style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">In 1982, the Italian writer and Nazi concentration camp survivor Primo Levi embarked on a translation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial. At first he was enthusiastic, hoping to improve the German he had learnt so imperfectly at Auschwitz. Instead, Kafka involved him more terribly than he could have imagined. Levi found only bleakness in the hero Josef K, who is arrested and executed for a crime he probably did not commit.