A new translation into American English of Kafka's 1916 "Das Schloß", or The Castle. This is volume III in the Complete Works of Kafka by Livraria Press. The Castle is one of Franz Kafka's three unfinished novels, along with The Prodigal or America and The Trial. The work was written in 1922 and published posthumously in 1926. It depicts the futile struggle of the enigmatic surveyor K. for recognition of his professional and private existence by a mysterious castle and its representatives.

A new translation into American English of Kafka's 1915 "Das Schloß" with an afterword by the translator. This is volume I in the Complete Works of Kafka by Livraria Press. Franz Kafka's first novel, The Trial, is a disturbing and thought-provoking work that tells the story of Josef K., a man who is arrested and tried for an unknown crime. The novel explores themes of guilt, injustice and the search for meaning in a world that seems to be controlled by forces beyond our understanding. The underlying philosophy of The Trial mimics Schopenhauer's pessimistic and hopeless outlook. Kafka's novel is a bleak commentary on the human condition, in which individuals are at the mercy of forces beyond their control. The characters are caught in a labyrinth of bureaucracy aimed at keeping them in the dark and preventing them seeking the truth. The novel's suggestion is that we are all caught in a similar web of confusion and despair, and that our search for meaning and understanding is doomed to failure.

Published posthumously in 1926, "Castle" is one of Kafka's major works alongside "The Trial" and "The Metamorphosis." The novel follows the protagonist, K., who arrives in a village and seeks to gain access to the mysterious Castle situated on the hill overlooking the village. K. is appointed as a land surveyor, but he struggles to understand his role and the purpose of his mission. As K. attempts to interact with the villagers and officials connected to the Castle, he encounters various obstacles and bureaucratic hurdles. He becomes embroiled in the complex and opaque social structure of the village, where authority figures wield power arbitrarily, and communication is fraught with ambiguity. Throughout the narrative, Kafka delves into themes of alienation, the search for meaning, and the individual's futile struggle against inscrutable systems of power. The Castle itself serves as a metaphor for elusive authority, symbolizing an unreachable goal or an idealized state that remains perpetually out of reach. The novel is characterized by Kafka's distinctive writing style, marked by its surreal and dreamlike atmosphere, its exploration of psychological depths, and its use of labyrinthine bureaucratic structures as a means of social critique. "Castle" is often interpreted as a commentary on the human condition, reflecting Kafka's own sense of alienation and estrangement from the world around him. It continues to be studied and analyzed for its profound insights into the nature of power, identity, and the absurdity of existence.

Through a range of accessible and innovative chapters dealing with a spectrum of genres, authors, and periods, this volume seeks to examine the complex relationship between translation and the classic, and how translation makes and remakes (and sometimes invents) classic works for new audiences across space and time. Translation and the Classic is the first volume in a two-volume series examining how classic works fare in translation, how translation is different when it engages with classic texts, and how classic texts can be shaped, understood in new ways, or even created through the process of translation. Although other collections have covered some of this territory, they have done so in partial ways or with a focus on Greek, Roman, and Arabic texts or translations. This collection alone takes the reader from 1000 BCE up to the digital age in a sequence of chapters that encompass areas including philosophy, children’s literature, and pseudotranslation. It asks us to consider translation not just as a mechanism of distribution, but as one of the primary ways that the classic is created and understood by multiple audiences. This book is essential reading for those taking Translation Studies courses at the senior undergraduate and postgraduate level, as well as courses outside Translation Studies such as Comparative Literature and Literary Studies.

