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drawing complex pictures with the simplest words
possible.
Meanwhile, the reader has learned Gregor’s
profession. He is a Reisender. The translations,
ranging from “commercial traveler” (1) to “traveling
salesman” (2, 3, 5, 7) or “commercial traveler” (4, 6),
are all persuasive in that they don’t leave the reader
any space for imagination. Reisender is turned into a
mere profession, and a very common one besides.
Translation 8, talking about Gregor being a traveler, is
literal and may at the first glimpse seem weak.
However, this rendition is suggestive, because it does
not specify a profession but leaves room for second
thoughts. After all, Kafka provided hints enough
(fabric samples) to conclude on our own what kind of
traveler Gregor is. Describing him simply as a
traveler, however, allows the reader to see the implied
ambiguity of a profession as well as a person
constantly on the move and nowhere at home. This is
Gregor, and whether he is a salesman or not becomes
virtually irrelevant. Just as reducing Ungeziefer to an
insect narrows the range of legitimate associations
available to readers, making Gregor a specific kind of
traveler when Reisender clearly does not demand such
specificity diminishes the text’s richness and
interpretive possibilities.
Here I must return to the first sentence of “The
Metamorphosis” and the word ungeheuer. This word
connotes a wide variety of meanings. It can simply
mean threatening or hideous, as well as unusually
huge. Its oldest meaning, however, is “foreign, not
being a part of the family,” which, applied to animals,
denotes “any animal that is not considered domestic”
(Deutsches Wörterbuch). Having this in mind, one
realizes how important it is to render Kafka’s wording
as inconclusive as he had made it. The traveler is apart
from the family. His father has become a disconnected
entity. Gregor has fallen from grace and is denied
humanness. He is kept in a kennel and has lost the
power to sustain his individuality. Those connections
are meant to be made by the individual reader. When
translators render abstract images in unnecessarily
concrete figures, they inappropriately channel readers
toward specific textual interpretations and deny them
the chance to discover their own Kafka.
What is happening in all these translations if not a
transformation They are certainly not
metamorphoses, “complete changes of form, structure,
or substance … appearance, character, circumstances”
(Random House College Dictionary). Their
differences are of no importance to critics like Patrick
O’Neill. He sees every translation as a particle of an
overall macrotext. Every single translation is like
every single reading, only together forming Kafka’s
macrotext (33). If this is so, no translation can be
evaluated, because any of them is just one particular
rendering following one particular reading of the
original. This view endangers fidelity to authorial
intentions in favor of the translator’s response to them.
Moreover, it regulates the reader because one facet of
the macrotext is, after all, only what one translator,
through a process of reading and rendering, makes of
that text. Only where the highest possible fidelity to
authorial intention is maintained will a translation
most completely allow a text to be what its author
imagined rather than what a translator might like it to
be.
To defend this demand for fidelity, I want to
return to the issue of the title. I have already shown
how certain translations kindle particular
interpretations. Now I want to allow the author to
speak. He writes to his fiancée, Felice: “The story’s
name is ‘Verwandlung,’ it would scare you
enormously. … Today [the hero reached] the last
stage of his going to be a continuous misfortune”
(Heller 52). So the change is continuous, not sudden.
It is not an immediately complete metamorphosis
decreed by some almighty authority. Yet, translation 7
tells the reader that Gregor “found that he had been
transformed.” It turns the active clause “he found
himself transformed” into a passive one, implying that
Gregor has in fact fallen victim to an act of God. Does
this translation itself fall victim to an established and
maybe misleading title Kafka once stated that “the
right word leads, the wrong one misleads” (Heller
150). Had Kafka’s first English translators not titled
the story “The Metamorphosis,” a theory like Douglas
Angus’ might not so easily have developed;
Corngold’s search for an “entomological identity …
the insect shape in which there is a human
consciousness” (43) might not have happened.
Without the concept of metamorphosis already fixed
in their minds, subsequent translators might not have
decreed Gregor’s transfiguration into a bug.
In addition to the concepts of syllepsis and
dialepsis, Clayton Koelb also detects prolepsis in
many of Kafka’s stories:
Kafka’s prolepsis usually works in a
paradoxical and unsettling fashion. A
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