【英文原声版72】Mark Anderson: The Trial

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Zachary Davis: Only a rarefied few authors have such an influence that their names become adjectives: Shakespearean, Dickensian, Orwellian. But my favorite author-turned adjective is Kafkaesque. A Kafkaesque situation is one that is disorienting, absurd, and nightmarish, where all of the normal ways of acting and responding fall apart. Franz Kafka wrote about situations that were horrific, and some of his most evocative tales were about a kind of bureaucratic dystopia, which in modern life, is pretty much a universal experience.

扎卡里·戴维斯：从古至今，只有寥寥几位作家影响力如此之大，乃至他们的名字都变成了形容词——莎士比亚式的、狄更斯式的、奥威尔式的。不过在这类形容词里面，我最喜欢的要数“卡夫卡式的”。“卡夫卡式的”情境离奇、荒谬、诡谲，寻不见一丝丝正常的举措或回应。弗兰茨·卡夫卡描绘了一些可怕的景象，他的一些最叫人回味的故事展现了反乌托邦式的官僚社会，映射了我们现代生活中近乎普遍的经历。

Mark Anderson: By describing the bureaucratic tangle of modern life in a humorous fashion, Kafka put his finger on something that ordinary people trying to negotiate a phone system of, you know, “press the button to get to this office”, and you never get there or trying to fill out some kind of bureaucratic form for unemployment, that you feel a sense of helplessness in the face of this bureaucratic world. And so the word “Kafkaesque” developed as a necessary descriptor of a lot of our modern life.

马克·安德森：卡夫卡用幽默的方式描绘了现代生活中人们与官僚机构的纠葛，精确地展现了普通人面对官僚系统时的境遇。就好比，你打电话协商什么事情，电话那头说，按某个键为您转接这个办公室，可电话最终还是打不通。再比如，你填着冗长的失业登记表，面对着官僚主义的流程，却无可奈何。“卡夫卡式的”成了我们现代生活中一个脱不开的形容词。

Mark Anderson: My name is Mark Anderson, I teach German and comparative literature at Columbia University. I've been there all my career.

马克·安德森：我叫马克·安德森，在哥伦比亚大学教德语和比较文学，我工作之后一直在哥大任教。

Zachary Davis: Kafka lived much of his life under oppressive and often dangerous governments. Writing was his way of responding to the horrors he witnessed. One of his most famous works is a novel called The Trial. The main character is a man named Josef K, who is arrested for a crime that is never revealed to him, nor the reader. Kafka wrote the book between 1914 and 1915, long before the rise of the Nazi party and the Soviet Gulags, but The Trial is often seen as an eerie prophesy for what was to come.

扎卡里·戴维斯：在一生中的大部分时间里，卡夫卡都生活在政府高压乃至恐惧的统治之下。写作是他应对眼前恐怖情形的方式。他最著名的作品之一是小说《审判》，主人公叫约瑟夫·K.。K.被捕了，但自始至终都没有人告诉他、也没有告诉读者他究竟犯了什么罪。卡夫卡在1914年至1915年间写了这本书，那时纳粹尚未崛起，苏联的古拉格劳改营也尚未建立。而《审判》常常被视为对日后恐怖现实的怪诞预言。

Mark Anderson: So, it's a haunting and quite terrifying novel, and for those people who experienced the totalitarian regimes of Hitler and Stalin in the 1930s and ‘40s, this lack of justice, this lack of transparency, this brutality of an authority that has the ability to move against an individual in this way was seen as prophetic.

马克·安德森：这是一部叫人着迷、又相当恐怖的小说。对那些经历过20世纪30至40年代希特勒和斯大林极权统治的人们来说，小说中描绘的缺乏正义和透明度、权力机关残酷压迫个体的情形颇具预言性。

Zachary Davis: Welcome to Writ Large, a podcast about how books change the world. I’m Zachary Davis. In each episode, I talk with one of the world’s leading scholars about one book that changed the course of history. For this episode, I sat down with Professor Mark Anderson to discuss Franz Kafka’s The Trial.

扎卡里·戴维斯：欢迎收听：改变你和世界的100书，在这里我们为大家讲述改变世界的书籍。我是扎卡里·戴维斯。每一集，我都会和一位世界顶尖学者讨论一本影响历史进程的书。在本集，我和马克·安德森教授一起讨论弗兰茨·卡夫卡的《审判》。

Zachary Davis: Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883, which at that time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The empire covered an enormous area of central Europe and included present day Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Croatia, and parts of Poland, Romania, Italy, Ukraine, Moldova, Serbia, and Montenegro.

