Despite appearances, this is not the case. One is tempted to believe that this entity once had some purposive form and is now simply broken. With the aid of this second bar on one side, and one of the points of the star on the other side, the whole thing can stand upright as though on two legs.

But it is not only a spool, since a small crossbar emerges from the middle of the star and another bar joins the first at a right angle. It looks at first like a flat starshaped spool, and in fact it does appear to be wound with thread which, to be sure, is really only ragged, old, knotted together or simply tangled pieces of string of mixed color and description. Naturally nobody would occupy himself with such study if there were not actually a being called odradek. The uncertainty of both interpretations permits one to conclude that neither applies, particularly since neither leads to a meaning for the word. Others think it comes from the German, only being influenced by the Slavonic.

Some say the word odradek comes from the Slavonic and look for the word’s derivation on that basis.

An English version by Willa and Edwin Muir (“The Cares of a Family Man,” in Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories 427-29) is more elegant than my own but differs from Schwarz’s, which is closer to Kafka’s language, in several respects. The version of “Worries of a Family Man” presented here hews as closely as possible to Kafka’s German while following, where feasible, the stylistic choices represented by Schwarz’s Portuguese translation. Roberto Schwarz’s “Tribulação de um Pai de Família” (in O pai de família e outros estudos 21-26), first published in 1966, begins with his translation of Franz Kafka’s “Die Sorge des Hausvaters” (1917).

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