Book Description
5 outstanding selections from noble tradition: Heinrich von Kleist's "The Earthquake in Chile," E. T. A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman," Arthur Schnitzler's "Lieutenant Gustl," Thomas Mann's "Tristan," and Franz Kafka's "The Judgment." For each selection the editor has supplied complete literal English translations on facing pages. Foreword. Introduction to each story.
Customer Reviews:
A WONDERFUL COLLECTION OF IMPORTANT GERMAN SHORT STORIES.......2006-07-10
I am a retired Internist. In college, I was privileged to Major in both Chemistry and German Literature. Now, after so many years, I find myself again reading familiar stories in the original German, without the need of a large and clumsy German-English Dictionary to spoil the flow of the prose. The works in this slim volume are all masterpieces, and, for me, old and much beloved friends. I am grateful for the dual-language series which brings me such tremendous pleasure.
Quiter awful.......2006-01-20
I am a german III student,so I am quite proficient in german. I found this book absolutely horrid. The translation was helpful yes, but the stories themselves were grotesque. After reading two of the stories I gave up trying to read a decent story. This book is best used a table decoration rather than reading.
OK study at a German 3 or higher level.......2004-12-04
This book provides five short stories, with English and German versions provided side-by-side: German on the left hand side, English on the right. This can definitely save time with a dictionary (but can also be a crutch - so watch out and discipline yourself). The stories are listed in the product description.
I'm assuming that you will be reading this to help study German. After about two years of a language you should be able to read a book on your own (slowly but surely). But many books will still be too complex. These are borderline. The stories here are at a level that could be read during a German 3 class, or between classes to maintain and build skills. I don't recommend this book during a German 1 or 2 class. Instead try Graded German Reader by Cossgrove during German 1. (It is expensive, but is very good if you know almost no German.) At a German 2 level move onto comic books like Tintin and Asterix, which have more complex grammar but use pictures to reinforce. Oh and by the way try replacing .com with .de on large websites for the German version. (This works on Amazon!) Especially look for fashion pages and "light" reading. You can understand more than you think!
Basically if you can already read moderately complex German then this is an economic book to read through. If you can't already pick up a book and read through it then this is not for you. However to get a book at your level ask advice from a German instructor. Chances are they will have had to study German, including literature, in college and will be familiar with the authors here. They can recommend authors to you and tell you if this is over your level. This is a book that you will never "outgrow", which means you have to be pretty skilled already to read it.
(And if you are German and trying to learn English, then you should be fine. Afterall you read this review;-)
Teach yourself German.......2002-02-13
For the avid self-teacher, this book will be very useful. Textbooks give you sentences here and there that are translated, and that's very useful. However, having entire stories translated for you is an even better way to learn a language. You have sentence after sentence of correct grammar and vocabulary. You can see how a proper sentence is constructed time and time again.
The translation looks like this: German on the left page, English on the right page. The five stories are by some of German's most famous writers...Hoffmann, Kafka, Kleist, Mann, and Schnitzler.
Amazon.com
My Dog Tulip is the ultimate bitch session--in the canine sense of the phrase, of course. In 1947, J.R. Ackerley rescued an 18-month-old German shepherd, and from the start her every look and move were to undo him. "Tulip never let me down. She is nothing if not consistent. She knows where to draw the line, and it is always in the same place, a circle around us both. Indeed, she is a good girl, but--and this is the point--she would not care for it to be generally known." As he anatomizes her from head to toe with the awe-struck precision of a medieval courtier, Ackerley instantly turns us into Tulipomanes. Alas, many of the mere mortals she encounters feel differently, for there are indeed two Tulips. One is highly strung but heroic, flirtatious but true. The other is a four-legged rejoinder to authority: a biter, a barker, and a dab hand at defecating her way around London. Not that any of these are her fault. "You're the trouble," Tulip's one good vet tells Ackerley as she banishes him from the surgery. "She's in love with you, that's obvious. And so life's full of worries for her."
