The Trial: A New Translation Based on the Restored Text - Hardcover

Kafka, Franz

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805241655 ISBN 13: 9780805241655

Publisher: Schocken, 1998

Synopsis

Written in 1914, The Trial is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century: the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, Kafka's nightmare has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers.

But until this edition, English-speaking readers have been able to read Kafka's masterpiece only in a translation of the 1925 German edition that was edited by Kafka's friend and literary executor, Max Brod, from an unfinished manuscript. Both Brod's edition and its 1937 translation by Willa and Edwin Muir have long been considered flawed.

This new edition is based upon the widely acclaimed work of an international team of experts who have restored the text, the sequence of chapters, and their division to create a version that is as close as possible to the way the author left it.

In his brilliant translation, Breon Mitchell masterfully reproduces the distinctive rhythms and wordplays of Kafka's prose, revealing a novel that is as full of energy and power as it was when it was first written.

About this title

About the Author

The son of a well-to-do merchant, Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 and died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium near Vienna in 1924. After earning a law degree in 1906, he worked most of his adult life at the Workers Accident Insurance Company for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague. Only a small portion of his writings were published during his lifetime; most of them, including the three unfinished novels, Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle, were published posthumously.

Breon Mitchell has received several national awards for literary translation, including the American Translators Association's German Literary Prize, the ALTA Translation Prize, and the Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award. He is a professor of Germanic studies and comparative literature at Indiana University.

From the Back Cover

Advance Praise for The Trial

"Breon Mitchell's translation of the restored text is an accomplishment of the highest order--one that will honor Kafka, perhaps the most singular and compelling writer of our time, far into the twenty-first century."

--Walter Abish, author of How German Is It

Praise for The Castle
translated by Mark Harman from the restored text

"The new Schocken edition of The Castle represents a major and long-awaited event in English- language publishing. It is a wonderful piece of news for all Kafka readers who, for more than half a century, have had to rely on flawed, superannuated editions. Mark Harman is to be commended for his success in capturing the fresh, fluid, almost breathless style of Kafka's original manuscript."
--Mark M. Anderson, Columbia University

"Semantically accurate to an admirable degree, faithful to Kafka's nuances, responsive to the tempo of his sentences and to the larger music of his paragraph construction. For the general reader or for the student, it will be the translation of preference for some time to come."
--J. M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books

"There is a great deal to applaud in Harman's translation. It gives us a much better sense of Kafka's uncompromising and disturbing originality as a prose master than we have heretofore had in English."
--Robert Alter, The New Republic

From the Inside Flap

914, The Trial is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century: the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, Kafka's nightmare has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers.

But until this edition, English-speaking readers have been able to read Kafka's masterpiece only in a translation of the 1925 German edition that was edited by Kafka's friend and literary executor, Max Brod, from an unfinished manuscript. Both Brod's edition and its 1937 translation by Willa and Edwin Muir have long been considered flawed.

This new edition is based upon the widely acclaimed work of an international team of experts who have restored the text, the sequence of chapters, and the

Reviews

Kafka's final work was left unfinished at the time of his 1924 death, and the original 1925 and subsequent editions were edited according to the standards of the day. This edition endeavors to restore the text as closely as possible to the original manuscript. According to the publisher, "This translation makes slight changes in the chapter divisions and sequence of chapter fragments." In addition to the text, this volume includes a bibliography and a chronology of the author's life.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Schocken
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805241655
• ISBN 13: 9780805241655
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 276