The Martin Buber Society of Fellows, Hebrew University, Jerusalem
Kafka wrote at least fifty shorter texts which must be considered poems in the narrower sense. They often rhyme, they are mostly structured through rhythm and meter, they appear in verses and stanzas, and they evoke strong images. To this day, apart from a short entry in the two Kafka handbooks (Metzler and Kröner), there is no research on Kafkaʼs poems. Kafkaʼs poems are not accessible as a collection. Dispersed in Kafkaʼs Quart- and Octavo-Notebooks, his so-called diaries, in letters and in his posthumous fragments, they had to be searched for and systematically identified initially in order to establish a lyrical corpus, one worthy of investigation in its own right. In the course of the project, Kafkaʼs poems shall be published and translated into English. Furthermore, the question shall be put, which position Kafkaʼs poems hold within Kafkaʼs oeuvre. On the one hand, they appear to a great extent as an independent achievement, on the other hand, they are connected to Kafkaʼs stories, novels, dramolettes, and drawings, be it through common motifs, be it through specific linguistic structures which reveal Kafkaʼs singular movements of thinking. More generally, Kafkaʼs poetics shall be reconstructed.