In many ways this 1956 memoir is an intimate saga of human idealism and doggish realism. Or is it the other way around? In any case, this odd couple undertakes a series of adventures, which bring them into contact with a gallery of strange, mostly martial players. There's the taunting Colonel Finch, owner of Gunner, an Alsatian suitor that Tulip finds wanting--and Captain Pugh, who had served with Ackerley in World War I and who even then was a bizarre mixture of efficiency and indolence. Decades later, in "those rare moments when he was not horizontal he would stalk about the farm buildings with great vigor, making pertinent remarks in his military voice and spreading consternation among the cows."
Ackerley stints no detail when it comes to the varieties of Tulip's urinary and anal experience. But he is concerned above all with the canine heart, and the perils of conception and whelping are at his book's center. Tulip's vita amorosa truly is a via dolorosa as she scorns and scants her aristocratic paramours. Finally, "this exquisite creature in the midst of her desire" hears of the call of-- But we shall reveal no more! My Dog Tulip should instantly make its way onto the shelves of lovers of fine dogs (of whichever bloodlines) and finer literature--and doesn't that cover most of humanity? --Kerry Fried
Book Description
J.R. Ackerley's German shepherd Tulip was skittish, possessive, and wild, but he loved her deeply. This clear-eyed and wondering, humorous and moving book, described by Christopher Isherwood as one of the "greatest masterpieces of animal literature," is her biography, a work of faultless and respectful observation that transcends the seeming modesty of its subject. In telling the story of his beloved Tulip, Ackerley has written a book that is a profound and subtle meditation on the strangeness abiding at the heart of all relationships.
Customer Reviews:
My Dog Tulip is a Classic.......2007-07-05
This book was exactly as other reviewers described it; some hated it and others loved it. I was hesitant at first but decided I had to experience it. It is charming and a big reminder of how people viewed dogs in the not so distant past. Tulip's loving owner did not think of using doggie poop bags and struggled for years with where and when she eliminated. He wouldn't hear of spaying her and struggled for years with her coming in season, even having a litter of puppies he didn't want and couldn't find good homes for. All this was delightfully described in a mercifully brief book. I'm glad I read it, although I've read many other books on dogs that were more amusing and more enlightening. It is a wonderful reminder of what things were like in the 1940s and should be on the shelf of every dog lover who also loves books.
Reviewers Trash Classic!!!.......2004-02-18
Who is Kerry Fried, and why is s/he reviewing this classic? I read this book several years ago. As a story of a female shepherd and her owner, it is brutally honest, to the detail. Ackerley as a dog person, seems so indulgent and feeble. While reading, one must be mindful that the events took place in the 40's and in Briton. Perhaps he never had a dog before, and knew no better. Pups, off leash adventures, pooping issues. As subject matter, who but another shepherd lover would care. Who but a post modern dog lover would be appalled at the old fashioned beliefs and attitudes. But, and this is critical, but, the language is beautiful, the sentiment expressed is pure. And the final chapter, and final paragraph, are exquisite. I feel the passing of her life from his own, his long life stretching out so far beyond her sweet existence within it. I love my dog Olk as dearly, and dread his eventual loss.
Nancy
Superb form, distressing content........2004-01-28
Being a dog lover but not a dog owner who believes that it is cruel to keep most dogs in an urban environment, and especially a large dog in a flat as the author did, I found this memoir not to be my cup of tea. Humans are portrayed in it as curious, rather unsympathetic creatures, whilst the dog at the center of his love, is romanticised despite the loving detail with which the author describes the bodily functions of the animal. I can understand though, its appeal to those with an obsession with their dog who find humans too argumentative, contrary or difficult. An instance of "horses for courses" so to speak.
A Real Dog of a Book ... and Not in a Good Way.......2002-11-15
If you want to be immersed in a definitely 1960's I'm-obsessed-with-Freud take on dog ownership from someone who should never have been allowed to own a dog ... if you're dying to discover in ad nauseum detail the fecal and urinary habits of an animal whose owner lacks the least understanding of training a dog ... if you yearn for all the details of the miseries this animal goes through whenever she's in heat, this is the book for you.
