The Castle: A New Translation Based on the Restored Text (The Schocken Kafka Library) by Franz Kafka (EPUB)

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Ebook Info

  • Published: 2012
  • Number of pages: 353 pages
  • Format: EPUB
  • File Size: 2.23 MB
  • Authors: Franz Kafka

Description

Translated and with a preface by Mark HarmanLeft unfinished by Kafka in 1922 and not published until 1926, two years after his death, The Castle is the haunting tale of K.’s relentless, unavailing struggle with an inscrutable authority in order to gain access to the Castle. Scrupulously following the fluidity and breathlessness of the sparsely punctuated original manuscript, Mark Harman’s new translation reveals levels of comedy, energy, and visual power previously unknown to English language readers.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The notion that Harman’s translation corrects errors made by the Muirs is laughable nonsense. One need only look at the first paragraph of The Castle to see that Harman himself changes words from the German just as the Muirs do. Below, I compare the German to the translations of the Muirs, Harman, and the more recent translation by Anthea Bell. One may prefer one over the other. But all three are interpretations, not error free transliterations. Here is the German:Das erste KapitelEs war spät abends, als K. ankam. Das Dorf lag in tiefem Schnee. Vom Schloßberg war nichts zu sehen, Nebel und Finsternis umgaben ihn, auch nicht der schwächste Lichtschein deutete das große Schloß an. Lange stand K. auf der Holzbrücke, die von der Landstraße zum Dorf führte, und blickte in die scheinbare Leere empor.Here is the Muirs’ translation:It was late in the evening when K. arrived. The village was [lag] in deep snow. The Castle hill was hidden, veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there even a glimmer of light to show that a castle was there. On the wooden bridge leading from the main road to the village, K. stood for a long time gazing up into the illusory emptiness above him.In the second sentence, the Muirs replace the German past participle “lag,” or “lay,” with “was” in deep snow. In the third sentence, they introduce the word “hidden” and use “veiled” instead of “surrounded” and “mist” instead of “fog” (Nebel). In the last sentence, they use “illusory” instead of “seeming” [Scheinbar]” and add the words “above him.” Clearly, they are interpreting the German. Their interpretation is just as defensible, in my view, as is Harman’s. Here is Harman’s:It was late evening when K. arrived. The village lay [lag] under deep snow. There was no sign [war nichts zu sehen] of the Castle hill [Schloßberg], fog and darkness surrounded it, and not even the faintest glimmer of light suggested the large castle [das große Schloß]. K. stood for a long time [Lange stand K.] on the wooden bridge that leads from the road to the village, gazing upward into the seeming emptiness [und blickte in die scheinbare Leere empor].Mark Harman, Schocken “restored text” editionIn the first two sentences, Harman stays very close to the German. In the third sentence, however, Harman substitutes the noun “sign” for the German verb “sehen,” or “to see.” Like the Muirs, he translates “Schloßberg”as “castle hill,” although “Berg” is frequently translated as mountain, as in Thomas Mann’s Die Zauberberg, The Magic Mountain. German “Berg” films are about scaling mountains. “Hill” is in keeping with Kafka’s later description of the castle as rows of houses one wouldn’t recognize as a castle if it weren’t called that. Mountain would suggest a greater distortion, however. The castle’s name is directly at odds with Kafka’s description of it. Harman’s translation of “und blickte in die scheinbare Leere empor] as “gazing upward into the seeming emptiness” is a bit closer to the German than the Muirs, though both they and Harman delete “und” and change the verb “blickte” into the gerund “gazing.”Anthea Bell’s translation is even closer to the German than Harman’s:It was late evening when K. arrived. The village lay in deep snow [lag in tiefem Schnee]. There was nothing to be seen [war nichts zu sehen] of Castle Mount [Schloßberg], for mist and darkness surrounded it, and not the faintest glimmer of light showed where the castle lay. K. stood on the wooden bridge leading from the road to the village for a long time, looking up at what seemed to be a void [die scheinbare Leere].Anthea Bell, Oxford World’s Classics, ed. Richie RobertsonUnlike Harman, Bell keeps the verb “to see.” [war nichts zu sehen]. She also uses “looking” rather than “gazing” for “und blickte.” Yet she separates “for a long time” from “k.” for no apparent reason: “K. stood on the wooden bridge leading from the road to the village for a long time.” Kafka has “Lange stand K.” She also uses “void” for “Leere” whereas both the Muirs and Harman use “emptiness.” “Void” is clearly a more abstract and charged word. I prefer it to “emptiness.”One could reasonably say that the Muirs are further away from the German than Harman is and that both they and he are further from the German than Bell is. But that would also be misleading in that Bell also makes her own changes to the German, changes that strictly speaking might be called “errors.” For example, she puts “idea” in the sentence of the mayor, undoing the syntactic parallel between the Mayor and K.But her use of “idea” is also defensible, as is Harman’s “no sign” or the Muirs’ bolder “hidden.”Harman does punctuate the text just as Paisley does, however. Anthea Bell occasionally replaces commas with periods or semi-colons to break up a single sentence into two. But Paisley also makes interventions in the manuscript. Watch for endnotes mentioning the “original manuscript.” Pailsey is typical. Stanley retains passages from “Building the Chinese Wall” that Kafka crossed out, putting them in brackets, and justifies doing so in footnotes. There will never be a definitive edition or a restored text edition of The Castle. There will only be more versions.

