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The trial kafka best translation6/10/2023 ![]() The storyline sounds simple enough: Gregor, a salesman who supports his father, mother and sister with his meager earnings – “an indentured servant to pay off his parents’ ancient debts”– one morning turns into a monstrous, nasty insect (at least that’s the closest English equivalent for the untranslatable German Ungeziefer a less abstract version comes from the family’s charwoman, who calls Gregor “a dung beetle”). She succeeds brilliantly, however, with a vivid fidelity to Kafka’s vision, driving home the way he makes us at once sympathetic to his anti-hero, Gregor Samsa, and repulsed by him. Susan Bernofsky’s new, exacting translation shows just how ingenious the structure of the book is, and just how difficult it is to render Kafka’s German into English. 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. In barely 100 pages, Kafka guides us through a range of emotions that resound like movements in a concerto – humor, irony, pathos, revulsion – expertly sustaining a single point of view, albeit one that is suddenly cut short the way you would, say, squash a bug. ![]()
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