In Paperback: The Metamorphosis

The Metamorphosisby Franz Kafkatranslated by Susan BernofskyWW Norton, 2014New from W. W. Norton is a sleekly-designed edition of Franz Kakfa's 1915 novella Die Verandlung, here translated by Susan Bernofsky with an Introduction by the Hollywood movie director David Cronenberg and an elegant cover by an illustrator with the lonely solitary name Keenan (many of his - hers? its? - book covers are of the hated "Just the Facts" variety, showing the title of the book in block letters unaccompanied by any kind of aesthetic, but this one is not only beautiful but ingenious). The combination makes an attractive package, a paperback fit to be slipped into a coat pocket or iPad case and read everywhere.Any attention drawn to Kafka's novella is to the good, since The Metamorphosis is the one of - perhaps the - defining texts of the 20th century. It shaped the fiction of that century far more extensively and indelibly than anything written by Wharton or James, Fitzgerald or Hemingway, Roth or Bellow. It birthed the bleak and pointless ironies of modern literature as surely as the First World War birthed the bleak and pointless ironies of modern statecraft. In ways we can neither define nor deny, Kafka speaks directly to the neuroses of being human. We not only read him but need him, in the way that we need Shakespeare or Keats or Twain.The story of The Metamorphosis will be familiar: young traveling salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect with a hard carapace and many writhing legs. He lives in an apartment in Prague with his parents and his sister Grete, and he's an industrious worker, always on the first train, so they immediately become worried when he doesn't stir from his room (they can't go in and check on him, because his ingrained traveler's instincts have conditioned him to lock the door). They knock and call out, and he tries to reassure them, but his voice has transformed as well, and they barely understand him. While he's floundering about what to do, a manager from his office shows up to demand an explanation for his absence. Gregor manages to unlock the door (without hands, it's tough) and eagerly present himself - in one of the story's most heartbreakingly terrifying speeches, he prattles on about just needing a minute to gather his samples, willfully oblivious to the staggering shock his appearance is having on the people who can finally see what he's become. That shock only worsens: he grows less and less able to interact with his bewildered and resentful family, and eventually he dies of hunger and despair in his room - after which his family feels rejuvenated and takes a little vacation. The disjointedness of the whole thing makes no sense at all and yet is intensely recognizable.Kafka claimed that the idea for the story came to him while he was miserably lying in bed (as far as I know, he never mentioned the obvious other part of the inspiration: seeing a cockroach skitter across the floor) and that he wrote it quickly. Some of that haste can still be seen in the finished product, but despite the claims various translators have made over the decades, Die Verandlung isn't a particularly tough text to translate. It contains none of the fussy rhetorical flourishes of, say, the Mann brothers, or Herman Hesse, whose beautiful little novel Siddhartha got an excellent translation by Bernofsky in 2006. So it often reduces its scholars to niggling questions of etymology (or, in the famous case of Nabokov trying to figure out exactly what kind of bug poor Gregor became, entomology). Instead of rendering masses of byzantine rhetoric, Kafka translators must concentrate on capturing a mood.Does Bernofsky succeed? A control standard might help: The Basic Kafka from 1946, a sturdy little paperback (its cover, too, consisted merely of its printed title on a colored background, but back then it wasn't called art) that's probably found its way into more dorm rooms and backpacks than any other edition of Kafka in any language - in 1971, you could find at least one battered copy of it in every flop-hostel in Kathmandu, almost like a hotel bible. The translator for its Metamorphosis is uncredited, and the famous opening line is rendered like this:

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

Flash forward half a century, and Bernofsky does it like this:

When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed right there in his bed into some sort of monstrous insect.

As you might expect, not much difference there (you might not expect the sheer volume of debate over that word "insect," and you should count yourself lucky), and what thin shades of difference there are work against Bernofsky, whose "right there in his bed" almost seems to imply there's something remarkable about the location where Gregor would do his dreaming and waking.But what about a meatier passage? Later on in the story, Grete gets the idea of going into Gregor's room and removing some of its furniture so he'll have more room to crawl around. In true cockroach fashion, Gregor hides under his couch while they heave one heavy item after another out of the room, but the stripping process, and the icy realization that his family no longer considers him human, eventually alarms him, and he impulsively decides to try to protect something of his former life. In a perfect presentiment of 20th century possession-culture, he chooses a framed picture on his wall - a picture of nobody he knows: he cut an image of a woman in furs out of a glossy magazine. It's as pathetic and hollow an act of defiance as you'll ever read, and The Basic Kafka presents it like this:

And so he rushed out - the women were just leaning against the writing desk in the next room to give themselves a breather - and four times changed his direction, since he really did not know what to rescue first, then on the wall opposite, which was already otherwise cleared, he was struck by the picture of the lady muffled in so much fur and quickly crawled up to it and pressed himself to the glass, which was a good surface to hold on to and comforted his hot belly. This picture at least, which was entirely hidden beneath him, was going to be removed by nobody. He turned his head towards the door of the living room so as to observe the women when they came back.

And Bernofsky:

And so he burst out of hiding - the women in the next room were just leaning on the desk to catch their breath - changing direction four times as he raced about, for he really didn't know what to save first, but then his eyes lit on the picture of the lady clad all in furs, conspicuous now on the otherwise empty wall, and quickly made his way up to it and pressed himself against the glass, which adhered to him, pleasantly cool against his hot belly. At least this picture, which Gregor's body now covered up completely, was absolutely certain not to be taken away from him. He swiveled his head toward the living room door to observe the women as they returned.

Here the clear advantage goes to our present translator: the action is cleaner, the cascading phrases of Kafka's German are better-managed, and the stumble of "was absolutely certain not to be taken away from him" is amply compensated by that perfect, sinister substitution of "swiveled" for "turned." It's in those telling little grace notes that Bernofsky excels (Hesse abounds with them; might we dragoon her into translating all his works for the new century?), and they fill this translation and end up making it stronger and more oddly charming than any other English Metamorphosis on the market.Readers of this edition are strongly advised to dive right into the work itself and avoid its bookends. David Cronenberg once made a movie about a man who gets caught in a scientific mishap and transformed into a giant fly, and one can only presume that's why Norton asked him to write the Introduction to this volume. The 1986 movie The Fly couldn't be less relevant to Kafka's story, an embarrassing reality softened only slightly by the fact that Cronenberg spends his pages windily talking about the movie anyway and scarcely remembers to mention the novella. And alas, Bernofsky's Afterword is little better, presenting one astonishing misreading after another:

Finally Gregor has only himself to blame for the wretchedness of his situation, since he has willingly accepted wretchedness as it was thrust upon him. Like other of Kafka's doomed protagonists, he errs by failing to act, instead allowing himself to be acted upon ... [he] is a salesman, but what he's sold is himself: his own agency and dignity, making him a sellout through and through.

Luckily, none of that nonsense makes its way into translation itself. And if it's any consolation, Erich Haller's editorial comments in The Basic Kafka can be pretty damn daffy too.