扎卡里·戴维斯：1883年，弗兰茨·卡夫卡出生在布拉格。当时的布拉格正处在奥匈帝国统治之下。帝国覆盖了中欧大片区域，包括如今的奥地利、匈牙利、捷克共和国、斯洛伐克、斯洛文尼亚、波斯尼亚、克罗地亚以及波兰、罗马尼亚、意大利、乌克兰，摩尔多瓦，塞尔维亚和黑山的部分地区。

Mark Anderson: The Bohemia, as it was known, that region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that he lived in, was overwhelmingly Catholic and Czech-speaking. The German-speaking community that lived in Prague was a distinct minority, but they had the power. So, it's a little bit like as if Florida were 95% Hispanic, Spanish-speaking, but the official language of government was still English. That was the unbalanced situation.

马克·安德森：卡夫卡生活在奥匈帝国统治下的波西米亚地区，这个地区的人绝大多数是天主教徒，说捷克语。说德语的人在布拉格占少数，但很有权力。可以这么来理解：假设佛罗里达州95%的人口都是西班牙裔，都讲西班牙语，但官方语言仍然是英语。布拉格当时的情况就类似于这样，非常不平衡。

Mark Anderson: So, the German speakers were resented by the Czech population. Within the German-speaking minority in Prague, the Jews were another minority. Many of the Jews were German-speaking or at least sent their kids, their children to German-speaking schools and the university. So they were in a kind of double minority, hated as Germans, but also looked down upon or the victims of prejudice, not only on the part of the Czech-Catholic majority, but also on the part of the Catholic-German, majority within the German-speaking world.

马克·安德森：捷克人对德语群体非常不满，而在布拉格的德语群体之中，犹太人又是少数。许多犹太人都说德语，或者至少将子女送到德语授课的学校。于是犹太裔德语群体成了布拉格的双重少数群体，不仅对多数捷克天主教徒来说是少数派，和德语群体中多数天主教徒相比也是少数。

Zachary Davis: Kafka was part of this double minority. He grew up in a middle class, Jewish, German-speaking family. And like many German-speaking Jewish families in the region, they wanted to assimilate. His parents were part of the first generation to move from the countryside to the city where Kafka was born.

扎卡里·戴维斯：卡夫卡是这个双重少数群体中的一员。他出生于一个说德语的犹太中产阶级家庭。他们家像当地许多德语犹太家庭一样，想要融入这个城市。卡夫卡的父母离开祖辈生活的农村，搬到了布拉格。在这里，卡夫卡出生了。

Mark Anderson: And so Kafka and his generation found themselves in a kind of spiritual, religious void. Their parents were no longer giving them that firm belief in their traditions and their religion that they had experienced, but the surrounding society was not accepting them as Jews. There was still a lot of interdictions, restrictions on what Jews could do, whether they could get a position in the university or practice medicine and so forth. So, they found themselves in a void. And so Kafka and his friends became very involved in their Judaism.

马克·安德森：卡夫卡和他的同辈人发现，自己陷入了精神与信仰的虚空之中。他们的父母不再坚持让他们遵从祖辈恪守的传统、信仰祖辈信奉的宗教，但周围社会并不接纳他们的犹太裔身份。当时仍然有很多针对犹太人的限制——不能在大学任教、不能从事医学工作。他们觉得仿佛陷入了一片虚空之中。于是，卡夫卡和朋友们开始积极投入到犹太传统中。

Zachary Davis: Kafka and his peers wanted to reconnect with their Jewish roots, which their parents were trying to abandon. But Kafka was more interested in the cultural aspects than the religious.

扎卡里·戴维斯：卡夫卡和朋友们想恢复父母一辈试图摆脱的犹太传统。不过在众多传统中，卡夫卡更感兴趣的是文化传统，而不是宗教传统。

Mark Anderson: He wasn't somebody who went to synagogue on a regular basis. But to be an artist, to be a writer also meant for him to discover that part of Jewish traditions, the Jewish legends, Jewish theater, Yiddish theater that his parents made a habit of avoiding, as if they were embarrassed. Assimilating German-speaking Jews often avoided anything having to do with Yiddish, with Eastern Europe.

