I think it reads better, though why they added fine to “one morning” I do not know-it is not in the original text-except that it emphasizes in advance the arbitrariness of the arrest. There is nothing in the original about the state of Josef K.’s knowledge of any wrongdoing, and to be arrested knowing that one has done no wrong is different from being arrested while innocent in the opinion of an omniscient narrator.

These two versions obviously relate to the same original, but they are importantly different. This is how David Wyllie translated it seventy years later: Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested. Here is the first English translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, published in 1937, ten years after the book appeared in German: Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.

There are few more distinctive or familiar openings of a twentieth-century novel than that of Kafka’s The Trial. An author can be utterly misrepresented in a language that is not his own: David Magarshack, for example, who translated Chekhov’s plays, argued that the entire Western approach to Chekhov was grossly mistaken and based solely on mistranslations that, especially in English, falsely emphasized the melancholy aspect of his work. The job of a translator is both difficult and one of great responsibility.

The trial book kafka