National Network for Equitable Library Service

Franz Kafka's writings are characterized by an extreme sensitivity manifested in absurdity, alienation, and gallows humor. These two particular collections of short pieces, A Country Doctor (1919) and A Hunger Artist (1924), newly translated by Thor Polson, represent later works in the corpus. Poems and Songs of Love is a translation of the collection Piyyutim ve-Shirei Yedidot by Georg Mordechai Langer. Published in Prague in 1929, it contains an elegy to Langer's friend and mentor Franz Kafka, and other openly homo-romantic poems. This collaborative translation by Elana and Menachem Wolff brings the fascinating work of Langer--poems as well as an essay on Kafka--to the English-reading public for the first time, and sheds light on a hitherto unexamined relationship.