Reading The Trial, a book filled with misery and poetry, leaves us changed—sadder and more aware. So this is it, this is the destiny of mankind: we can be persecuted and punished for an unknown crime that we did not commit, that “the court” will never disclose to us. Yet we can be ashamed of that crime until death and perhaps even beyond. Now, translating is more than reading, and I emerged from this translation as if from an illness. Translating is to examine under a microscope the fabric of the book, to penetrate it, to become entangled and involved with it. You take on this distorted world, where all logical expectations are in vain. You travel with Josef K. through dark mazes, on twisting paths that never lead where you expect.
From the first sentence, you are plunged into the nightmare of the unknowable, on every page confronted with haunting passages. K. is followed and persecuted by alien presences, by tiresome busybodies who spy on him from near and far, and in front of whom he feels stripped naked. There is a constant impression of physical constraint: ceilings are low, the rooms crammed with a jumble of furniture, the air is always gloomy, sultry, stale, dark. Paradoxically but significantly, the sky is clear only in the merciless final scene of the execution. K. is afflicted by unnecessary and irritating physical contacts; by avalanches of vague words, which are supposed to clarify his fate but confuse him instead; by pointless gestures; by desperately bleak backgrounds. His dignity as a man is compromised from the very beginning, and then relentlessly demolished day after day. Only women can, or could, provide salvation: they are motherly, loving, but inaccessible. Only Leni allows K. near her, but he despises her, he wants to be rejected; he does not seek safety. K. is afraid of punishment and at the same time wants it.
I do not believe that Kafka is very similar to me. Often, during this work of translation, I felt a collision, a conflict, an immodest temptation to untangle in my own way the knots in the text: in short, to correct, to tamper with the choice of words, to superimpose my writing style on Kafka’s. I tried to resist this temptation. Since I know that there is no “right way” to translate, I relied more on instinct than on reason. I followed a line of interpretative correctness, as honest as possible, although maybe not always consistent from page to page, as not all the pages posed the same problems. I had Alberto Spaini’s 1933 translation in front of me, and I seemed to recognize in it the reasonable propensity to smooth what was rough, to render comprehensible what was incomprehensible. The more recent (1973) translation by Giorgio Zampa follows the opposite approach: it is philologically rigorous, extremely respectful, even with the punctuation; it is parallel, interlinear. It is a translation, and presents itself as such, openly; it does not disguise itself as an original text. It does not help the reader, it does not ease the way for him, it courageously preserves the syntactical density of the German.
I believe I followed a middle course between these two. For instance, while recognizing the obsessional impact (maybe deliberate) of the speech by the defending counsel Huld, which goes on relentlessly for ten pages without a new paragraph, I had mercy on the Italian reader and introduced a few breaks. To retain the agility of the language, I did away with a few restrictive adverbs (almost, much, a little, about, maybe, etc.) that are more apt in German than in Italian. On the other hand, I made no attempt to weed out the proliferation of expressions of the “to seem” family: likely, probable, to see indistinctly, to perceive, as if, apparently, similar, and so on. They seemed to me typical, rather, absolutely indispensable, in this tale of tirelessly unraveling events where nothing is as it appears. For the rest, I made a determined effort to balance faithfulness to the text with the flow of expression. Whenever the text—notoriously tormented and controversial—contained contradictions and repetitions, I left it unchanged.
Note on the translation of The Trial, by Franz Kafka (Turin: Einaudi, 1983)
1. Levi translated The Trial from German for his publisher, Einaudi.