ABSTRACT
Franz Kafka wrote his own story based on a famous adventure, apparently in late October of 1917, but he never published it. Max Brod, Kafka's friend and literary executor, found it in one of the octavo notebooks Kafka had left and included it in a collection of fiction from Kafka's Nachlab which appeared in 1931. It is possible to write a story about the Sirens' silence that is on the whole faithful to the spirit of the Homeric original and can be read as a version of the adventure from the Odys-sey. Odysseus plays the role of witness. If the story does nothing else, it establishes him as the single mortal authority on the Sirens. He alone among living men knows what the Sirens sing and what effect their song has. The most fundamental feature of the Homeric version of the tale, then, is the unique authority it ascribes to the narrating voice of Odysseus himself.
