Jun 8, 2024 05:31 PM
(This post was last modified: Jun 8, 2024 05:49 PM by C C.)
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...ok/678497/
EXCERPTS: Franz Kafka wasn’t a rabbi, exactly, but he is the high priest of 20th-century literature, and he also wrote in parables. In a brief one called “On Parables,” he asks, in effect, what they’re good for. Why do sages feel obliged to illustrate their principles with tales, requiring their listeners to, as he puts it, “go over” to another world?
Kafka answers: The sages don’t mean that we should go to “some actual place,” but rather to “some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something, too, that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the least.” In short, even the sage can’t articulate the meaning of his own parables, and so they’re useless to us. “All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible.” (MORE - missing details)
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You'll have to disable javascript in order to access or read all of it. If you haven't long since installed one of the more trusted JS toggle apps on your browser, then you ought to -- because Reader View and ad-blocks simply don't do the job for everything. What you can fully access without such (aside from the nuisance of all the ads) is Cynthia Ozick's 1999 article: The Impossibility of Translating Franz Kafka
EXCERPTS: Franz Kafka wasn’t a rabbi, exactly, but he is the high priest of 20th-century literature, and he also wrote in parables. In a brief one called “On Parables,” he asks, in effect, what they’re good for. Why do sages feel obliged to illustrate their principles with tales, requiring their listeners to, as he puts it, “go over” to another world?
Kafka answers: The sages don’t mean that we should go to “some actual place,” but rather to “some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something, too, that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the least.” In short, even the sage can’t articulate the meaning of his own parables, and so they’re useless to us. “All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible.” (MORE - missing details)
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You'll have to disable javascript in order to access or read all of it. If you haven't long since installed one of the more trusted JS toggle apps on your browser, then you ought to -- because Reader View and ad-blocks simply don't do the job for everything. What you can fully access without such (aside from the nuisance of all the ads) is Cynthia Ozick's 1999 article: The Impossibility of Translating Franz Kafka