Abstract

In the first part, the article discusses selected aspects of the history of the first Polish translation of F. Kafka’s novel The Trial, and indicates that numerous and significant changes were introduced into it anonymously, starting from the first post-war issue in 1957. The author claims that in fact we are not dealing with one and the same translation, but a translation palimpsest. The second part of the article presents the interpretation of The Trial which states that while writing his novel Kafka considerably referred to the anthroposophical ideas included in the book How to Know Higher Worlds by Rudolf Steiner, then regarding that it analyzes The Trial as a variant of a folktale (a mythical story) about a hero based on the findings of Vladimir Propp (Morphology of the Folktale) and Joseph Campbell (The Hero with Thousand Faces).