Coming to an understanding with patients and prepositions

Editor—The translation of the phrase from Franz Kafka's short story A Country Doctor at the beginning of Marshall Marinker's personal paper should read: “To write prescriptions is easy, but to come to an understanding with people is hard.” 1 It is unlikely we will ever come to an understanding of people; coming to an understanding with them, though difficult, is at least feasible and, in any case, entirely in the sense of Marinker's article. It is worth observing that the reflexive German verb sich verständigen puts the onus on the pronominal subject–that is, the doctor–to make himself or herself understood in a more subtle way than that conveyed by the gesticulating of the English prepositional construction. Interestingly, the …