Kafka (Franz) The Castle.

Translated from the German by Willa and Edwin Muir
London, Martin Secker, 1930.

First edition in English. 8vo.. Original blue cloth, lettered in gilt. Dust-jacket, priced 7s6d.

This stands as the first English translation of any of Kafka’s works, appearing some seven years before English editions of either The Trial or The Metamorphosis, which makes it considerably the rarer book.

The Castle was first published in German in 1926. It is the longest and last of Franz Kafka’s novels (1883-1924), begun in the final two years of his life and left unfinished at his death. The novel works a quiet transformation on the medieval grail narrative, substituting the quest for the grail with its protagonist’s dreamlike struggle against a remote and impenetrable bureaucracy – the kind Kafka had encountered at first hand in the unsettled years following the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy. What Kafka intended the novel to mean has never been satisfactorily resolved; this first English edition inclines toward the text’s religious symbolism, with the repeated and frustrated attempts to reach the castle read by some critics as an allegory of the search for salvation, rather than emphasising the partially autobiographical strand that led Kafka to begin the book in the first person.

The translation is made from the first German edition, incorporating the posthumous revisions of Kafka’s friend and literary executor Max Brod, who prepared the manuscript for publication.

The book was banned in Germany between 1933 and 1945 under the National Socialist regime.