The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

ISBN-13: 9780199238552 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 208 str.

Joyce Crick

Opis

It is one of the most memorable first lines in all of literature: "When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into some kind of monstrous vermin." So begins Kafka's famous short story, The Metamorphosis. Kafka considered publishing it with two of the stories included here in a volume to be called Punishments. The Judgment explores an enigmatic power struggle between a father and son, while In the Penal Colony examines questions of power, justice, punishment, and the meaning of pain in a colonial setting. These three stories are flanked by two very different works. Meditation, the first book Kafka published, consists of light, whimsical, often poignant mood-pictures, while the autobiographical Letter to his Father analyzes his difficult relationship with his father in devastating detail. This new translation by Joyce Crick pays particular attention to the nuances of Kafka's style, and the Introduction and notes by Ritchie Robertson provide guidance to this most enigmatic and rewarding of writers. There is also a Biographical Preface, an up-to-date bibliography, and a chronology of Kafka's life.
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Recenzje

This edition contains a fascinating introduction by Ritchie Robertson, offering Buddhist, Freudian and expressionist readings of the text. Guardian online, WB Gooderham

O autorze

Joyce Crick taught at University College London for many years. She has written on Kafka's first English translators Willa and Edwin Muir, and for Oxford World's Classics she has translated Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (winner of the Schlegel-Tieck prize in 2000), and edited and translated a selection of Grimm's Tales. Ritchie Robertson is the author of the Very Short Introduction to Kafka. For Oxford World's Classics he has translated Hoffmann's The Golden Pot and Other Stories and introduced editions of Freud and Schnitzler. He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann.