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THIS WEEK IN HISTORY

LITERATURE

Kafka’s Metamorphosis: 100 years of perplexity

100 years ago, Franz Kafka published The Metamorphosis, now seen as one of the most significant works of 20th century German literature. The Local speaks to the academic who has reinterpreted it for a modern audience.

Published: 26 February 2015 11:01 CET
Updated: 26 February 2015 15:29 CET
Kafka's Metamorphosis: 100 years of perplexity
Franz Kafka. Photo: DPA

In 1915 Prague-born writer Franz Kafka published a short story in German literary magazine Die Weißen Blätter (The White Pages).

Known casually among Kafka's friends as the 'bug piece', but officially entitled 'The Metamorphosis', the darkly surreal short story would become one of the most famous pieces of German literature of the century.

The tale centres on Gregor Samsa, a work-obsessed, miserable travelling salesman who wakes up one morning to find himself mysteriously transformed into a giant insect-like creature. The rest of the story documents Gregor's attempts to deal with his absurd predicament.

The short story explores alienation as Gregor becomes more and more distanced from the rest of his family.

But Gregor's newly grotesque appearance is also often interpreted as a physical representation of how he is so obsessed by his job that he has ended up neglecting more human aspects of his life.

Modernist Fairy Tales

Kafka's other works have also been interpreted and reinterpreted by various different literary schools of thought, from psychoanalysis to existentialism.

He is considered to be one of the most important writers of the early 20th Century because of his preoccupations with contemporary themes like alienation, guilt, the justice system, dehumanization and bureaucracy, as well as his modernist style.

The great poet W.H Auden famously coined Kafka "the Dante of the 20th century", and he is cited as an influence by the likes of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Satre and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Translation Troubles

The Metamorphosis has always been at the centre of debates on how best to translate the story into English.

The first sentence alone has been scrutinised time and time again, with particular focus on what Gregor turns into – "einem ungeheuerem Ungeziefer".

The use of 'un' in both the adjective and the noun creates a double negative which cannot be recreated in English.

The adjective "ungeheuer" means "monstrous" or "huge", and doesn’t pose too much of a problem, but "Ungeziefer" certainly does.

The word originates from Old High German and means an animal unfit for sacrifice.

The vagueness of Kafka's choice of words means that, despite the fact that descriptions of Gregor's body later on conjure the image of a human sized beetle, the English words "bug", "beetle", or "insect" are all too specific.

Reinterpretations 100 years on

Just last year, Susan Bernofsky, Director of literary translation at Columbia University in New York, published her own latest version of Kafka's text.

Bernofsky told The Local that in her opinion, "The Metamorphosis is virtually a perfect story. The grotesque central premise grabs the reader's interest, and the story's solid psychological underpinnings keep it."

"It's one of Kafka's cruellest and funniest pieces, with straight-faced humour hidden behind the lines in the form of both the strange contrast between the story's grotesquery and the bureaucratically correct language used in it throughout, and the inappropriateness of Gregor's response to his predicament."

Bernofsky has translated a wide range of other German authors, including Herman Hesse and Walter Benjamin, which was no easy feat.

"All translation is difficult, and the particular trickiness of a given text is not always apparent until you start work on them." she said.

"For example, the word "also" in German is often a killer – an almost invisible logical connector that gets used a lot because it establishes relations while taking up so little real estate in a sentence.

"In English, "so" works only sometimes, and often the translator is forced to go the route of "for this reason," "therefore," etc, which instantly changes the register.

"It's not just German that has pitfalls like this – pretty much any pair of languages offers challenges."

When asked whether it was a daunting task to translate the text, she replied "Yes, because it's a story everyone already knows, with a first sentence whose translation everyone already has an opinion about.

"But revisiting an already-translated classic gave me the freedom to look for a voice for the story that I think had previously been uncaptured."

As well as differences in translation, Bernofsky also tried to stamp her own identity on the story.

"My English-language Metamorphosis is a bit more skittish and hysterical than others, with more dramatic rhetorical sweeps.

"I've done what I could to show my readers what it is that I believe makes Kafka so funny, disturbing, and brilliant."

