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interpretation of this chapter and of Karl’s final journey.

    The multilingual Kafka was acutely aware of the challenges facing translators and of the need to negotiate between sometimes conflicting linguistic and literary claims. Though he praised his first Czech translator, Milena Jesenská, for her faithfulness to his German, he also asked “whether Czechs won’t hold its very faithfulness against you.” His comments on her Czech rendering of the first two sentences in the novel are particularly revealing, since this is one of the trickier passages in the book. What, for instance, are we to make of the ambiguous statement that Karl has been sent to America by his
“arme Eltern”
(poor parents)? Kafka was not happy with Milena’s decision to eliminate the ambiguity of “poor” by inserting the adjectival phrase “financially needy,” suggesting that Karl’s parents are impoverished. He emphasized that
arme
(poor) “here also has the secondary meaning: pitiable, but without any special emphasis of feeling.” 34 Could this reference to Karl’s “poor parents” be an ironic, or even sarcastic, comment by the narrator? Perhaps. But Kafka disclosed another interpretative possibility when he revealed to Milena that the expression mirrors Karl’s feelings toward his parents: “an uncomprehending sympathy that Karl, too, has with his parents.” 35
    Kafka also commented on the
“freie Lüfte”
(literally, “free airs”) blowing about the Statue of Liberty. He noted that the German phrase is “a little more grand” than Milena’s Czech rendition as “free air”—like English, Czech cannot easily use the word
air
in the plural. But then he added, with his characteristic awareness of the inherent limits of translation, that “there’s probably no alternative.” I ended up choosing the phrase “free winds,” which like Milena’s Czech term is less elevated than the original German, partly because I wanted to retain that simple but resonant word
free.
    In general I have sought to keep the interpretative options open and to follow Kafka whenever he chooses to be ambiguous and whenever he flouts conventions. For instance, in describing the mysterious Theater of Oklahama, he avoids straightforward German verbs such as
einstellen
(to hire), and I have sought to make the English text comparably elusive. 36 The same goes for the punctuation, which some readers may find a little unsettling. Kafka employs it rather erratically—for example, some questions are followed by question marks, others not. Here we must keep in mind that, with the exception of the “Stoker” chapter, he never revised the manuscript for publication and that we cannot know precisely what he would have changed had he done so. For stylistic reasons, he preferred to use punctuation sparingly, and I have tried to be comparably thrifty. After all, at least in the original German, the very lightness of the punctuation helped to create prose that is often full of sharply observed detail—as in the first chapter—yet still flows with seemingly miraculous ease.
    Max Brod corrected obvious slips, such as a bridge stretching from New York to Boston, a sudden shift in the U.S. currency from dollars to pounds, and conflicting indications as to whether Karl Rossmann is sixteen or seventeen; these editorial corrections were adopted by Edwin and Willa Muir, who used Brod’s edition as the basis for the first English translation (1938). The more recent German-language editors of Kafka’s novels have refrained from making such changes, on the grounds that it is preferable to offer readers as close an approximation as possible of the state in which Kafka left his texts. Although I have usually followed the editors of the German critical edition in retaining idiosyncratic features of the original manuscript, I have