By happy coincidence BBC Radios 3 and 4 are in the midst of a Kafka season, so if you have a particular favourite translation of The Castle, The Trial or Investigations of a Dog, or any other Kafka, now is an ideal time to flag them up. And please don’t feel you have to limit yourself to The Metamorphosis. Please feel free to point out any that I have missed (or you feel I have misrepresented) or to champion your own particular favourite. This piece, then, is intended as a starting point for discussion on the merits or otherwise of the different translations available.
Rather, my intention was simply to compile a list of those translations I considered particularly noteworthy. The purpose of my reading was not to uncover that even more mythical of beasts, the Definitive Translation nor was it to discover the True Meaning of The Metamorphosis (and the fable-like simplicity of Kafka’s prose means there are even more interpretations of the story than there are translations – from Ritchie Robertson’s Freudian description of “a constellation of sex, power and violence at the heart of the family” to Nabokov’s possibly tongue-in-cheek, certainly self-aware assertion that “the Samsa family around the fantastic insect is nothing less than mediocrity surrounding genius”). With the centenary of The Metamorphosis’s publication looming, I’ve spent the past month or so reading as many of the different translations I’ve been able to get hold of.
(“Ungeheuren Ungeziefer” has no literal translation in English, but broadly speaking it means an enormous or monstrous kind of unclean vermin thus the entomology of Gregor Samsa remains a much-contested mystery.) So begins The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella of angst par excellence, in which a travelling salesman struggles to adapt to his horrific new identity against the backdrop of his middle-class family’s repulsion – although depending upon which translation you happen to be reading, poor old Gregor could be waking up to find himself transformed into anything from a giant bug to a monstrous cockroach to a large verminous insect. As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
0 kommentar(er)
