The Castle

卡夫卡（1883-1924），奥地利小说家，生前鲜为人知，其作品也未受到重视，身后却文名鹊起，蜚声世界文坛。他被称为“作家中之作家”。《城堡》是其最具特色、最重要的长篇小说。

出版者:Random House Inc

作者:[奥地利] 弗朗茨·卡夫卡

页数:528

出版时间:1995-3

价格:128.00元

装帧:Pap

isbn号码:9780805210392

图书标签:卡夫卡Kafka

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Book Description

Arriving in a village to take up the position of land surveyor for the mysterious lord of a castle, the character known as K. finds himself in a bitter and baffling struggle to contact his new employer and go about his duties. As the villagers and the Castle officials block his efforts at every turn, K.’s consuming quest–quite possibly a self-imposed one–to penetrate the inaccessible heart of the Castle and take its measure is repeatedly frustrated. Kafka once suggested that the would-be surveyor in The Castle is driven by a wish “to get clear about ultimate things,” an unrealizable desire that provided the driving force behind all of Kafka’s dazzlingly uncanny fictions.

Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir

Amazon.com

They are perhaps the most famous literary instructions never followed: "Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me ... in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others'), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread...." Thankfully, Max Brod did not honor his friend Franz Kafka's final wishes. Instead, he did everything within his power to ensure that Kafka's work would find publication--including making some sweeping changes in the original texts. Until recently, the world has known only Brod's version of Kafka, with its altered punctuation, word order, and chapter divisions. Restoring much of what had previously been expunged, as well as the fluid, oral quality of Kafka's original German, Mark Harman's new translation of The Castle is a major literary event.

One of three unfinished novels left after Kafka's death, The Castle is in many ways the writer's most enduring and influential work. In Harman's muscular translation, Kafka's text seems more modern than ever, the words tumbling over one another, the sentences separated only by commas. Harman's version also ends the same way as Kafka's original manuscript--that is, in mid-sentence: "She held out her trembling hand to K. and had him sit down beside her, she spoke with great difficulty, it was difficult to understand her, but what she said--." For anyone used to reading Kafka in his artificially complete form, the effect is extraordinary; it is as if Kafka himself had just stepped from the room, leaving behind him a work whose resolution is the more haunting for being forever out of reach.

From Library Journal

Upon his death in 1924, Kafka instructed his literary executor, Max Brod, to destroy all his manuscripts. Wisely refusing his friend's last wishes, Brod edited the uncompleted Castle, along with other unfinished works, ordering the fragments into a coherent whole, and had them published. Brod's interpretation of the work as a novel of personal salvation was accepted and strengthened by Willa and Edward Muir, who translated it into English in 1930. Recent scholarship, less willing to accept Brod's version, has led to a new critical edition of the novel, which was published in German in 1982 and which purports to be closer to Kafka's intentions. Harman's translation represents this edition's first appearance in English. Harman's stated goal as translator is to reproduce as closely as possible Kafka's style, which results in an English that is stranger and denser than the Muirs' elegant work. A necessary acquisition for anyone interested in Kafka.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Michael O'Pecko, Towson State Univ., Md.

About Author

The son of a well-to-do merchant, Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 and died of tuberculosis in a sanitorium near Vienna in 1924. After earning a law degree in 1906, he worked most of his adult life at the Workers Accident Insurance Company for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague. Only a small portion of his writings were published during his lifetime; most of them, including the three unfinished novels, Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle, were published posthumously.

Mark Harman holds a Ph.D. from Yale University and has taught German and Irish literature at Oberlin and Dartmouth. In addition to writing scholarly essays on Kafka and other modern authors, he has edited and co-translated Robert Walser Rediscovered: Stories, Fairy-Tale Plays, and Critical Responses and has translated Soul of the Age: Selected Letters of Hermann Hesse, 1891-1962. He teaches literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

Book Dimension :

length: (cm)20.3 　　　 　　　　　 　 width:(cm)12.7

读后感

严彬 卡夫卡的长篇小说《城堡》中译本（人民文学出版社“名著名译插图本”）正文有二十章，另外还有附录六章。有人说，K在小说中最后将会死去。关于这点在二十章正文中没有说明——卡夫卡也许根本没有完成小说……他留下了一些其他碎片，包括被出版者取名为“异文”置于小说“...  

最近重读，当然还是没能读到最后，人物间没完没了的对话，已经不能称之为对话了，相互攻击比较贴切。记得早年看过一个关于《城堡》的评论，不记得是出自米兰昆德拉还是格非了，他说这个长篇不可能完成，如果一开始还有情节推进，那么到最后只有无尽的对谈，主人公几乎没有行动...  

这不是一篇正式的评论，只是我看书时候做得一些笔记，文笔手法上也没什么渲染，病句错字也有，应该很多（笑），但其中有一些自己最直接最真实的想法的记录。拿出笔记的后半部分。有心思能看完者我想也不多吧。笔记以原著的章节为顺序，对内容作了123....的分别讨论 我的卧室...  

又有一个同事从德国出差回来了。吃午饭的时候，大家脑海里浮现的都是那清冷的、几十年也许都不会有什么变化的街道，还有那德国特有的潮湿阴冷的天气。同事Y总结得比较直白：做德国人多没意思啊，一辈子也就那样了。 没错，要是把俺搁那儿搁个一年半载的，准会憋疯。但是回头想...  

卡夫卡，一个多么有趣且吸引人的名字，还有他的照片那双清澈如月亮般的眼睛，好像可以洞察世间事物一样，无论是有形存在的事物，还是无形存在的事物都逃不过他那双眼睛似的。我印象中很早以前接触过他的一篇短篇小说，那就是他的最为人所知的《变形记》。而真正接触他的...  

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