by Franz Kafka
In the present translation the structure of the definitive text of The Trial is rendered precisely, paragraph by paragraph, and sentence by sentence. Punctuation generally follows established English usage, since Kafka’s own punctuation, even where it loosens substantially, normally remains well within the range of accepted German usage, and I do not wish for it to appear falsely ungrammatical. It should be noted in particular that Kafka’s prevalent use of what we call a comma splice has been perfectly acceptable in German prose since the eighteenth century, as are the long and complex sentences resulting from this practice. I have, however, attempted to reflect every truly unusual use of punctuation, including the occasional omission of commas in a series, or a period where one would expect a question mark.
The present version thus attempts to mirror the critical edition of the text quite closely. But rendering Kafka’s prose involves far more than punctuation and paragraphing. The power of Kafka’s text lies in the language, in a nuanced use of the discourses of law, religion, and the theater, and in particular in a closely woven web of linguistic motifs that must be rendered consistently to achieve their full impact. Here the Muirs, for all the virtues of their translation, fell far short, for in attempting to create a readable and stylistically refined version of Kafka’s Trial, they consistently overlooked or deliberately varied the repetitions and interconnections that echo so meaningfully in the ear of every attentive reader of the German text. Which is not to say that there are any easy solutions to the challenges Kafka presents.
Jemand mußte Josef K. verleumdet haben, denn ohne daß er etwas Böses getan hätte, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet.
The translator’s trial begins with the first sentence, in part because the hint of uncertainty grammatically present in the subjunctive verb “hätte[n]” is inevitably lost in the standard translation, even with E. M. Butler’s later revisions: “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” Although in this version it is by no means clear why Josef K. has been arrested, there is no doubt about his innocence. Nor does there seem to be in the German, since the subjunctive is merely required by the “ohne daß” construction. Of course nothing is ever that simple in Kafka, even in translation, and we could also argue that since the information received is filtered through Josef K.’s own mind from the very beginning, it is constantly suspect in any case. On a strictly literal level, however, any English translation is forced to declare K.’s innocence.
There are other problems as well. Why render the common phrase “eines Morgens” with the false irony of “one fine morning”? Why not end the sentence, as in German, with the surprise of his arrest? And why has the legal resonance of “verleumden” (to slander) been reduced to merely “telling lies”? A further problem is posed by “Böses,” a word that, when applied to the actions of an adult, reverberates with moral and philosophical overtones ranging from the story of the Fall in the Garden of Eden to Nietzsche’s discussion of the origins of morality in Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil). To claim that K. has done nothing “Böses” is both more and less than a child’s claim he has done nothing wrong. Josef K. has done nothing truly wrong, at least in his own eyes.
In wrestling with these problems I finally settled upon the following: “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.” Although at first I had hoped, by using the phrase “truly wrong,” to push the word “wrong” toward the province of the criminally malicious and to introduce, on a level corresponding to the almost subliminal use of the subjunctive in German, the question of truth, I eventually realized that this would be to err in the other direction, by moving too strongly toward interpretation.
There are no totally satisfying solutions to the difficulties presented by Kafka’s opening sentence. But it is crucial to recognize and grapple with them. Such a struggle is not inappropriate in a novel that deals with Josef K.’s attempts throughout the course of a year to twist and turn his way through the process of his own trial. And indeed, having made it through the first sentence, the translator is immediately confronted by problems of another sort in the second.
Die Köchin der Frau Grubach, seiner Zimmervermieterin, die ihm jeden Tag gegen acht Uhr früh das Frühstück brachte, kam diesmal nicht.
Here Kafka himself is partly to blame. He originally began the sentence quite straightforwardly: “Die Köchin der Zimmervermieterin, die ihm jeden …”; but the manuscript reveals that he inserted the words “Frau Grubach, seiner” between the lines, introducing her immediately into the cast of characters. Literal versions such as “The cook of Frau Grubach, his landlady, who brought him breakfast …” or “His landlady Frau Grubach’s cook, who brought him breakfast …” are impossibly awkward and even grammatically misleading. The Muirs solved this problem by simply omitting her name: “His landlady’s cook, who always brought him his breakfast …” Here as so often, the Muirs smooth away the difficulties at some cost, since when Frau Grubach’s name first comes up later in the scene, it is not clear in the English version who she is. In order to reflect Kafka’s obvious intentions, I have retained her by name: “His landlady, Frau Grubach, had a cook who brought him breakfast …” Although this solution is less readable, it remains true to Kafka’s text, even in its slightly awkward construction.