马克·安德森：他没有定期去犹太教堂。不过要成为一名艺术家、一名作家，他就得去发掘父母想要摆脱的犹太传统、犹太传说和犹太戏剧。他的父母仿佛觉得难堪似的，刻意不看犹太人的意第绪戏剧。想要融入布拉格的德语犹太人常常避免和意第绪语还有东欧相关的任何东西沾上关系。

Zachary Davis: What's the general arc of his writing career?

扎卡里·戴维斯：卡夫卡的写作生涯大致是怎样的？

Mark Anderson: He started writing very young, the earliest things we have by him are pieces he wrote in his early 20s. He studied law. His parents pushed for him to have a kind of traditional, respectable career. But he took a job in an insurance company that allowed him to have much of the later part of the day to himself. He worked from 8:00 in the morning till 2:00 without a break, went home for lunch, had a nap, and then the rest of the day was his. And he used that schedule to write in the evening and even at night.

马克·安德森：卡夫卡很小的时候就开始写作。在如今我们能看到的所有作品当中，最早的是他二十来岁的时候写的。他在大学学了法律。父母想让他从事一份传统的、受人尊敬的职业，但他在保险公司做起了小职员，这样一来，一天里的大部分时间他都能自由安排。他的工作时间是早上八点到下午两点，中途没有休息。下班后，他回家吃个午饭，小憩一会，剩下的时间就全部是他自己的了。他一般晚上写作，甚至会写到深夜。

Zachary Davis: He started out writing short, impressionistic works about urban life. He wrote for roughly a decade without much success or recognition. His interest in Yiddish theatre helped define his sense of drama, but his stories just weren’t landing with audiences.

扎卡里·戴维斯：他开始创作有关城市生活的印象式小短篇。他写了大约十年，但一直没有什么反响。他对意第绪戏剧的兴趣让他有了对戏剧的感觉，但他的小说并没有吸引到读者。

Mark Anderson: He experiences in the fall of 1912 a miraculous breakthrough, which is the word that he uses. He writes The Judgment, his first major story, and then he writes The Metamorphosis shortly after that, and the novel America or The Man Who Disappeared, as it sometimes translated, all in the space of a couple of months at the end of 1912, in which suddenly he's telling stories that are intensely dramatic and visual, where you feel the actors, or the protagonists are actors on the stage.

马克·安德森：1912年的秋天，用他自己的话来说，他有了“奇迹般的突破”。他开始创作写作生涯中第一个重要小说——《判决》，接着又写了《变形记》。不久之后，他又写了《美国》，又称《失踪者》。所有这些都是在1912年最后几个月写下的。突然之间，他的小说充满戏剧性和场景感，让你觉得小说主角仿佛都是舞台上的演员。

Zachary Davis: This same year, Kafka met a young woman named Felice Bauer. She, like Kafka, was drawn to her Jewish roots. Like many of their peers, they wanted to take a trip to Palestine.

扎卡里·戴维斯：那一年，卡夫卡遇到了一个叫菲利斯·鲍尔的年轻女子。她和卡夫卡一样，对犹太传统很感兴趣。他们也像许多同龄人一样，想去巴勒斯坦旅行。

Mark Anderson: And they begin a correspondence with this idea in mind that they would perhaps travel together. Kafka already thinks of this woman as his fiancée, his future wife, and it's while he's writing to her that this breakthrough occurs, so that he's writing in a fever — his stories and his novel. But he's also writing three, four letters a day to this woman. It's a real breakthrough in many ways.

马克·安德森：他们互相通信，计划着或许一起旅行。卡夫卡把她看做未来的妻子。正是在给她写信的时候，卡夫卡在写作上出现了“奇迹般的突破”。他怀着满腔热情写下了一个个故事、一篇篇小说，还给女友每天写三四封信。从很多方面来讲，当时的卡夫卡都有着真正的突破。

Zachary Davis: But their relationship falls apart just a few months after it begins.

扎卡里·戴维斯：但没过几个月，两人之间就冷淡了下来。

Mark Anderson: When the relationship is no longer there, when the promise of this marriage, this engagement is no longer there, he stops being able to produce literature. And there's a long hiatus that lasts about a year, until—a year and a half—until he has another breakthrough and writes, very quickly, The Trial and In The Penal Colony in the summer and the fall of 1914. And those two moments, the fall of 1912, the summer and fall of 1914, intense bursts of creativity in which he writes, two of his three novels and a good number of his most famous stories.

