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Gabriele Kafka was nominated for deletion. The discussion was closed on 19 April 2024 with a consensus to merge. Its contents were merged into Franz Kafka. The original page is now a redirect to this page. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected article, please see its history; for its talk page, see here.
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I happened to notice this diff added two claims of borderline personality disorder, but also that the account which made them was since blocked for abuse. Since this is a featured article, it would be best if this was double-checked. --Joy (talk) 21:07, 20 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In the sentence, "All of Kafka's published works were written in German, with the exception of a number of letters he wrote in Czech to his contemporary Milena Jesenská," I deleted the phrase after the comma, for a couple of reasons. The phrase "published works" is ordinarily read to mean works intended for publication, which the letters Kafka wrote to Milena were not, because they were personal letters, and personal letters aren't "works." The fact that Kafka became famous and his letters were published decades after his death doesn't make them "published works" in the ordinary sense of the term. Also, Kafka must have written personal letters in Czech to people other than Milena. To claim that those to Milena were the only ones written in Czech would require examination of every letter Kafka wrote that has been published, and, again, the fact that a letter has been published doesn't make it a "published work" or even a "work."
I will also add "[citation needed]" to the sentence that follows: "What little was published during his lifetime attracted scant public attention." How much is "scant"? Maurice Magnus (talk) 02:58, 1 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
(talk) Letters to Milena does not state that Kafka wrote the letters in Czech, and it should; it states merely that they were originally published in German. Do you have a source that says that Kafka wrote them in Czech? I'll check out the English translation to see it if says that (but I can't do that for a few days). Maurice Magnus (talk) 13:28, 1 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'll try and find one and get back to you, I'm quite curious myself. That said, I'm no expert at sourcing, I mostly do typos, fixing weird sentences and such. Vtipoman (talk) 18:37, 1 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't have a direct quote on this, but the majority of (if not all) the surviving correspondence Kafka wrote to Milena seems to be in German. I've been able to find a website with their digitized contents, hosted under the University of Vienna (just delete the end of the URL). The website also has letters he did write to other people in Czech (example, search "Milý" for some more), but everything from him to Milena is in German (with a Czech word or phrase seldom thrown in) – search her name for that. I'd post the URLs for the searches directly, but Wikipedia doesn't seem to like them. Vtipoman (talk) 18:47, 2 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, here are the pages for the relevant years, everything labelled "Brief an Milena" (letter), "Kartenbrief an Milena" (card-letter?), "Ansichtkarte an Milena" (postcard) and "Postkarte an Milena" (also postcard?) is what we're interested in:
The normal approach on Wikipedia and elsewhere is to give the titles in English, with the German in parentheses, not the other way around, as the article does. It is also the more common approach when it comes to the specific famous works by Kafka mentioned here (The Trial, the Castle). 62.73.72.3 (talk) 12:09, 31 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think the reason it's been done like this is to allow for multiple translations of the title, e.g. "Das Urteil" ("The Judgment", literally: "The Verdict") and Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis, or The Transformation). I think this is a reasonable reason to keep it this way around, at least in the article body; the lead gives only the English names. Ligaturama (talk) 13:09, 2 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The decision for the original titles was made in 2012, when Kafka became a featured article. He wrote in German, and while a few works have well-known names also in English, the majority of his works is less known in English. Some works have several different names in English. Balzac was an example for this approach. There is no "normal approach" in Wikipedia. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:56, 2 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
These don't seem like serious reasons. If there are several translations, we can pick one and add the other one in parentheses. If there is no known translation, we can make one. Or we can write the works that don't have a predominant and well-known English title in German with translations, but do it the other way around with the ones that do have one. Every writer has works that aren't very famous. Should we call 'Crime and Punishment' Prestuplenie i nakazanie just because Dostoyevsky also has some works that aren't world-famous? Here is what Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Titles of works#Translations says:
'For works originally named in languages other than English, use WP:COMMONNAME to determine whether the original title or an English language version should be used as the article title. For works best known by their title in a language other than English, an English translation of that title may be helpful. If the work is also well known by an English title, give the English translation in parentheses following normal formatting for titles: Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons). Where the work is not known by an English title, give the translation in parentheses without special formatting in sentence case: Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen (Weeping, lamenting, worrying, fearing).'
'Wikipedia ... generally prefers the name that is most commonly used (as determined by its prevalence in a significant majority of independent, reliable, English-language sources)'
It seems logical that the same thing should be applied to mentions of works in an article. This means that at least The Trial and the The Castle should be called that. With Balzac, I suspect that the reason is partly that a large proportion of readers used to know French and partly that he isn't read a lot these days and that whoever reads him is likely to be so versed in French culture already that he reads him in French. But I don't actually know which names are more common for his works. In general, this packing of the text with foreign-language phrases and sentences strikes me as a snobbish custom ('if you don't know that language, the problem is yours'), and Wikipedia should strive to be reader-friendly, not turn people off with snobbery.--62.73.72.3 (talk) 00:02, 10 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
level-4 vital article is rated FA-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
