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The Bridge
I was stiff and cold, I was a bridge, I lay over a ravine. My toes on one side, my fingers clutching the
other, I had clamped myself fast into the crumbling clay. The tails of my coat fluttered at my sides. Far
below brawled the icy trout stream. No tourist strayed to this impassable height, the bridge was not
yet traced on any map. So I lay and waited; I could only wait. Without falling, no bridge, once
spanned, can cease to be a bridge.It was toward evening one day- was it the first, was it the
thousandth? I cannot tell- my thoughts were always in confusion and perpetually moving in a circle. It
was toward evening in summer, the roar of the stream had grown deeper, when I heard the sound of a
human step! To me, to me. Straighten yourself, bridge, make ready, railless beams, to hold up the
passenger entrusted to you. If his steps are uncertain, steady them unobtrusively, but if he stumbles
show what you are made of and like a mountain god hurl him across to land.
He came, he tapped me with the iron point of his stick, then he lifted my coattails with it and put them
in order upon me. He plunged the point of his stick into my bushy hair and let it lie there for a long
time, forgetting me no doubt while he wildly gazed around him. But then – I was just following him
in thought over mountain and valley – he jumped with both feet on the middle of my body. I
shuddered with wild pain, not
knowing what was happening. Who was it? A child? A dream? A wayfarer? A suicide? A tempter? A
destroyer? And I turned so as to see him. A bridge to turn around! I had not yet turned quiet around
when I already began to fall, I fell and in a moment I was torn and transpierced by the sharp rocks
which had always gazed up at me so peacefully from the rushing water.
Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir
Written by Franz Kafka
http://www.scribd.com/doc/6366575/The-Bridge

http://guzoliyu.wordpress.com/?s=kafka

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