One has to wonder at the dark workings of Ackerley's psyche. There's a strident and distressing pornographical note that sounds throughout the book as he writes of his beloved Tulip. Here he is, writing of the first time she goes into heat: "I was enchanted. That small dark bud, her vulva, became gradually swollen and more noticeable amid the light gray fur of her thighs as she walked ahead of me, and sometimes it would set up, I supposed, a tickle or a trickle or some other sensation, for she would suddenly squat down in the road and fall to licking it. At such moments I could see how much lager it had grown and the pretty pink of its lining ... I felt very sweet toward her. She also felt very sweet towards me." He goes on to describe in great detail how she mounts his leg and what that's like for the 2 of them. And it's not as if this is a one-time thing.
No, folks, the ENTIRE book is a treatise detailing such events: "Now, squatting here and there upon other dogs' droppings... like some famous chef adding to a prepared dish the final exquisite flavor, the crowning touch, she left behind her in the snow as she flew a series of sorbets, and her crazed attendants were so often and so long delayed in licking them up that they eventually fell far behind."
This is not exactly the kind of thing I care to discover about an animal, however charming the dog herself might be. But what REALLY disturbed me was the misery Ackerley put this poor animal through in his obsession to find her "a husband." Worse still, once she finally managed to produce a litter, Ackerley's inclination, was to kill all the pups. "In the bathroom ... I prepared a bucket of water and a flour sack weighted with such heavy objects as I could lay my hands on ... How could I distract proud Tulip's attention while I carried out my dark deed? Soon, no doubt, she would wish to relieve nature and my chance would come."
If this is the kind of a boy-and-his-dog relationship you want to know more about, go for it. Personally, I was left feeling I'd exposed myself to the dark workings of a pretty twisted mind, and I wish I hadn't learned there are people of relate to animals the way Ackereley does.
Possibly good for potential dog breeders.......2002-10-05
I liked this book, although as a dog owner I found myself shaking my head and shocked at many of the things that were done with this dog... I do think this is a great book for anyone who is thinking of breeding their dog as it gives a good account of the trials of breeding, raising puppies, and the problems that can occur for the pups and mother.
Book Description
"Had one to name the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relations to our age as Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe bore to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of."-- W. H. Auden
Packaged with French flaps, acid-free paper, and rough front.
Customer Reviews:
Necessary and perfect.......2007-07-06
Kafka found the stories and language to express some of the most inaccessible and painful truths of human existence.
Kafka's Best.......2007-06-03
This is a definitive collection of the short work of Franz Kafka, encompassing all of the greatest moods of his writing. The following stories are included.
The Judgment is a tale of what is and what is not. A young man reveals, through a letter, that he's engaged. He reveals this to an estranged friend in St. Petersburg, but then things start to unravel as he's undone by his father's probing and accusations. His father questions him extensively and demoralizes him, while revealing his own frailty.
The Metamorphosis. What can I say about this classic that hasn't been said by many more insightful and austere than myself? What I love about the story is that the action has occurred before the tale begins and the whole story is the aftermath, the coping, the results. It's quite a bit of masterful technique to pull that off.
In the Penal Colony is a devilish story of torture, execution and the morality of punishment. A machine is used for capital punishment and it's greatest advocate is a salesman for its continued use. Wicked.
A Country Doctor deals with Kafka's own issues of faith as told through a story about a doctor's ability or inability to treat patients. It's very much a theological tale, questioning faith and the foundations of morality. Kafka was an unbeliever but in this story he gives a fair analysis of the possibility of a greater power.
A Report to an Academy is the most fun of all the Kafka stories. At least to me. It's the story of an outsider trying to fit in - the ape rejecting his ape past, his heredity, his roots. It's the Jew rejecting his Jewish heritage. It's the European abandoning Europe for the promises of America. It's a grand journey told through an ape that takes on humanism in order to advance beyond his station, yet revealing that this is a false promise because one's true nature can't be avoided, can't be buried.
