Selected Stories by Franz Kafka

The world and our perception is no longer reliable as previously dark undercurrents bubble up to the surface and sweep away all that just a few pages earlier seemed normal.

Retranslating Franz Kafka is nothing new. Originally written in German, there have been many attempts to render his stories and novels into English.

While most translators have given the title of Kafka’s best-known story as The Metamorphosis, Mark Harman in this new Selected Stories opts for Transformation. Given that this is Kafka’s best known story and the word “metamorphosis” has almost become synonymous with its author, this may seem like a brave move or a bid to stir up a bit of literary controversy.

However, there is a historic precedent for this rendering.

The story was originally published in German in 1915 but its first translation into English, by Edwin and Willa Muir, did not come until years after Kafka’s death in 1924. Harman writes: “When the Muirs’ remarkably elegant and highly influential translation of this story appeared in London in 1949, it did so under the appropriately plain title Transformation. Unfortunately, however, all subsequent editions of their translation bear the flowery—and stylistically less apt—title The Metamorphosis.”

In a footnote Harman says the word “metamorphosis” “reflects an odd twist in the English-language reception of Kafka’s work.”

Linguistic nerds may want to compare Harman’s translation of this story’s iconic opening line with earlier versions, and there are plenty of resources online for those who choose to do so.

Harman’s reads: “One morning when Gregor Samsa awoke in his bed from restless dreams he found himself transformed into a monstrous insect.”

Edwin and Will Muir’s version is: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

In a 1993 translation  Joachim Neugroschel goes for “One morning, upon awakening from agitated dreams, Gregor Samsa found himself, in his bed, transformed into a monstrous vermin.”

While Michael Hofmann in a 2007 Penguin Modern Classic edition gives us: “When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed.”

No matter which version of Transformation/The Metamorphosis that you prefer there is no doubt it is one of the most unsettling opening lines in literature.

Kafka is one of the few artists whose name has come into common usage as an adjective. “Kafkaesque” is used by those who may never have even read him to describe a situation that is sinister, frightening or confusing and that makes you feel paranoid.

As well as his translations of around 20 stories and short texts Harman has written a long biographical introduction that traces Kafka’s personal life, relationships, crises, and paranoias in a bid to put into some context the stories, and novels, that he wrote.

Copious footnotes and endnotes accompany each story to mine individual words for layers of meaning, not just in terms of translation but also pondering on why Kafka might have chosen to use one word over another synonym.

The first two pieces are just a few lines long and are more like Zen koans. The second of these, The Trees, reads (in full): “For we are like tree trunks in the snow. Seemingly, they lie there smoothly, and with a little shove one should be able to push them away. No, one cannot, for they are firmly attached to the ground. But look, even that is only seemingly so.”

The first story proper is “The Judgement,” which Harman tells us was written in a single night and of which Kafka was “ particularly fond of” and claimed it had come to him like “a real birth, covered with filth and slime”.

The story opens with a fairly innocuous description of a man called Georg Bendemann sitting in a room and writing a letter to a friend while looking at the scenery outside on a spring morning.

The friend, who remains nameless, has been living in Russia for three years, and Bendemann becomes agitated as he recalls the many things that he has not him in previous letters, including Bendemann’s engagement and how successful his family business, under his management, has become.

It all sounds quite bland, but this is where Kafka becomes Kafkaesque and these agitations gain a power over Bendemann. The tensions crank up when he goes to his father’s room and starts talking about his friend and his father ridicules him, saying there is no such friend, that he is imagining him.

Suddenly what was taken for granted by the reader is rocked, all that we have assumed about Bendemann is thrown into doubt—reality wobbles.

This is what Kafka does so well, the normal is suddenly sinister, what we, and his subjects, see and believe to be real is suddenly in doubt.

Our perception of the world is no longer reliable as previously dark undercurrents bubble up to the surface and sweep away all that just a few pages earlier had seemed normal.

By the end of this 14-page story, which started in such a simple and banal way, Bendemann has run out of his house and thrown himself off a bridge. The final line reads: “Passing over the bridge just then was an almost endless stream of traffic.”

Harman notes that the German word Verkehr (traffic) “can also denote sexual intercourse.” He adds that according to Kafka’s friend and publisher Max Brod, Kafka said of this last sentence: “When I wrote it, I had in mind a violent ejaculation.”

It is these layers of additional meaning that make Harman’s translations so rich, uncovering hidden layers that may well have been missed previously by even the most dedicated English-language readers of Kafka.