Orson Welles makes Kafka less funny

The English version of "Before the Law" that Orson Welles uses to narrate the animated version of Kafka's story that opens his film of "The Trial" translates the opening sentence as follows: "Before the law there stands a guard." The "guard" replaces the more literal "doorkeeper" in the original translation of the text by Willa and Edwin Muir. But a guard's relationship to what is being guarded has more to do with "law" and is thus more conventional than is the case with a doorkeeper. Without the associative distance between "law" and "doorkeeper", the literalization of the law as architecture no longer works, and the text loses some of its comedy.  (Andrew Shields, #111words, 27 April)