⭐Like many of his works, Franz Kafka’s the Castle foresaw some of the most alienating aspects of the twentieth century. Even a first read of the book allows the reflective reader to see Kafka’s major theme: bureaucracy and a state that obliterates the difference between the private and the political leads to dehumanizing personal relations and a loss of our collective humanity.Kafka epitomizes this in a scene where a state assigned gopher and his boss temporarily forget that the gopher is ostensibly at the boss’s command (though he is actually a spy). The boss suddenly realizes their common humanity and changes from legalese to a more natural tone.The reader can also witness this in a reversal of such movement as the book progresses. At first, a surveyor comes to a village full of common sense and thinking reasonably. As the story develops, he increasingly begins to think and act in the self-evidently mad but ostensibly rational bureaucratic manner that pervades the townsmen.Decades before the National Socialists and the Bolsheviks created societies that resembled all too well the collective life of the Castle, Kafka was somehow able to pen one of the most eloquent, while still humorous, defenses of human nature in the face of ideologies that sought to radically change it. It really isn’t optional reading given the pervasiveness of like minded systems in the twenty-first century.In my opinion, Kafka will only grow in importance by focusing on the changes over-bureaucratization brings to personal relations while Orwell and Huxley will wane by being too tied to attacking governments of their day. The Castle just makes me look forward to reading more and more of Kafka. Highest recommendation.

⭐… as Bob Dylan once sang, in “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”I’ve read two of Kafka’s major works twice:

⭐and

⭐, and have reviewed both. Franz Kafka was a German Jewish writer who was born and raised in Prague, when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He would die young, at the age of 40, in 1924, and like some other writers, he would die of tuberculosis. His world view was worse than mere “gloomy.” There is this nightmarish quality to his writing: the lone protagonist, with the last name of “K,” locked in a struggle with a bureaucracy were all the rules, and all the people who espouse them, are “non-Euclidian,” as it were… operating in a geometry very different from the one that we were taught in school. And even those rules are shifting, “contextually.” And “K” never wanted to be there to begin with! His books resonate, since I have not only been there, but am there. Rare is the writer, Machiavelli, for example, whose last name has been turned into a word in the English language. Kafka is in that elite club. He is Kafkaesque.Thanks to a fellow Amazon reviewer who urged me to also read this work, I have again experienced the nexus between real world experience and the absurdity and existential angst of fight “the system” of Mitteleuropa of a century ago. K. is a surveyor, and has been hired by The Count of the Castle. He arrives in the village near the Castle, expecting to assume his new position. He immediately encounters the hostility of the villagers, not aimed at him specifically, but rather because he is an outsider, who does not understand the system or the power arrangements. But does anyone?The plot has two primary threads, naturally entangled. Like “The Trial,” there is K.’s dealings with the nightmarish bureaucracy, filled with idiosyncratic characters, who have their “prerogatives.” Is the messenger more important than his boss? K.’s meeting with the Mayor, in bed, with gout, is a classic. The Mayor infers that K.’s actual hiring may not have been authorized, that the bureaucracy is working on the issue, and that it is the most “trivial” of cases before it. The Mayor manages to stir in some threat and menace. Typical of Kafka’s layered style, concerning the messenger Barnabas: “But what were they to pardon him for, they answered; no charge had been brought, at least none had been entered in the records, at any rate not in the records available for public lawyers.” They do, indeed, try to keep it all hidden. There is what is available to the public, and, again as Kafka says: “I found out quite a lot from the servants about how to get taken on at the Castle by getting round the public recruitment process, which is difficult, and takes years…”Unlike “The Trial,” there is K’s relationship with women, commencing with the barmaid, Frieda, who was once Klamm’s mistress, and quickly became K’s fiancée. Barnabas has a couple of daughters who may, or may not be interested in K., and then there is the landlady. Towards the end of the work, I thought that Kafka made some interesting observations about Frieda, and her barmaid replacement (for a while) Pepi, as well as their customers.Serendipity, and those female relationships, present K. with the opportunity to pull back the curtain, a la

⭐and see how power is actually distributed. Or perhaps not, as is Kafka’s style. And is K.’s own file that single sheet of paper? Nothing can be certain. After all, they are masters at keeping it all hid!This work was unfinished at Kafka’s death. He wanted all his works destroyed. The world owes Max Brod a debt of gratitude because he disobeyed his friend’s wish. This novel ends in mid-sentence. I do think a good editor would have substantially reduced its wordiness, and seemingly irrelevant tangents, such as the relationship of Frieda and Pepi. For Kafka’s work, 4-stars; for my real-world experience, as in “The Trial,” the jury is still out.

⭐Great novel. Good quality paper and typeface, good translation. Warning: all the books in this series from this publisher have deckle/uncut edges. It doesn’t bother me, and Kafka deserve this, the best translation available.

⭐Kafka is often described as dream-like, surrealist. But the deeper I get into this book, the more my own life appears to resemble that of the protagonist. There is in fact something chillingly real about the absurdness that pervades this story.

⭐not an easy read in but worth the effort

⭐this is a beautiful book! i really like this story and I suggest you to read it! you can spend a really good time!

⭐First off this is an excellent book, as you might expect given that it was written by, arguably, one of the most influential writers of the last 150 years. I would recommend this novel to anyone with an interest in contemporary philosophical and existential literature.However, I would also suggest that anyone wanting to read this should read ‘The Trial’ (also by Kafka) first, simply because it’s a slightly gentler starting point with regards to style and narrative and is an easier way to become acquainted with Kafka’s works, before tackling ‘The Castle’ which is a trickier and more unfinished novel, but ultimately just as challenging and interesting a story.(PS: Check out his short stories as well, most are similar works of genius from one of the most unique and tragic authors who ever put pen to paper.)

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