KAFKA, Franz. The Metamorphosis.

KAFKA, Franz. The Metamorphosis.First Edition of Kafkas Metamorphosis in English KAFKA, Franz. The Metamorphosis. London: The Parton Press. 1937. 8vo. Publishers blue buckram backed boards with black paper sides, blue printed label to upper board; pp. [vi], [1 (blank)], 74; a little spotting to fore edges, else a very good copy. First complete English translation of Kafkas Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), printed by the publisher of Dylan Thomass first book and translated by the

First Edition of Kafka’s Metamorphosis in English

KAFKA, Franz. The Metamorphosis. London: The Parton Press. 1937.

8vo. Publisher’s blue buckram-backed boards with black paper sides, blue printed label to upper board; pp. [vi], [1 (blank)], 74; a little spotting to fore-edges, else a very good copy.

First complete English translation of Kafka’s Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), printed by the publisher of Dylan Thomas’s first book and translated by the influential folklorist Bert Lloyd.

The translator, the London-born folk singer, ethnomusicologist, and broadcaster Albert Lancaster Lloyd (also known as Bert Lloyd, 1908-1982), is perhaps best remembered for his instrumental role in popularising British folk music in the 1950s and 1960s; in 1959 he was the co-editor of The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, with Ralph Vaughan Williams. At the age of sixteen, he went to Australia to work as a shepherd and farmhand, returning to England in the early 1930s, where he worked briefly at the Foyles Foreign Books Department, spent a great deal of time in the British Museum’s reading room, befriended Dylan Thomas and Jack Lindsay, joined the Communist Party, and produced a translation of poems by Lorca. It is perhaps through Thomas that he became connected with David Archer of the Parton Press and bookshop in Red Lion Square in London; the Parton Press had published, in collaboration with the Sunday Referee, Dylan Thomas’s first book, 18 Poems (1934), here advertised on the half-title verso.

Nabokov owned a copy of the present translation (the 1946 Vanguard Press edition, his copy now at the New York Public Library), featuring copious drawings, annotations, and amendments to Lloyd’s translation, which he annotated in preparation for his lectures on Die Verwandlung at Cornell.

Hemmerle, p. 22.

SKU: 2120979