This volume ought to be, and probably is, required reading for all educated people.
- CV Rick
Good reading.......2005-05-22
The metamorphosis is perhaps Kafka's most famous story. It is about a man who suddenly wakes up as horrible creature (whose appearence is left to the imagination of the reader). His whole life changes and his room becomes his world. His family begins to forget him as he becomes an embarassment for them. The end comes as unexpected as the metarphosis itself.
I found the other stories not as interesting as the described above, and some of them have a very strange end, if we can call it so.
Fascinated in fear and anxiety .......2004-11-24
Three of these stories , " The Metamorphosis ' ' The Penal Colony' ' The Country Doctor' are among the most Kafkaesque of Kafka's stories. They awaken in the reader a vague anxiety, a confusion, a sense of disturbance it is difficult to adequately describe. They give us a sense of life as something more menacing and threatening than we had imagined. And yet they do this with such a precise and even beautiful description of inner and outer reality so as to fascinate us completely. They hold us as their narratives procede in their own incredible ways to an ending which too is forever vague and unclear.
Kafka makes the human soul a startling juxtaposition of anxiety and beauty- in a destiny lost and unclear.
More than just "The Metamorphosis".......2004-04-30
As someone who had only read "The Metamorphosis," I found this collection of Kafka's works to be very refreshing. Since I had not enjoyed reading "The Metamorphosis" in high school I was skeptical about reading other works by Kafka. I was pleasantly surprised when I read "In the Penal Colony", "A Country Doctor", and "A Report to an Academy." These works were assigned as part of a college class I had, and I found that they were not only very personally thought provoking, but they inspired a lot of insightful in-class discussion. I would recommend this collection to anyone who has not yet read any of Kafka's works, or who have only read The Metamorphosis.
Average customer rating:
- Terrifying metaphor
- Alternate translation, not necessarily updated
- Dark and idiosyncratic
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The METAMORPHOSIS AND OTHER STORIES: THE GREAT SHORT WORKS OF FRANZ KAFKA
Kafka
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Customer Reviews:
Terrifying metaphor.......2005-06-11
Metamorphosis was my first introduction to Kafka and I found his dark humour unsettling yet addictive. Samsa plagued and burdened with poverty and family responsibility, is in the end betrayed by himself and his loved ones in a dramatic turn of events. As a "useful" and able man, he was respected and cared for by his parents and loved by his sister. But after the metamorphosis, his family at first tolerated him, his sister perhaps pitied him, but towards the end, it turned to hate and disgust. They realised Samsa had become a burden and embarassment to the family. A useless vermin stuck to the family walls. Metaphor taken to great heights. Physically and intellectually an insect, but emotionally and spiritually still a man.
Alternate translation, not necessarily updated.......2005-01-26
Translations are generally taken for granted.
Only recently have I been re-reading books translated by different authors to compare the interpretation of the author's orignial intent, mood and word choice. Kafka has been a longtime favorite and I have been using the same translation with every pass. Then I came across the audio version of this book.
When some of my favorite passages would come up I would be surprised at the change of words; sometimes an improvement, other times a disappointment.
In the introduction, a note on the translation explains the disparity of the various translations starting with his most famous story, The Metamorphosis. For example, the typical narrations begins by calling the newly transformed creature an ugly insect. However, when looking at the original German, translator Joachim Neugroschel changes it to "monsterous vermin," a significant difference. I can't remember the German words, but they look like the direct translation would be monstrous vermin, and clearly not "insect."
The authors extended discussion of the translation on the audio book made me feel better about his grasp of both languages, poetry and the intent of the author. So I can almost for give differences like "a pack of nobodies" being changed to "a bunch of nobodies." I prefer "pack" for its comparisons to wolves over "bunch" for its comaprison to bananas.