Bernofsky's new translation shows the longevity of Kakfa's The Metamorphosis, which even after 100 years is still being debated, discussed, and reinterpreted.

And how does she address the problem of the first sentence?

A widely accepted translation of "Ungeziefer" is "vermin", but in Bernofsky's new translation she pushes the boundaries a little by adding a few words.

She opts for "some sort of monstrous insect", in order to convey the required ambiguity.

by Matty Edwards

 

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HISTORY

‘Lost’ manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

A book by one of France's most celebrated and controversial literary figures arrives in bookstores this week, 78 years after the manuscript disappeared

Published: 4 May 2022 11:42 CEST
'Lost' manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

It is a rare thing when the story of a book’s publication is even more mysterious than the plot of the novel itself.

But that might be said of Guerre (War) by one of France’s most celebrated and controversial literary figures, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, which arrives in bookstores on Thursday, some 78 years after its manuscript disappeared.

Celine’s reputation has somehow survived the fact that he was one of France’s most eager collaborators with the Nazis.

Already a superstar thanks to his debut novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Celine became one of the most ardent anti-Semitic propagandists even before France’s occupation.

In June 1944, with the Allies advancing on Paris, the writer abandoned a pile of his manuscripts in his Montmartre apartment.

Celine feared rough treatment from authorities in liberated France, having spent the war carousing with the Gestapo, and giving up Jews and foreigners to the Nazi regime and publishing racist pamphlets about Jewish world conspiracies.

For decades, no one knew what happened to his papers, and he accused resistance fighters of burning them. But at some point in the 2000s, they ended up with retired journalist Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, who passed them – completely out of the blue – to Celine’s heirs last summer.

‘A miracle’
Despite the author’s history, reviews of the 150-page novel, published by Gallimard, have been unanimous in their praise.

“The end of a mystery, the discovery of a great text,” writes Le Point; a “miracle,” says Le Monde; “breathtaking,” gushes Journal du Dimanche.

Gallimard has yet to say whether the novel will be translated.

Like much of Celine’s work, Guerre is deeply autobiographical, recounting his experiences during World War I.

It opens with 20-year-old Brigadier Ferdinand finding himself miraculously alive after waking up on a Belgian battlefield, follows his treatment and hasty departure for England – all based on Celine’s real experiences.

His time across the Channel is the subject of another newly discovered novel, Londres (London), to be published this autumn.

If French reviewers seem reluctant to focus on Celine’s rampant World War II anti-Semitism, it is partly because his early writings (Guerre is thought to date from 1934) show little sign of it.

Journey to the End of the Night was a hit among progressives for its anti-war message, as well as a raw, slang-filled style that stuck two fingers up at bourgeois sensibilities.

Celine’s attitude to the Jews only revealed itself in 1937 with the publication of a pamphlet, Trifles for a Massacre, which set him on a new path of racial hatred and conspiracy-mongering.

He never back-tracked. After the war, he launched a campaign of Holocaust-denial and sought to muddy the waters around his own war-time exploits – allowing him to worm his way back into France without repercussions.

‘Divine surprise’
Many in the French literary scene seem keen to separate early and late Celine.

“These manuscripts come at the right time – they are a divine surprise – for Celine to become a writer again: the one who matters, from 1932 to 1936,” literary historian Philippe Roussin told AFP.

Other critics say the early Celine was just hiding his true feelings.

They highlight a quote that may explain the gap between his progressive novels and reactionary feelings: “Knowing what the reader wants, following fashions like a shopgirl, is the job of any writer who is very financially constrained,” Celine wrote to a friend.

Despite his descent into Nazism, he was one of the great chroniclers of the trauma of World War I and the malaise of the inter-war years.

An exhibition about the discovery of the manuscripts opens on Thursday at the Gallimard Gallery and includes the original, hand-written sheets of Guerre.

They end with a line that is typical of Celine: “I caught the war in my head. It is locked in my head.”

In the final years before his death in 1961, Celine endlessly bemoaned the loss of his manuscripts.

The exhibition has a quote from him on the wall: “They burned them, almost three manuscripts, the pest-purging vigilantes!”

This was one occasion – not the only one – where he was proved wrong.

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