NZBC short fiction: Transformation
The Franz Kafka masterpiece known as Metamorphosis in English isn’t about a cockroach. Gregor Samsa’s transformation (Verwandlung without the masculine article was its original title) was from man into “Ungeziefer”, which can be translated only to “vermin” — as Richard Stokes explains in the flawed but lovely Hesperus Press edition. In Kafka’s story, a cleaning woman calls the metamorphosed Gregor “alter Mistkäfer” — “old dung beetle” — but Kafka didn’t mean that he had changed into a dung beetle, either; it’s a term of affection in German. How far-sighted of Kafka (a Jew himself, whose three sisters were murdered by the Nazis) to predate the use of “Ungeziefer” to denigrate Jewry during the Third Reich. The generic term “vermin” didn’t work in translating Metamorphosis into English, so most people think of Kafka’s story as “the one about the man who turns into a cockroach”. I’ve written about roaches before and enjoyed it, so I wondered what would happen if I wrote a short story that turned Metamorphosis on its head. Read on…
posted by Chris Bell at 6:26 PM
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