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.
Punctuation generally follows established English usage, since Kafka’s own punctuation, although somewhat loose, is still well within the range of accepted German usage, and I do not wish for it to appear falsely ungrammatical. In it the structure of the definitive text of The Trial is rendered precisely, paragraph by paragraph, and sentence by sentence. Schocken Books will publish the entire translation later this year.
This new translation of the opening chapter of The Trial is based on the German critical edition prepared by Pasley for the Fischer Verlag and published in two volumes in 1990. Now, after almost three decades of reading, teaching and writing about Kafka, I have undertaken the closest reading of all, faced with the challenge of doing him justice.
Thirty years have passed, and Kafka now gazes from the shop windows of every bookstore in Prague. I had no idea then that scarcely five years later I would be studying with Malcolm Pasley in Oxford, hearing firsthand his tale of retrieving most of Kafka’s manuscripts and arranging for their deposit in the Bodleian Library, nor that my next summer would be spent walking the streets of Prague on a pilgrimage that, in the mid-sixties, still retained its spiritual excitement, and even a hint of danger under a regime that had forbidden the publication and sale of Kafka’s works. From the moment I first read The Trial, as a teenager on the plains of Kansas in the late fifties, I was drawn into his world so strongly that I have never quite escaped it. Now all I dream of is how I might have done it better. The following is Breon Mitchell’s afterword to his translation of the first chapter of Frankz Kafka’s The Trial the complete text of Mitchell’s translation was published in print issue 30.
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