про Кафку

The diligence of the translator, Ross Benjamin, is above praise—or at any rate my praise as a general reader. ... an admirable thoroughness that I should be tempted to call Teutonic if stereotyping were not so frowned upon these days. But when I say admirable, I mean precisely that, for who does not admire the cobbler who sticks so manfully to his last?

...
It pains me, however, to say that the ratio of enlightenment to the effort of reading these diaries is quite low.

--Kafka's Trials by Theodore Dalrymple

это он про новый перевод дневников Кафки. не tongue in cheek, а прямо, без обиняков, издевательски. причем издевается он и над переводчиком, и над Кафкой:

The commencement of the greatest cataclysm of modern European history, the First World War, is recorded as follows:

           Germany has declared war on Russia.—Swimming school in the afternoon.

много интересного в этом эссе, вот, к примеру:

...one suspects that Kafka would have been highly neurotic in any circumstances, a prophet and exemplar of a psychological tendency, so powerfully stimulated by Freud, to make mountains out of molehills.

...
Far from being graspable, as it had once seemed (without actually being so), the world had become absurd and even menacing.

вот кстати картинка подходящая про Кафку: