| Franz Kafka lived through less than a quarter of the twentieth century, yet he still managed to become one of its “few truly indelible writers,” The New Yorker’s Cynthia Ozick observed, in 1999. Kafka ranks among “those writers who have no literary progeny,” she went on, “who are sui generis and cannot be echoed or envied.” Monday marks the hundredth anniversary of Kafka’s death, of tuberculosis, at age forty. When he died, much of his work had never been published; the literary world owes a controversial debt to his friend Max Brod, who ignored Kafka’s wish that his manuscripts be “burned unread.” Kafka wrote “The Metamorphosis,” “The Trial,” and the rest of his canon in German, a language that was both a mother tongue and a source of acute alienation. Ozick argues that scholars have not adequately grappled with the influence on Kafka’s writing of his personal identity, as a German-speaking Jew during a time of anti-German sentiment and anti-Jewish violence in his Czech home town. But she focusses more deeply on the challenges of translating his work. Even Kafka’s use of punctuation, she notes, would become subject to debate, including the decision by his most prominent translators to “regulate” his commas differently in English. The resulting ambiguities are inevitable and frustrating—but, given the topics and themes of his writing, perhaps they are also perfectly fitting. | 
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