马克·安德森：后来，他们的婚约解除了，卡夫卡的创作也中断了。他停了很长一段时间，有大概一年到一年半都没有写什么作品。好在1914年他有了新的突破，在夏天和秋天先后迅速写下了《审判》和《在流放地》。他在两个创作季——1912年秋天和1914年夏秋的时候，写下了他三部长篇小说中的两篇以及许多最有名的短篇小说，迸发出强大的创造力。

Zachary Davis: Kafka was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1917. He battled the disease for the next seven years, all the while continuing to write. In 1924, his condition grew worse, and he died in June at the age of 40. Kafka only published a few short stories during his life. He was hardly known outside of his own literary circles. His small profile during his own life is hard to believe given the height of his literary fame today.

扎卡里·戴维斯：1917年，卡夫卡被诊断出肺结核。之后的七年里，他一边与疾病作斗争，一边继续写作。1924年，他的病情恶化。6月他去世了，享年40岁。卡夫卡生前发表的作品只有几篇短篇小说。在他自己的文学小圈子之外，很少有人知道他。想到如今他的文学地位，你很难相信他生前竟然这么鲜为人知。

Mark Anderson: And it almost didn't happen because Kafka was plagued by doubts about the quality of his work. None of his novels was finished. So, he left instructions with his friend and the literary executor of his estate to burn everything that hadn't been published up until that point. And as a result, if his friend Max Brod had actually carried out that request, we would know nothing about Kafka. We would never be speaking about him. But Brod was absolutely convinced of the quality of this work, and he spent the rest of his life really dedicated to making sure the world knew who Kafka was.

马克·安德森：他没有发表这些作品，因为他总怀疑自己写得不够好。他的所有小说都没有写完。去世前，他告诉朋友兼遗稿保管人马克思·布罗德，在他死后烧掉所有未出版的手稿。若是布罗德听从了他，那么我们就永远不知道卡夫卡，也永远不会谈论他了。好在布罗德相信这些作品的质量，余生一直努力把卡夫卡的作品带到全世界人们的面前。

Zachary Davis: Max Brod succeeded in his mission, and Kafka became hugely popular around the world.

扎卡里·戴维斯：马克思·布罗德成功了——卡夫卡在世界各地广受欢迎。

Mark Anderson: Kafka becomes a true literary phenomenon. After the end of World War II, there's a memoir by a New York Times reviewer called “Kafka Was All the Rage” about life in Greenwich Village in the 1950s. That gives you an idea of how important Kafka was for a certain bohemian, alternative, artistic world in America, but not just in America.

马克·安德森：卡夫卡成了真正现象级的文学作家。第二次世界大战结束后，《纽约时报》的评论家撰写了一部回忆录，名为《卡夫卡无处不在》，回忆了20世纪50年代纽约格林威治村的生活。由此可见，卡夫卡对美国乃至全世界波西米亚式的小众艺术圈子来说多么重要。

Mark Anderson: That brings me to The Trial because Kafka wrote The Trial in 1914. He died in 1924. As a result, he never knew or experienced the Nazis, the rise of Hitler to power, but many people who experience the persecution and the totalitarianism of the 1930s and ‘40s believed that Kafka, and especially the novel The Trial, that Kafka was a prophet who had understood what the legal system was capable of and read The Trial, which begins with two men entering a man's bedroom and arresting him without ever telling him what he is guilty of.

马克·安德森：所以我今天谈起了《审判》。卡夫卡于1914年写下这本小说，1924年去世。他从没有经历过纳粹统治，也没有目睹希特勒上台。但很多经历过20世纪30、40年代极权统治的人认为，特别是在小说《审判》中，卡夫卡像先知一样，揭示了法律制度能对个体做什么。在《审判》的开头，两个人来到一个人的卧室，把他逮捕了，从头到尾都没有告诉他犯了什么罪。

Zachary Davis: Yeah, it has prophetic qualities, which is remarkable. Could you try to summarize this enigmatic story? What does the story unfold?

扎卡里·戴维斯：它有预言的特征，这也是它了不起的地方。您能给我们概括一下这个诡异的故事吗？它展现了什么？

Mark Anderson: The Trial, as the title suggests, is a kind of crime novel. Usually a crime novel has a clear crime, and there's a perpetrator who is revealed, discovered by the detective at the end. This is a crime novel in which the crime itself is never revealed. The novel begins: “Someone must have been spreading rumors about Josef K because without having done anything wrong, one day he was arrested.” We're told that Josef K is still in his nightshirt in bed when the men come into the room. Their clothing is described very precisely. So, there are lots of very specific details that pique the reader's interest.

马克·安德森：顾名思义，《审判》是一本犯罪小说。一般来说，犯罪小说会揭晓罪行，指认罪犯，最终侦探会让真相水落石出。但这本犯罪小说从头到尾都没有揭晓主人公犯了什么罪。小说是这样开头的：“有人诬陷了约瑟夫·K.，肯定的。因为这天早上，他被捕了——但他什么坏事都没做”。约瑟夫·K.还穿着睡衣躺在床上，这时候一个男人进了房间。卡夫卡精细地描述了这个人的衣着。书里有很多细节都让读者很感兴趣。

Mark Anderson: The other thing, of course, that Kafka does in this novel is describe a world in which everything is quite oppressive. There's not enough air to breathe in the rooms that he travels to. The ceilings are so low that it's cramped. There's a kind of strange logic that doesn't allow you to know whether what is happening to Josef K is reality or somehow in his head. Bizarre, strange things happen to him, that everyone seems to be an enigma wrapped in a riddle surrounded by a mystery, to misquote Churchill.

马克·安德森：卡夫卡在小说里还做了一件事。他描绘了一个世界，那儿的一切都令人压抑。K.去的房间里没有足够的空气呼吸。天花板太低了，K.不得不蜷缩着身子。所有事情都如此荒谬，你甚至不知道K.所经历的是现实还是他的臆想。各种奇奇怪怪的事情发生在他身上，误用丘吉尔的话来说，所有人都像“被层层谜团包裹的谜团”。

Mark Anderson: Eventually he's arrested, but he's not put into prison. He is never told what he's guilty of. He tries to go to the law courts to discover what's going on, but doesn't get any further. And one has the feeling that he is treading in snow and never getting further, that he's walking in circles, that he's not moving forward. But at the end of the novel, there are two men who arrive, and Josef K seems to be waiting for them. They escort him out onto the street to a deserted quarry. It's a moonlit night. He's completely alone. And they put a knife in his chest, and his dying words are: “Like a dog!”.

马克·安德森：K.被捕了，但没有被关进监狱。自始至终都没有人告诉他犯了什么罪。他想去法院弄清原委，但没有丝毫进展。你感觉，他像是在雪地里迈步，永远迈不动腿；又像是在兜圈子，永远没法向前。在小说末尾，两个人来到了K.的住处，K.似乎也在等待他们。两人架着他穿过街巷，来到了一处废弃的采石场。月夜下，K.孤自地面对着他们。他们持着刀，刺入了K.的心脏。“像一条狗！”K.说着，就这么死去了。

Mark Anderson: So, it's a quite brutal novel and brutal because one's never told what he has done. Is he guilty? Many things in the novel indicate a kind of guilty conscience, but at the same time, it's a horrible, he's given a death sentence and is never told who the judge is, who's decided on this punishment, or indeed what his crime is.

马克·安德森：这是一部非常残酷的小说，小说里没有人告诉主人公犯了什么罪。他有罪吗？小说中的很多地方都暗示他有些心虚，但可怕的是，他被判了死刑，却从没有人告诉他判决结果是什么、法官是谁或罪名到底是什么。

Zachary Davis: So, one of the themes of The Trial is clearly an examination of power. What do you think he is saying about power and about bureaucratic power in particular?

扎卡里·戴维斯：《审判》的主题之一显然是对权力的审视。您觉得卡夫卡是在探讨权力、尤其是官僚机构的权力吗？

Mark Anderson: Kafka was somebody who was always writing about power relationships and understood power and was very good at describing power from the point of view of somebody who is the object, the victim of power, from the person down below experiencing the exercise of power.

马克·安德森：卡夫卡经常在作品中在探讨权力关系。他善于从个体角度出发刻画权力，这些个体大多是权力的受害者，处于权力的压迫之下。

Mark Anderson: Josef K—it's interesting, he's not given a full name. He remains a kind of cipher. People have said, well, this suggests that anonymity of the modern bureaucracy where people are reduced to numbers or initials or cases. And that is certainly true. He was very much aware. He worked in an insurance company. He was aware of the use of statistics that were beginning to describe individuals in terms of numbers and risk factors rather than as human beings.

马克·安德森：有意思的是，《审判》的主人公叫约瑟夫·K.，没有全名，名字就像一个代号。人们说，这展现了现代官僚机构的特征——他们革去人们的姓名，让他们沦为一个个字母或案件代码。事实的确如此，卡夫卡也很清楚。他在一家保险公司工作，公司做统计时用数字和风险因素来衡量受保人，而不是把他们看作一个个人。

Zachary Davis: Kafka hated this trend towards depersonalization. And he saw firsthand how this depersonalization made it easier to disempower workers. At one point, he became a civil servant for the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute, which handled workman’s compensation. Workers who had been injured on a job would come to him to see what they could get in compensation.

扎卡里·戴维斯：卡夫卡讨厌这种去人格化的趋势。他亲眼目睹了这种去人格化如何在剥夺工人权力时起到了推波助澜的作用。他曾在工伤事故保险公司当职员，这家公司负责处理工人们的保险赔偿款。受工伤的工人们会来找他，看看能拿到什么赔偿。

Mark Anderson: But he noted privately, “They come so meekly, rather than storming the palace, rather than tearing down the insurance company walls, they come meekly, their hats in their hands.” So, he saw the dilemma that the people who were the victims of power were often the most meek and willing to acquiesce in giving up their rights, in giving up their own power, not protesting, and not making use of the power that they had.

马克·安德森：他私下说：“他们温和地过来了。他们没有冲进大厅，把保险公司的墙砸个粉碎。他们手上抓着帽子，温和地走了过来。”他看到了一个矛盾的地方：权力受害者往往非常温和，顺从地放弃自己的权利和力量，不反抗不挣扎，不动用自己的力量。

Mark Anderson: And I think that's one of the things that you see in The Trial, that Josef K, for whatever reason, accepts this notion of a trial and never gives up trying to play by the rules of this trial, even though those rules are obscure to him. It's some organization that works, and he's never been given a copy of the rules. And he, nonetheless, he wants to play the game, and he tries to play the game. But it's an uneven playing surface, and he winds up not being able to compete or to represent himself or to win in any significant way.

马克·安德森：你可以在《审判》中看到这一点。K.不知何故接受了审判的概念，所作所为都按照这场审判的游戏规则来，即使这些游戏规则对他来说太过晦涩。规则背后是一套运转的体系，但体系中从未有人告诉过他规则。尽管如此，K.还想努力玩这场游戏。然而这场游戏自始至终就是不对等的，直到最后他也没有胜出，没法以任何有力的方式自我辩护或赢得这场游戏。

Zachary Davis: He places faith in a rational government or rational bureaucracy, and that faith is just simply not rewarded. It's a misplaced faith. There is no rational order to society. It ends up being, you know, the strong dominate the weak.

扎卡里·戴维斯：他相信理性的政府，相信理性的官僚机构，而它们却辜负了他。他错将信任付于它们，却不知这社会根本没有理性的秩序，结局只有强者支配弱者。

Mark Anderson: That's right. That's right. And at the very beginning of The Trial, Josef K is reflecting on what has just happened to him. And he says, “I live in a society of laws, a state that is ein rechtsstaat,” which means “a state governed by laws”. So, he doesn't understand how this could have happened. It's that lack of legal justification, even though he thinks he's living in a society governed by laws, that is the real absurdity, the real existential dilemma that he's in throughout the novel.

马克·安德森：没错。在《审判》的开头章节，K.思考着刚刚的遭遇，心想：自己生活在一个法治社会，法律法规治理着整个国家。他不明白为什么会发生这些事。即使他以为自己生活在一个法治社会，在毫无法律依据的情况下他就被捕了。这才是真正的荒谬之处，也是整部小说中他的切实处境。

Zachary Davis: So, as you've noted, part of the strong appeal of Kafka was that he prophesied and described the rise of ultimately cruel, powerful bureaucracies tied to, you know, state power. Is state power, state bureaucracies...do these rise because of, you know, forces of nationalism, forces of industrialization, scientific theories about, you know, how to kind of rationalize society? You know, what are the other historical forces that led to this, led to Kafka trying to describe this emerging social phenomenon?

扎卡里·戴维斯：正如您所说，卡夫卡吸引人的地方之一就是他预言并描述了行使国家权力的残酷、强大的官僚机构崛起后的样子。国家官僚机构为什么会崛起？是因为民族国家的发展、工业化的推动以及社会研究等科学理论的发展吗？还有哪些因素导致了卡夫卡笔下这种新的社会现象？

Mark Anderson: I think one crucial aspect is that, rationalization of industry, modernization, technology, those things were pushing society towards an efficiency that I think Kafka understood was related to this assault on the individual. And the brother of Max Weber, the famous German sociologist, a man named Alfred Weber, was actually in Prague lecturing about bureaucracy. So, already before the First World War, sociologists, historians of society, of culture were aware of those processes of bureaucratization and the increasingly anonymous quality of modern urban life. And they're describing it.

马克·安德森：我觉得工业的普及、现代化的发展与技术的进步是几个关键因素。这些因素让社会效率提升，但这种效率在卡夫卡看来反而会损伤个体。马克斯·韦伯的弟弟、德国著名社会学家阿尔弗雷德·韦伯当时正在布拉格讲学，主题便是官僚主义。在第一次世界大战前，社会学家、社会历史学家和文化历史学家已经意识到官僚主义慢慢滋生，个体渐渐淹没在现代城市生活中。他们也描述了这些现象。

Mark Anderson: So these ideas were not in the air. Kafka gives them an unbelievable novelistic form, but the ideas were there. And one of the very strong ideas in German society that emerges at the end of the 19th century is the difference between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. Those are German words, meaning “community” and “society”.

马克·安德森：这些观点并非凭空而出，当时已经有人提出来了，只不过卡夫卡用精彩的小说形式将它们呈现了出来。在19世纪末期的德国，一个非常重要的观点就是“社区”和“社会”的区别。

Mark Anderson: And, of course, what was going on in Prague, but also throughout Europe, was this move, this huge demographic shift from small, rural communities into big, urban centers in which people not only left the countryside and agricultural work for the city, but they lost a community, a small world in which they were known, in which they knew the other members of the community and found themselves in a city where they were anonymous.

马克·安德森：在人口上，布拉格乃至整个欧洲出现了巨大的变化。许多人离开农村小社区，来到了中心大城市。迁徙到城市的人们不仅远离了乡野和农务，也远离了熟悉的小社区。在原先的小社区里，人与人之间都很熟悉；而在大城市，他们的姓名却淹没在人群中。

Mark Anderson: And so German sociologists at the time described this as the difference between community and society, modern urban society. And I think that's one of the things that Kafka's world was aware of and that Kafka very much wanted to describe in his novels.

马克·安德森：当时的德国社会学家认为这是“社区”与“社会”之间的差异。我觉得这个差异也是卡夫卡意识到的，他很想在小说中展现这种差异。

Zachary Davis: Okay, I'd love to talk now about the afterlife of Kafka. So, you mentioned that he really takes off after World War II kind of globally. What accounts for his continued importance in the literary world?

扎卡里·戴维斯：我们现在来谈谈卡夫卡的影响吧。您刚刚说，二战后他在世界各地广受欢迎。为什么他在文学领域一直这么有影响力？

Mark Anderson: The reason Kafka continues to be read is the same reason that teenagers often find him so funny and so close to them, that they feel he speaks to their situation. A teenager is somebody who is already in many ways an adult and wants to be able to live with the freedom and the rules of adults but is being kept from doing that, and therefore finds themselves in a situation of powerlessness, even though they have an adult awareness of their situation. And so I think Kafka again and again describes people in that situation of wanting the world to be rational, wanting to be able to live fully, but in fact they find themselves powerless and incapable of defeating the authority that is keeping them back.

马克·安德森：人们阅读卡夫卡的原因一直没变。青少年觉得他很有意思、和他们很像，道出了他们的处境。青少年往往在很多方面已经是大人了，他们想自由自在地生活，却总是受阻挠。他们即使已经有成人意识，却陷入了无能为力的境地。我觉得卡夫卡一次次地表达了人们在这种境况下的愿望——希望世界变得理性，希望能自由全面地生活。然而实际上，他们发现自己无能为力，也无法击败阻碍他们前进的权威。

Mark Anderson: If Kafka speaks to the adolescent, he will also speak to the adult who has a memory of what it was like to be an adolescent. He will also speak to minorities or weaker states that are oppressed by majorities or more powerful states because he's a kind of clinician of power or somebody who is able to describe power relations from the down-below. I think that he continues to speak to people, and I think that's the reason that he became so well-known after World War II, because World War II had given tens of millions of people the experience, the direct experience of what the exercise of arbitrary power was like.