Of course, Kafka may well have smoothed out such sentences, or even rewritten them entirely, had he completed the novel and prepared it for publication. He would surely have removed inconsistencies in the spelling of a character’s name, Kullich and Kullych, both versions of which are retained in the critical edition; he would probably have straightened out the confusion with time in the cathedral chapter, where K. plans to meet the Italian at ten o’clock, then later refers to eleven instead; he might well have cleared up the matter of the maid’s room where Block works and sleeps, which is at first windowless (“fensterlos”), although a few pages later it includes a window that looks out onto an air shaft. But we can hardly hold the author of The Metamorphosis to a strict standard of reality. Kafka constantly distorts time and space, and often underlines the frailty of human perception. The critical edition therefore retains such apparent anomalies, allowing the reader direct access to Kafka’s text in progress, and here too I have followed the German version faithfully.
The Trial begins as farce and ends in tragedy. The opening chapter has a strong theatrical air, complete with an audience across the way. Later that evening, when Josef K. reenacts the scene for an amused Fräulein Bürstner, who has just returned from the theater herself, he takes on both his own role and that of his accuser, replaying the farce, shouting his own name aloud with comedic consequences. The final chapter of the novel offers a carefully balanced counterpart in which the men who are sent for him, like a pair of “old supporting actors,” stage the final scene in the deserted quarry before yet another audience at a distant window. But this time no one is laughing.
Josef K.’s appearance before the examining magistrate at the initial inquiry is yet another farce, a staged gathering in which the supposed parties of the assembly are merely acting out their roles before the gallery under the direction of the magistrate. In the lawyer’s apartment, Huld calls in the merchant Block and offers a performance intended solely to demonstrate his power to K. Even the priest’s appearance in the cathedral has all the trappings of a private show for K.’s benefit.
Throughout the novel the line between farce and tragedy is blurred in such scenes. Although they are connected at the level of the plot, the relationships are made striking and forceful in the language itself. The Muirs’ translation weakens these connections by failing time and again to render Kafka’s language precisely. When K. accuses the inspector of staging “the most senseless performance imaginable” before the “audience” at the opposite window, the Muirs misread “führen … auf” as a reflexive verb and simply have him “carry on in the most sens
eless way imaginable,” while the group opposite is turned into a “crowd of spectators.” When K. reenacts that same scene for Fräulein Bürstner in the second chapter, moving the nightstand to the center of the room for his performance, he tells her she should “visualize the cast of characters” (“die Verteilung der Personen”) including himself, “the most important character,” before the action begins. The Muirs lessen the effect of this language by having her simply “picture where the various people are,” including K., “the most important person,” and undermine the sense of a rising curtain implied by “Und jetzt fängt es an,” with a colorless: “And now we can really begin.”
In the final chapter, the two “supporting actors” (the Muirs call them “tenth-rate,” but “untergeordnet” is not pejorative in German) work hard to stage the execution properly. They seek out a loose block of stone lying by the rock face of the quarry and attempt to place Josef K. upon it in a posture that seems “plausible.” Then the appalling action of the final scene begins. The Muirs, evidently unfammiliar with quarries, have the men approach a “spot near the cliffside where a loose boulder [is] lying,” and prop K. up against the “boulder.” This transformation from the manmade to a natural formation, however, creates a scene that is not only less theatrical, but impoverished in meaning, since it obscures any sense of the rectangular quarry stone as a sacrificial altar, and thus weakens the connection made throughout K.’s trial between religion and the Law. When, at the crucial moment, it becomes obvious that K. is expected to seize the butcher knife and plunge it into his own heart, it is clear in what sense the two men are “supporting actors.” Josef K. is still the most important figure in the drama, even if he cannot perform the final act himself.
Over the course of the novel, such verbal echoes accumulate with great power. Kafka took special care to create links between important passages in his work, links the Muirs consistently missed or unintentionally weakened. One extended example must suffice here.
Fräulein Bürstner’s apparent reappearance in the final chapter reminds the reader how crucially related she is to K.’s fate. Kafka has reinforced this in many ways, including in particular his use of the verb “überfallen” (to attack by surprise, assault). Although this verb has a range of meanings, including “mugging” if it occurs on the street, it is of crucial importance to render it consistently. In the opening chapter K. wonders: “wer wagte ihn in seiner Wohnung zu überfallen” (“who dared assault him in his own lodgings”). On two further occasions in that first chapter he refers specifically to this “assault,” and when he appears before the examining magistrate at the initial inquiry he repeats the same word again. Thus when he hesitates to speak to Fräulein Bürstner because his sudden emergence from his own darkened room might have “den Anschein eines Überfalls” (“resemble an assault”), and even more strikingly, when he suggests to her “Wollen Sie verbreitet haben, daß ich Sie überfallen habe” (“If you want it spread around that I assaulted you”), and repeats the phrase a sentence later, the verbal link between his slander and arrest and his relationship to the young typist is made abundantly clear. A final link in the chain of associations is forged when K. worries that his lawyer is simply lulling him to sleep, “um ihn dann plötzlich mit der Entscheidung zu überfallen” (“so that they could assault him suddenly with the verdict”). The Muirs, however, render the five occurrences where K. is referring to his own arrest or the possible verdict as: “seize him,” “grab me,” “fall upon me,” “seized,” and “overwhelm him,” while the three times Kafka uses the term in Josef K.’s conversation with Fräulein Bürstner are rendered as “waylaying her” and “assaulted” (twice). Thus no reader of the English version is in the position to recognize one of the central links in the novel, nor fully understand why her appearance in the final chapter is such a strong reminder of the futility of all resistance.
