The Trial begins with one of the most famous opening sentences in modern literature: "Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested." The arrest leads nowhere. The charges are never specified. The court is everywhere and nowhere. The process grinds on toward a conclusion that has been determined before it begins. Whether this reads as bureaucratic horror, dark comedy, theological allegory, or all three simultaneously depends almost entirely on which translation you are reading.
Kafka left The Trial unfinished at his death in 1924, and his friend Max Brod assembled and published it the following year. The novel exists in a form Kafka never finalised — chapters without agreed ordering, scenes without resolution — and translators must make editorial decisions as well as linguistic ones. The best translations acknowledge this incompleteness rather than paper over it.
The Breon Mitchell translation is this guide's primary recommendation. It is the most accurate and most scrupulously researched English Trial available, and it restores details that the earlier Muir translation smoothed away or mistranslated entirely.
The Trial — trans. Breon Mitchell (1998)
First translation, recommended for most readers
Mitchell's 1998 Schocken translation replaced the Muir version as the scholarly standard and is now the translation used in most university courses and serious reading editions. Mitchell worked directly from Kafka's manuscripts rather than Brod's edited text, which means his Trial is closer to what Kafka actually wrote — including passages that Brod silently altered and details that the Muirs mistranslated due to the German slang and bureaucratic vocabulary of Kafka's Prague. Mitchell's prose preserves Kafka's characteristic flatness: the deadpan syntax, the polite formality, the total absence of alarm in the narrator's voice as increasingly inexplicable things happen. That tonal control is what makes The Trial so disturbing, and Mitchell keeps it intact. The Schocken Definitive Edition is the one to own.
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The Trial — trans. Edwin & Willa Muir (1937)
The classic translation — significant for literary history
Edwin and Willa Muir's 1937 translation introduced Kafka to the English-speaking world and shaped how an entire generation understood his work. For decades it was the only English Trial available, and its influence on how English readers conceive of "Kafkaesque" — the oppressive labyrinthine institution, the individual swallowed by process — is impossible to overstate. The Muirs were gifted translators, and their version has a literary dignity that kept it in print for sixty years. Its weaknesses are now well-documented: some passages are mistranslated, some of Kafka's deliberate strangeness is smoothed into conventional English prose, and the Muirs worked from Brod's edited text rather than the manuscripts. Read the Muir translation for its historical importance and its prose quality. For the most accurate Kafka, read Mitchell first.
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The Trial — trans. Mike Mitchell (2015)
Most contemporary, good for a first encounter
Mike Mitchell's Penguin Modern Classics translation is the most recent major English Trial and offers a more colloquial, contemporary reading experience than either Mitchell or the Muirs. Mike Mitchell — not to be confused with Breon Mitchell — translates from a more idiomatic register, making The Trial feel immediate and accessible in a way that can lower the barrier for first-time readers of Kafka. The Penguin edition is well-produced and includes useful contextual material. Those who have read Breon Mitchell's translation may find Mike Mitchell's choices too loose; those approaching Kafka for the first time may find the contemporary idiom a helpful entry point. A solid second-choice edition.
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