This week we’re putting Franz Kafka’s slim novella, The Metamorphosis, under the microscope. It’s a famous story about one character, Gregor Samsa, transforming from a human into something decidedly not-human. An insect, or a “vermin”, some kind of bug! As it turns out, the question of what he has become is even trickier to narrow down in the original German than it seems in English, so we compare several translations. We also discuss Gregor’s wretched family, and their response to his metamorphosis. They may be the characters with human bodies, throughout the story, but they act in shockingly inhumane ways! As a result, Gregor’s becoming a bug may offer a counterintuitive form of freedom from a terribly dreary life.
There’s a lot going on in this small story, as our experts explain. Dr. Mark Harman, who is an acclaimed translator of Kafka and Professor Emeritus at Elizabethtown College, talks about the challenges and pleasures of rendering Kafka’s German into English prose. Later we interview Dr. Carolin Duttlinger, who is an Associate Professor of German at Oxford University and co-director of the Oxford Kafka Research Centre. She shows how popular ideas of the “kafkaesque”, as dark and claustrophobic writing, certainly have something to them, but have also obscured certain aspects of his works, such as its comedy.
Dr. Franziska Kohlt, who is a Research Associate at the University of York, gave the readings at the start of this episode. After reading the book’s first paragraph in its original German, she shared her own translation into English.
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Sources
Crick, Joyce, translator. The Metamorphosis and Other Stories. By Franz Kafka, introduced and notes by Ritchie Robertson, Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford World’s Classics.
Bernofsky, Susan, translator. The Metamorphosis. By Franz Kafka, edited by Mark M. Anderson. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2014. Norton Critical Editions.
Sokel, Walter H. “Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’: Rebellion and Punishment.” The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka, edited by Mark M. Anderson, translated by Susan Bernofsky, Norton Critical Edition, W. W. Norton, 2014, pp. 117-129. Originally published in Monatshefte, vol. 48, no. 4, April-May 1956, pp. 203-214.
Stokes, Richard, translator. Metamorphosis. By Franz Kafka, forward by Martin Jarvis. Hesperus Press, 2002.
