The Special Challenges of Attempting a New Translation of Kafka | Hacker News Reader

The Special Challenges of Attempting a New Translation of Kafka

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36 pointslermontov13 comments

I recently reread the first few chapters of The Castle and was surprised find such a different novel than what I remembered as a teenager: it was funny.

My German is better now than when I first attempted the novel, but when I was younger I took everything so much more earnestly that I was immune to the humor. I think it was mainly that I regarded irony as a complaint, rather than a punch line.

Kafka - Franz Kafka, the German-speaking Bohemian Jewish novelist and writer from Prague

Confluent must put this guy to the trial for using their project's fair name to get cheap publicity.

I am delighted that this article isn't about translating Kafka from Java to Rust.

Even though the title has the word "translation" in it my mind ran to Apache Kafka :-).

Same, I thought hmm, RedPanda already has a kafka replacement

Apache Kafka is obviously named after Kafka himself.

Because he can write!

I wonder if naming the project after him was actually a disservice - previously pretty disambiguous name now leads many people to think of a software project.

OTOH, he might be shocked (and perhaps even displeased), what a cultural icon he became after his death.

"As Franz Kafka awoke one morning from uneasy death he found himself transformed in his coffin into a software project"

And what an apt name. Always gave me true Kafkaesque experience. Never figured out why it fails randomly, turns out it was my mistake all along.

from my experience with the C++ API, including debugging problems until I find that they were indeed issues that eventually got fixed upstream, the API is poor and any combination of functions that were not explicitly tested is likely to not work correctly and trip you up.

I was a big Kafka fan in my younger years. Having read Metamorphosis multiple times, its depth became shallower everytime I've read it. Today, I don't know what to make of his writings.

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