New translation of Kafka’s ‘The Trial’ incorporates an unpublished fragment in Spanish

The Spanish publishing house Arpa has published a new translation of ‘The process’, by Franz Kafkain which the chapters have been reordered and an unpublished fragment in Spanish has been incorporated, recent discoveries by Reiner Stach, his most prominent biographer.

‘The process’ It is one of the most acclaimed novels of the 20th century that, as soon as it appeared in 1925, after Kafka’s death, was admired by writers such as Thomas Mann and praised by great thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Adorno and Hannah Arendt.

The epilogue that completes this new edition explains the biographical origin of the work and provides a panoramic view of its multiple interpretations and resonances, Arpa explained this Thursday.

This innovative translation is the work of the philosopher and Germanist Luis Fernando Moreno Claros, who faithfully follows Kafka’s original manuscripts and recreates his characteristic style.

Josef K., an ordinary citizen, wakes up one morning in the presence of some mysterious officials who have come to arrest him at the boarding house where he resides.

They interrogate him and tell him that he is allowed to continue with his daily life despite being detained and, from there, he finds himself involved in a labyrinthine judicial process whose inexplicable plot he will try to unravel.

To do this he will have to enter the enigmatic world of ‘court’an omniscient instance that dominates everything from the shadows.

With this argument, ‘The Process’ has been interpreted as the novel that best symbolizes the alienation and helplessness of modern man: a being lost in a tangle of absurd bureaucracy, stunned by the force of an abstract power that subjugates him, and that He sees himself abandoned to his despair in the middle of a world lacking sanity, or simply condemned to exist and die without having given meaning to his life.

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