The dominant discourse in The Trial is of course legal. Some critics have gone so far as to suggest that the whole of the novel is written in legalese, reflecting Kafka’s own training as a lawyer and his abiding interest in the law, effacing all distinctions of tone, so that “everybody in The Trial, high or low, uses the same language.” But in fact the voices of the novel are clearly varied. They include not only the long legal disquisitions of the lawyer Huld, but also the voices of women, of K.’s uncle, of the merchant, the painter, and the priest. Moreover, the narrative itself is recounted in a voice we have long since come to recognize as distinctly Kafka’s own. The translator’s task includes rendering these voices individually, even if they are all entangled in the web of the law.
The German word “Prozeß,” as has often been noted, refers not only to an actual trial, but also to the proceedings surrounding it, a process that, in this imaginary world, includes preliminary investigations, numerous hearings, and a wide range of legal and extra-legal maneuvering. “The Trial” is a reasonable translation of the German, combining as it does the literal and figurative associations surrounding Josef K.’s yearlong struggle. Yet the shadowy and seemingly infinite hierarchy of mysterious courts depicted in The Trial does not correspond to any actual legal system so far as we know, then or now. Nevertheless, Kafka employs a vocabulary of recognizable legal terms that have come down to us relatively intact from the period in which he practiced law. Somewhat surprisingly, the Muir translation misses several of these scattered throughout the novel, often with unfortunate consequences, as in the following two examples, chosen from among many.
The three possibilities the painter Titorelli presents to Josef K. as outcomes for his trial are “wirkliche Freisprechung,” “scheinbare Freisprechung,” and “Verschleppung.” The first two of these, “actual acquittal” and “apparent acquittal,” represent a distinction with no parallel in actual law, but the third, which seems on the surface least likely to be real, is in fact a common German legal term referring to drawing out a trial by delaying tactics, or “protraction.” When the Muirs chose to translate this as “indefinite postponement,” they misrepresented both the tactic itself (the trial is not in fact indefinitely postponed) and its basis in actual law.
Perhaps the most striking use of a legal term occurs in the final lines of the novel, yet up to now a reader of the standard English version could have no idea it was there. When the two men thrust the knife into Josef K.’s heart, then draw near his face to observe the “Entscheidung,” the Muirs tell us they are “watching the final act.” Yet “Entscheidung” is not only the ordinary German word for “decision,” but also the legal term for a judge’s verdict. This is the verdict K. has been moving toward throughout his trial, the verdict he feared would be sprung upon him, like an assault, once he was lulled into sleep or a state of helplessness. The lessons of such a final verdict are lost, he has been told, even on the officials of the court. They can be learned only by the accused, for he alone follows the trial to its very end. Thus when the two men draw near his face and lean cheek-to-cheek “to observe the verdict,” they seek it in Josef K.’s own eyes.
Over the course of a year, Josef K. gradually weakens in his struggle with the mysterious forces that surround him. His true trial begins with the first sentence and ends only with his death. The translator’s trial is in its own way a similar ordeal. Faced with his own inadequacy, acutely aware each time he falls short, the translator too is impelled toward a final sentence in an imperfect world. No one is more aware of these imperfections than one who, like Josef K., has followed that process to its very end. It is always dangerous to translate an author one reveres as deeply as I do Kafka. The journey has not been an easy one, but it has brought me even closer to the most complex and intriguing writer of our century.
