Title: On Translating Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” | The New Yorker
Headings: On Translating Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”
On Translating Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”
Content: Many, too many; just as Gregor, lying on his back in the story’s opening sentences, discovers he has “these many little legs” waving in the air above him. Both are physical correlatives of a life that has gotten out of hand. Kafka is not even particularly attentive to the continuity of his cast of characters. Early on in the story we see the maid give notice and flee, only to find her still working in the household several pages later and in fact doing all the cooking, since now it is the cook who quit. Except for the charwoman who plays a starring role in the penultimate scenes, the household help is just part of the furniture of the story, like the cabinet that gets shifted to another room. Even the main characters tend to appear categorically, named only by their functions: “ father,” “mother,” “sister.” Only one of them gets a name, Grete (rhymes with beta ), but even she is usually referred to only as “sister” throughout, until the decisive moment near the end when she becomes instead a “daughter.” By defining all these characters through their relationship to Gregor, Kafka slyly allows Gregor’s point of view to dominate the story even when he is not actually present in the scene being described.