Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors by Franz Kafka

Author:Franz Kafka [Kafka, Franz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schocken Books
Published: 2013-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

To Dr. Josef David

[Matliary, end of January 1921]15

Dear Pepa,16

Well done, well done, and I am only putting in a few small mistakes not in order for there to be some mistakes in it but because, forgive me, even in your letter my director17 would find mistakes, as he would find them in any letter. I only do it so that the letter will contain a suitable quota of mistakes.

Here I am trying to live quietly. A newspaper hardly ever comes my way; I don’t even read the Tribuna18 and have no notion of what the Communists are doing or what the Germans19 are saying, but only of what the Magyars are saying. This I hear, but I don’t understand. Unfortunately they talk a good deal and I would be happy if they said less. Why a poem, Pepa; don’t put yourself to such trouble, why a new poem? Horace has already written many beautiful poems and we have read only one and a half of them. Besides, I already have a poem of yours. Near here there is a small military infirmary and all evening there is marching along the road and it’s always the “Panthers” and “turning round and round.”20 The Czech soldiers are not the worst; they go skiing and laugh and shout like children, though children with soldiers’ voices. But there are also a few Hungarian soldiers among them, and one of them has learned five words of the Panther song and apparently has lost his mind to it; wherever he goes, he bellows out the song. And the lovely mountains and forests round about look down on all this so gravely, as if they liked it.

But all this is not bad; it only goes on a little while every day. Much worse in this respect are the devilishly noisy voices inside the house. But that too can be endured. I won’t complain. We are in the Tatra Mountains and the Sabine hills are elsewhere and perhaps nowhere.

Please give my regards to your parents and sisters. How has it worked out with the National Theater?

Yours, F

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