马克·安德森：卡夫卡不仅道出了青少年的心声，还道出了留有青春期记忆的成年人的心声。作为权力的剖析者和从小人物视角描绘国家权力的人，他也道出了少数群体面对多数群体、弱国面对强国时的心声。我觉得他一直在道出人们的心声，这也是为什么二战之后他变得如此有名，因为二战让数千万人切身体会到极权的恶果。

Zachary Davis: In the 1960s, Prague was ruled by a socialist government that was controlled by the Soviet Union. Kafka’s work was not allowed under this government, so people began reading and reproducing his works in secret.

扎卡里·戴维斯：1960年代，布拉格由苏联控制的社会主义政府统治，卡夫卡的作品被政府封禁。人们开始偷偷阅读、传抄他的作品。

Mark Anderson: People copied his novels out by hand, and these handwritten copies circulated under the table in secret until at a certain point, the people in Prague rose up and protested. So, he has continued, I think, to animate people seeking justice. He speaks to one and all.

马克·安德森：人们用纸笔抄写他的小说，私下传播。直到有一天，布拉格的人们起来反抗。所以我觉得，卡夫卡一直鼓舞着追求正义的人们，他道出的是每一个人的心声。

Zachary Davis: What other authors have found him inspirational? And do you see any resonance in other media as well?

扎卡里·戴维斯：有哪些作家觉得他们受到了卡夫卡的启发？您在其他媒体上有没有看到什么反响？

Mark Anderson: Kafka had an enormous influence on writers in, starting already in the, very much in the ‘50s and ‘60s. There was a kind of Kafka voice or style. His works were so instantly recognizable that they could also be copied and adapted. And very quickly, also, people realized that they're very visual.

马克·安德森：从20世纪50、60年代起，卡夫卡就对很多作家产生了巨大的影响，甚至出现了一种卡夫卡式的风格。他的作品迅速得到了认可，被广泛模仿、改编。很快，人们发现这些作品很有场景感。

Mark Anderson: So, Orson Welles made a film based on The Trial in the 1950s that interpolated scenes from Nazi Germany and concentration camps in a way that made clear the connection. There have been again and again plays and movies produced or based on Kafka's works because, going back to the Yiddish theater, Kafka had understood the theater and drama and a kind of plastic visual mise-en-scène of his stories was essential.

马克·安德森：20世纪50年代，奥森·威尔斯基于《审判》拍了一部电影，其中还加入了纳粹德国和集中营的片段，显化了小说中的隐喻。他的作品被一次次地搬上舞台和银幕，因为他的小说呈现出了某种可塑的视觉效果，而这或许可以归结到他对意第绪戏剧的热爱。

Zachary Davis: In The Trial, Kafka showed readers the horrors we experience when subjected to an arbitrary exercise of power. It can make us feel alone and defeated. Kafka continues to resonate because his works show us that this feeling of powerless isolation is sadly more and more of a universal human experience.

扎卡里·戴维斯：在《审判》中，卡夫卡向读者展现了极权下的恐怖经历。在极权统治下，我们孤自陷入绝境，被彻底击垮。书中那种无能为力的孤独感成为人类越来越普遍的情感体验，也正因此，一直以来卡夫卡不断引发着人们的共鸣。

Mark Anderson: The Trial allowed readers to understand what that’s like, what it's like to experience that arbitrary power, use of power. And I think that’s tremendously important for almost any worlds or society we live in, that he allowed us to see that.

马克·安德森：《审判》让读者知道了什么是极权、生活在极权统治下是什么感觉。卡夫卡把这些呈现在我们眼前，我觉得这对我们所处的任何社会来说都极其重要。

Zachary Davis: Writ Large is a production of Ximalaya. Writ Large is produced by Jack Pombriant, Liza French, and me, Zachary Davis. Script editing is by Galen Beebe. We get help from Feiran Du, Ariel Liu and Monica Zhang. Our theme song is by Ian Coss. Don’t miss an episode. Subscribe today in the Ximalaya app. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

扎卡里·戴维斯：本节目由喜马拉雅独家制作播出。感谢您的收听，我们下期再见！