BREON MITCHELL
ARREST
Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested. His landlady, Frau Grubach, had a cook who brought him breakfast each day around eight, but this time she didn’t appear. That had never happened before. K. wa
ited a while longer, watching from his pillow the old woman who lived across the way, who was peering at him with a curiosity quite unusual for her; then, both put out and hungry, he rang. There was an immediate knock at the door and a man he’d never seen before in these lodgings entered. He was slender yet solidly built, and was wearing a fitted black jacket, which, like a traveler’s outfit, was provided with a variety of pleats, pockets, buckles, buttons and a belt, and thus appeared eminently practical, although its purpose remained obscure. “Who are you?” asked K., and immediately sat halfway up in bed. But the man ignored the question, as if his presence would have to be accepted, and merely said in turn: “You rang?” “Anna’s to bring me breakfast,” K. said, scrutinizing him silently for a moment, trying to figure out who he might be. But the man didn’t submit to his inspection for long, turning instead to the door and opening it a little in order to tell someone who was apparently standing just behind it: “He wants Anna to bring him breakfast.” A short burst of laughter came from the adjoining room; it was hard to tell whether more than one person had joined in. Although the stranger could hardly have learned anything new from this, he nonetheless said to K., as if passing on a message: “It’s impossible.” “That’s news to me,” K. said, jumping out of bed and quickly pulling on his trousers. “I’m going to find out who those people are next door, and how Frau Grubach can justify such a disturbance just opposite me.” Although he realized at once that he shouldn’t have spoken aloud, and that by doing so he had, in a sense, acknowledged the stranger’s right to oversee his actions, that didn’t seem important at the moment. Still, the stranger took it that way, for he said: “Wouldn’t you rather stay here?” “I have no wish to stay here, nor to be addressed by you, until you’ve introduced yourself.” “I meant well,” the stranger said, and now opened the door of his own accord. In the adjoining room, which K. entered more slowly than he had intended, everything looked at first glance almost exactly as it had on the previous evening. It was Frau Grubach’s living room; perhaps there was slightly more space than usual amid the clutter of furniture coverlets china and photographs, but it wasn’t immediately obvious, especially since the major change was the presence of a man sitting by the open window with a book, from which he now looked up. “You should have stayed in your room! Didn’t Franz tell you that?” “What is it you want, then?” K. said, glancing from the new man to the one called Franz, who had stopped in the doorway, and then back again. Through the open window the old woman was visible again, having moved with truly senile curiosity to the window directly opposite, so she could keep an eye on everything. “I’d still like Frau Grubach—” K. said, and started to walk out, making a gesture as if he were tearing himself loose from the two men, who were, however, standing some distance from him. “No,” said the man by the window, tossing his book down on a small table and standing up. “You can’t leave, you’re being held.” “So it appears,” said K. “But why?” “We weren’t sent to tell you that. Go to your room and wait. Proceedings are under way and you’ll learn everything in due course. I’m exceeding my instructions by talking to you in such a friendly way. But I hope no one hears except Franz, and he’s being friendly too, although it’s against all regulations. If you’re as fortunate from now on as you’ve been with the choice of your guards, you can rest easy.” K. wanted to sit down, but he now saw that there was nowhere to sit in the entire room except for the chair by the window. “You’ll come to realize how true that all is,” said Franz, walking toward him with the other man. The latter in particular towered considerably over K. and patted him several times on the shoulder. Both of them examined K.’s nightshirt, saying that he would have to wear a much worse one now, but that they would look after this one, as well as the rest of his undergarments, and if his case turned out well, they’d return them to him. “You’re better off giving the things to us than leaving them in the depository,” they said, “there’s a lot of pilfering there, and besides, they sell everything after a time, whether the proceedings in question have ended or not. And trials like this last so long, particularly these days! Of course you’d get the proceeds from the depository in the end, but first of all they don’t amount to much, since sales aren’t based on the size of the offer but on the size of the bribe, and secondly, experience shows that they dwindle from year to year as they pass from hand to hand.” K. scarcely listened to this speech; he attached little value to whatever right he might still possess over the disposal of his things, it was much more important to him to gain some clarity about his situation; but he couldn’t even think in the presence of these men: the belly of the second guard—they surely must be guards—kept bumping against him in a positively friendly way, but when he looked up he saw a face completely at odds with that fat body: a dry, bony face, with a large nose set askew, consulting above his head with the other guard. What sort of men were they? What were they talking about? What office did they represent? After all, K. lived in a state governed by law, there was universal peace, all statutes were in force; who dared assault him in his own lodgings? He’d always tended to take things lightly, to believe the worst only when it arrived, making no provision for the future, even when things looked bad. But that didn’t seem the right approach here; of course he could treat the whole thing as a joke, a crude joke his colleagues at the bank were playing on him for some unknown reason, perhaps because today was his thirtieth birthday, that was certainly possible, perhaps all he had to do was laugh in the guards’ faces and they would laugh with him, perhaps they were porters off the street-corner, they looked a little like porters—nevertheless, from the moment he’d first seen the guard named Franz, he had decided firmly that this time he wouldn’t let even the slightest advantage he might have over these people slip through his fingers. K. knew there was a slight risk someone might say later that he hadn’t been able to take a joke, but he clearly recalled—although he generally didn’t make it a practice to learn from experience—a few occasions, unimportant in themselves, when, unlike his friends, he had deliberately behaved quite recklessly, without the least regard for his future, and had suffered the consequences. That wasn’t going to happen again, not this time at any rate: if this was a farce, he was going to play along.