Discusses contemporary medievalism in studies ranging from Brazil to West Africa, from Manila to New York. Across the world, revivals of medieval practices, images, and tales flourish as never before. The essays collected here, informed by approaches from Global Studies and the critical discourse on the concept of a "Global Middle Ages", explore the many facets of contemporary medievalism: post-colonial responses to the enforced dissemination of Western medievalisms, attempts to retrieve pre-modern cultural traditions that were interrupted by colonialism, the tentative forging of a global "medieval" imaginary from the world's repository of magical tales and figures, and the deployment across borders of medieval imagery for political purposes. The volume is divided into two sections, dealing with "Local Spaces" and "Global Geographies". The contributions in the first consider a variety of medievalisms tied to particular places across a broad geography, but as part of a larger transnational medievalist dynamic. Those in the second focus on explicitly globalist medievalist phenomena whether concerning the projection of a particular medievalist trope across borders or the integration of "medieval" pasts from different parts of the globe in a contemporary incarnation of medievalism. A wide range of topics are addressed, from Japanese manga and Arthurian tales to The O-Trilogy of Maurice Gee, Camus, and Dungeons and Dragons.

In the archive of Verrazzano Castle in Greve in Chianti, Professor Stefaan Missinne, discoverer of the da Vinci Globe dating from 1504, stumbled upon the 500-year-old travel report by the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano. This led to Windsor Castle, where the only world map dating from c. 1515 portraying an open seaway between Florida, as an island, and Newfoundland, was found among the papers of Leonardo da Vinci. Verrazzano did meet with Magellan in Seville in 1517 prior to his historical departure, but did Leonardo, while living in France between 1516 and 1519, influence his young royal employer and his Tuscan compatriot in any way? Astonishingly, the families of Verrazzano and da Vinci had been neighbors in Florence. In this reassessment of Verrazzano´s travel report, the author offers new evidence on Leonardo and Verrazzano. The Codex Cèllere, at the Pierpont Morgan Library, now takes its rightful place as New York´s literary birth certificate.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1882.

A deep dive into the nature of translation from one of its most acclaimed practitioners Avoiding theoretical debates and clichéd metaphors, award‑winning translator Damion Searls has written a fresh, approachable, and convincing account of what translation really is and what translators actually do. As the translator of sixty books from multiple languages, Searls has spent decades grappling with words on the most granular level: nouns and verbs, accents on people’s names, rhymes, rhythm, “untranslatable” cultural nuances. Here, he connects a wealth of specific examples to larger philosophical issues of reading and perception. Translation, he argues, is fundamentally a way of reading—but reading is much more than taking in information, and translating is far from a mechanical process of converting one word to another. This sharp and inviting exploration of the theory and practice of translation is for anyone who has ever marveled at the beauty, force, and movement of language.

Dearest Father, You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, and partly because an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details than I could even approximately keep in mind while talking. And if I now try to give you an answer in writing, it will still be very incomplete, because, even in writing, this fear and its consequences hamper me in relation to you and because the magnitude of the subject goes far beyond the scope of my memory and power of reasoning, to you the matter always seemed very simple, at least in so far as you talked about it in front of me, and indiscriminately in front of many other people. It looked to you more or less as follows: you have worked hard all your life, have sacrificed everything for your children, above all for me, consequently I have lived high and handsome, have been completely at liberty to learn whatever I wanted, and have had no cause for material worries, which means worries of any kind at all. You have not expected any gratitude for this, knowing what “children’s gratitude” is like, but have expected at least some sort of obligingness, some sign of sympathy. Instead I have always hidden from you, in my room, among my books, with crazy friends, or with crackpot ideas. I have never talked to you frankly; I have never come to you when you were in the synagogue, never visited you at Franzensbad, nor indeed ever shown any family feeling; I have never taken any interest in the business or your other concerns; I saddled you with the factory and walked off; I encouraged Ottla in her obstinacy, and never lifted a finger for you (never even got you a theater ticket), while I do everything for my friends. If you sum up your judgment of me, the result you get is that, although you don’t charge me with anything downright improper or wicked (with the exception perhaps of my latest marriage plan), you do charge me with coldness, estrangements and ingratitude. And, what is more, you charge me with it in such a way as to make it seem my fault, as though I might have been able, with something like a touch on the steering wheel, to make everything quite different, while you aren’t in the slightest to blame, unless it be for having been too good to me.