KAFKA, Franz.

£3,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Metamorphosis. First edition in English of Kafka's famous story, in which the protagonist finds himself transformed into an "ungeheuren Ungeziefer", translated here as "some monstrous kind of vermin". Lloyd's translation went quickly out of print in Britain, selling similarly poorly to the original publication in German, Die Verwandlung (1915). The public's unfamiliarity with the strange world of the Kafkaesque proved a difficult obstacle for the author and his early translators to overcome. In the same year as this publication, Willa and Edwin Muir produced the first English translation of The Trial, following their version of The Castle (1930), which had been financially unsuccessful. Lloyd's Metamorphosis briefly reappeared when the Vanguard Press published it in America in 1946, before vanishing into the shadow of the Muir translation. It was Lloyd who gave the work its enduring name in English. The Muirs initially used the title "The Transformation" and later reverted back to Lloyd's "The Metamorphosis".

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