Translating the silence: Ulysses by Franz Kafka

Abstract

The present study’s aim is to investigate how myth is translated within contemporary literature, particularly within the work of Franz Kafka and his short story entitled The silence of the sirens. Kafka give us two possible interpretations of the character of Ulysses. On the one hand we find a new Ulysses, far from the hero of the Homeric poems. On the other we see a Ulysses who sins of hybris and manage to escape the silence of sirens.
The sirens pretend to sing but make no sound; Ulysses pretends to listen but is actually aware of the sirens' ruse. This fiction within fiction represents a stratagem to get through the Sirens' silence unscathed and raises, at the same time, questions about the nature of truth and fiction of myths and their interpretation in moderncontemporary debate.