction and What Happened to It A careful account of Kafka's documented requests that his unpublished work be destroyed — what he wrote, to whom, when — and the documented sequence by which Brod instead prepared them for publication. By the Kafka Garden editors4 min read

Translating Kafka The Word Kafka Used Was Not 'Insect' Examines the German Ungeziefer — an unclean animal unfit for sacrifice, without a single English equivalent — and why every translation of Die Verwandlung is forced to make a decision Kafka himself refused to make. By the Kafka Garden editors2 min read

The Letters The Letter His Father Never Received Looks at the 'Brief an den Vater' — never sent, never seen by Hermann Kafka — as a text with its own formal properties, neither pure confession nor pure fiction. By the Kafka Garden editors3 min read

Prague The City He Kept Trying to Leave Traces Kafka's repeated plans to move — Berlin, Palestine, elsewhere — against the fact of his staying, using the letters and diaries to show the tension without resolving it into a single explanation. By the Kafka Garden editors2 min read

Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt.

Working English gloss, not a published translation: when Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself in his bed transformed into a monstrous Ungeziefer.
Franz Kafka, Die Verwandlung, opening sentence · Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1915