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silently rectified several minor inconsistencies, such as Kafka’s somewhat erratic spelling of
New York
(sometimes as one word, sometimes as two, sometimes linked by a hyphen) and
Occidental Hotel
(in the original the spelling of the former word is generally lowercase), while retaining the names of a tycoon’s son, who is called Mak and subsequently becomes Mack.
    The greatest challenge for me as a translator lay in endeavoring to re-create in English a style that would mimic such seemingly disparate traits of Kafka’s prose as its “provocatively ‘classic’ German,” 37 its meticulous attention to detail, its “flowing vivacity,” 38 and its modernist adherence to the restricted perspective of the main character. Although some critics who are native speakers of German have found Kafka’s style in
The Missing Person
jarring, 39 such criticism fails to acknowledge the startling modernity that is often hidden under its surface conservatism. There certainly is something very modern about the way he tells the story, switching back and forth between indirect interior monologue and an unobtrusive narrator, who occasionally winks to the reader over the hero’s head, thereby alerting us to the irony and humor beyond the awareness of the all-too-earnest young hero. 40

    Although Brod’s once widely accepted portrayal of Kafka’s works as religious allegories has not aged well, he may not have been too far off in claiming that this novel can yield a new interpretation of Kafka, and also—I would add—a new appreciation of neglected qualities in his writing.

    â€” MARK HARMAN
    Elizabethtown College
    NOTES
    1. Kafka,
Letters to Felice
(New York, 1973), p. 267. Here, as elsewhere, the cited translations have been modified whenever appropriate. Early versions of this preface were presented at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference and at Duke University.
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    2. Brod sought to make the purported salvation of the young hero the centerpiece of his argument that Kafka was a writer with an ultimately positive faith in man and in the possibility of divine grace. Many subsequent readers have rejected Brod’s sunny insistence that the hero’s “misfortune is kept in check by his child-like innocence and touchingly naïve purity.” See Max Brod, “Nachwort” in Kafka,
Die Romane
(Frankfurt, 1969), p. 254.
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    3. In a passage in his famous letter to his father (1919), Kafka explains that he gave Franklin’s autobiography to Hermann Kafka partly “because of the relationship between the author and his father” (p. 218), and elsewhere in the same letter he connects his own largely imaginary travels to his need to avoid spaces that his father already occupies: “Sometimes I imagine the map of the world spread out and you stretched diagonally across it. And I feel as if I could consider living in only those regions that either are not covered by you or are not within your reach” (p. 231).
The Basic Kafka
(New York, 1979). See also John Zilcosky,
Kafka’s Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing
(New York, 2003).
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    4. See
Amerika in der deutschen Literatur,
ed. Sigrid Bauschinger et al. (Stuttgart, 1975). The volume includes a characteristically insightful essay by Walter Sokel on
The Missing Person
. See also
Das Amerika der Autoren
, ed. Jochen Vogt and Alexander Stephan (Munich, 2005).
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    5. See Heinz Hillmann, who also examines the relationship between
The Missing Person
and Holitscher’s book, in “
Amerika:
Literature as a Problem-solving Game,” in
The Kafka Debate,
ed. Angel Flores (New York, 1977), pp. 279–97. Mark Harman, “Biography and Autobiography: Necessary Antagonists?” in
Journal of the Kafka Society
10, nos. 1–2 (1986), pp. 56–62; and Mark Harman, “Life into Art: Kafka’s Self-Stylization in the