In 1926 Brod persuaded
Kurt Wolff to publish the first German edition of
The Castle in his publishing house. Due to its unfinished nature and his desire to get Kafka's work published, Max Brod took some editorial freedom. In 2022 the German text of
The Castle entered the
public domain in the US.
Muir translation In 1930 Willa and Edwin Muir translated the first German edition of
The Castle as it was compiled by
Max Brod. It was published by
Secker & Warburg in England and
Alfred A. Knopf in the United States. The 1941 edition, with a homage by
Thomas Mann, was the one that fed the post-war Kafka craze. In 1954 the "definitive" edition was published and included additional sections Brod had added to the
Schocken Definitive German edition. The new sections were translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. Some edits were made in the Muir text namely the changes were "Town Council" to "Village Council", "Superintendent" to "Mayor", "Clients" to "Applicants". The 1992 edition of the Muirs' translation, in Alfred A. Knopf's
Everyman's Library, contains a preface by
Irving Howe. The Muirs' translations use words that some consider "spiritual" in nature. For example, the Muirs translate the description of a church tower in K.'s homeland, which K. compares with the castle, as "soaring unfalteringly", where Harman, p. 8, uses "tapering decisively", Underwood, p. 9, writes, "tapering straight upward", and Bell, p. 11, writes "tapering into a spire". Furthermore, the Muirs use "illusory" from the opening paragraph forward. Some critics note this as further evidence of their bias toward a mystical interpretation.
Harman translation In 1961 Malcolm Pasley was able to gain control of the manuscript, along with most of the other Kafka writings (save
The Trial) and had it placed in the Oxford's
Bodleian library. There, Pasley headed a team of scholars and recompiled Kafka's works into the Critical Edition.
The Castle Critical Edition, in German, consists of two volumes—the novel in one volume and the fragments, deletions and editor's notes in a second volume. They were published by
S. Fischer Verlag in 1982, hence occasionally referred to as the "Fischer Editions". Mark Harman used the first volume of this set to create the 1998 edition of
The Castle, often referred to as based on the "Restored Text" or the "English Critical Edition". Unlike the Muir translation, the fragments, deletions, and editor's notes are not included. According to the publisher's note: We decided to omit the variants and passages deleted by Kafka that are included in Pasley's second volume, even though variants can indeed shed light on the genesis of literary texts. The chief objective of this new edition, which is intended for the general public, is to present the text in a form that is as close as possible to the state in which the author left the manuscript.
Eric Ormsby found Harman's translation generally more accurate than the Muirs' and that it gives "a sense of the harsh and jagged texture Kafka's prose on occasion displays". Yet, Ormsby added, "while Harman was usually right in his meanings, he was often wrong, and sometimes completely off, in his ability to catch the correct tone or register of a phrase or sentence". Harman includes an eleven-page discussion on his philosophy behind the translation. This section provides significant information about the method he used and his thought process. There are numerous examples of passages from Pasley's, Muir's, and his translation to provide the reader with a better feel for the work. Some feel that his (and the publisher's) praise for his work and his "patronizing" of the Muirs goes a little too far.
J. M. Coetzee writes that Harman says that his translation is "stranger and denser" than the Muirs'. But, Coetzee adds, "in its very striving toward strangeness and denseness [Harman's] own work—welcome though it is today—may, as history moves on and tastes change, be pointing toward obsolescence too". == Adaptations ==