The translation should not be considered an "updated version" because that would imply simplification or modernization of the text. It still reads like it comes from Kafka's age. This version is great for a first time Kafka reader, a dedicated fan who wants to compare the language interpretations, or for someone who wants to re-experience the genius of Kafka.
I would give this book 5 stars if it were a complete collection of stories. Some of the ones that still haunt me are missing.
Dark and idiosyncratic.......1999-09-28
This was my first exposure to Kafka, and was actually in audiobook form, with a masterful narration by George Guidall. It was a very well-rounded collection, including The Metamorphosis, The Stoker, A Country Doctor, and Visit to a Penal Colony.
I won't pretend that I understood all of the political/religious symbolism, but was captivated by the dark humor and weird, despairing ambience of these character studies. There isn't a lot of conventional dramatic movement, but the power of these surreal images and bizarre viewpoints sneaks up on you. Kakfa has a narrative voice that is utterly unique. I found that it gained power upon re-reading(hearing), and promptly loaded up cassette one as soon as I reached the end.
Average customer rating:
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ASIN: 048643205X |
Book Description
Translations of 8 masterpieces by writers who defined the modern German short story, including Arthur Schnitzler's "Lieutenant Gustl," Heinrich von Kleist's "Earthquake in Chile," as well as important works by Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Gerhart Hauptmann, Rainer Maria Rilke, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Clemens Brentano.
Average customer rating:
- when it first came out..
- The story of a courageous and noble human being
- Historically interesting
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Milena: The Tragic Story of Kafka's Great Love
Margarete Buber-Neumann
Manufacturer: Arcade Publishing
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Customer Reviews:
when it first came out.........2006-03-10
Since the hardback edition of the new translation of Milena was published last year, Margarete Buber-Neumann, friend to the mistress of Kafka for four years at Ravensbruck Concentration Camp, has died. She died old enough to see the collapse of the Stalinist system that imprisoned her in Siberia, old enough to feel the great hopes that the socialism she fought for will now at last sweep through Europe.
Milena Jesenska fought for the cause too, in her writing and through her actions, leading to her arrest and incarceration at Ravensbruck. She initially sought out Greta Buber to hear the truth about Stalin; what developed was a deep and passionate love. Though Buber-Neumann is no great stylist indeed the book at times fails to come alive because of her reverence for Milena this is a profoundly moving memoir, part biography, part autobiography and part love story, even if, as the subject predicted, told by an 'indulgent judge.' For Milena, on her deathbed, commissioned Buber-Neumann to write this book as a document of life in the camps. However, the camp is but the terrifying context for a tale about a beautiful girl who turned the eyes of the Prague Circle in the Twenties with her boyish looks and who began a painful love affair with Franz Kafka and of how she outlived him and of how 'the living fire' as Kafka described her was quenched.
The story of a courageous and noble human being .......2004-12-07
Milena Jesenka is most known to the world through her connection to and correspondance with Kafka. Her friend Margerete Buber- Neumann tells her story with great insight and feeling. She tells especially of Milena, who imprisoned at Ravensbruck was a heroic helper of others there. This story inspires and saddens deeply because it shows the tragic and painful end of a truly noble and courageous human being.
Historically interesting.......2002-07-02
This is a biography of Milena Jesenská, a Czech journalist who was, in a way, a great love of Kafka's. She was an unusual woman for her time. Highly intelligent and with a rebellious streak, she fashioned herself into a journalist and became well-regarded for her literary and political writing. In her 20s she came to know Kafka when she translated his work into Czech. This gave rise to an impassioned correspondence between them, although the connection didn't turn into a real-life love affair, partly because Milena was married, and partly because of Kafka's numerous anxieties and aversions in the male/female domain. Unfortunately, those interested in insights into Kafka will not get many from this book, as he comes and goes quite quickly in the narrative. Rather, the book is a loving tribute to Milena by Margarete Buber-Neumann, with whom she was imprisoned at the women's concentration camp at Ravensbrück. The two had planned to write a book together when they were freed, but Milena died of kidney failure in May 1944, so Margarete chose instead to tell her friend's story.
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