Part 23

I took possession of the manuscript of the novel “The Trial” in June 1920 and arranged it at that time. The manuscript bears no title. Yet in conversation Kafka always gave the novel the title “The Trial.” The division into chapters as well as the chapter headings are Kafka’s own. As for the arrangement of the chapters, I had to rely on my own feeling. But since my friend had read aloud to me a large part of the novel, my feeling in ordering the papers could lean on memories. — Franz Kafka regarded the novel as unfinished. Before the concluding chapter that is present, several further stages of the mysterious proceedings were still to be described. But since, in the poet’s orally expressed view, the trial was never to advance to the highest instance, in a certain sense the novel was altogether uncompletable, i.e., extendable in infinitum. The completed chapters, taken together with the rounding-off final chapter, in any case let both the meaning and the shape of the work emerge with the clearest lucidity, and whoever is not alerted to the fact that the poet himself intended to go on working at the book (he omitted to do so because he turned toward another atmosphere of life) — will scarcely feel its gap. — My work on the great bundle of papers that this novel then constituted was limited to separating the completed from the uncompleted chapters. The uncompleted ones I reserve for the final volume of the posthumous edition; they contain nothing essential to the course of the action. One of these fragments was taken by the poet himself, under the title “A Dream,” into the volume “A Country Doctor.” The completed chapters are here united and ordered. Of the uncompleted, I have included only one, which is evidently nearly finished, with a slight transposition of four lines, as Chapter 8 here. — In the text I have naturally altered nothing. I have merely transcribed the numerous abbreviations (e.g., instead of F. B. “Fräulein Bürstner” — instead of T. “Titorelli” written out in full) and corrected a few small oversights that obviously remained in the manuscript only because the poet did not subject it to a definitive revision.

Max Brod.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”