Reading Kafka in german is so much more modern and musical than in english or any other language. Kafka in english sounds almost sentimental, less modern. At least thats my feeling. In english translators often break his long paragraphs and sentences. Samuel Beckett said that he used to read most of Kafka in german, especially the Castle - Das Schloß.
This is a classic:
http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html
Also check his open code lisp section!
I would like to add as somebody whose first language was lisp, car/cdr never represented a problem. It looks more balanced than first/rest.
The thing that got me were emacs, SICP lectures and the whole idea of lisp writing lisp. I don't think changing syntax would help much because lisp attracts certain types of people (I believe).
As a professional musician, classicaly trained, who just recently (I wasted a lot of time living in terminal and emacs while playing with linux distros)
started learning programming from ground up I find Lisp, S-expressions and more functional approach attractive and comparable to
music composition. If we take for example Bach fugues of Beethoven Sonatas we can see functional approach of may I say multiparadigm:
development of motives, objects, augmentation, expanding themes(functions) that contain smaller themes (closures) etc..
The beauty and magic of SICP lectures and their may I say musical approach to composing higher abstractions is just plain better than pure
python or javascript tutorials that I tried learning from.
Not to mention amazing talks and writings from Alan Kay, Guy Steele, Pg, Norvig and other hackers who for me
define the essence of hacking and programming. The whole point of writing lisp in itself is like some strange Bach or Mozart
read/eval loop that never stops. I am far from being an average user of lisp but I keep doing it day and night. It is not easy though.
The only sad thing is so many people dismiss lisp and I see finding a job will also not be an easy thing. By the way I am open for internships
in some lisp shops, I would work for free. I dont know how much I can contribute but I could at least clean extra parentheses (thats a joke! :)))