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Franz Kafka. The Metamorphosis. Susan Bernofsky, tr. New York. W.W. Norton. 2014. isbn 9780393347098
" As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed into a gigantic insect." This is how generations of English readers came to know Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. What is one of twentieth-century literature's most iconic first lines, translated by Will and Edwin Muir, is also one of the most reinterpreted. In 1972 Stanley Corngold would transform Kafka's ungeheuren Unge- ziefer into a "monstrous vermin," while Michael Hofmann in 2007 introduced his readers to "a monstrous cockroach."
In the afterword to this new edition, translator Susan Bernofsky discusses the challenge of translating Ungeziefer; whereas Hoffman offers the reader specificity, Bernofksy opts to highlight the word's ambiguity with "some sort of monstrous insect." This periphrasis, however, seems clumsy.
Occasional clumsiness is only one of this translation's peccadilloes. At the end of the day, translation is...