A Horrible Vermin

The first sentence of "The Metamorphosis" gives the whole premise away, so Unferth starts there, with the word Kafka chose for what Gregor Samsa has become. The Muirs made it a gigantic insect. The translation we read makes it a horrible vermin, closer to the German and still missing the music of the original.

What kind of creature is it? Kafka never settles the question, and his descriptions contradict one another on purpose. When his publisher wanted a picture of it on the cover, he said anything but that. Unferth argues that the shifting, undrawable image is the engine of the story, the thing that drives every turn and stays with you after.

The film sits before the first chapter. The structure, she says, could not be simpler: a man turns into an insect. Now what? And when Kafka read it to his friends, they could not stop laughing.

Transcript

Welcome back. Even if you've never read "The Metamorphosis," you probably know it's the story of a man who wakes up one day having turned into a bug. Now, I have no intention of spoiling this story, or any story, for you. It's too exciting to read these stories for the first time, and believe me, I'm jealous of anyone who gets to read "The Metamorphosis" for the first time. But since the revelation of Gregor's new corporeal state occurs in the very first sentence of the story, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it doesn't count as spoiling. "The Metamorphosis" is his most famous story, and if you've never read it, you are in for a treat. It's a dark, hilarious, emotional read, among the most well-known stories ever written.

Let's not forget this is a translation. Kafka wrote in German. His first language was German, and that's what his family and friends spoke. But Prague in the 19th and early 20th centuries was a bilingual city, and German was a minority language. Most people spoke Czech. Kafka wrote in classic German, and there has been much ink spilled on how to translate it into English: the phrase that Kafka uses to describe the creature, the bug that poor Gregor wakes up to find himself transformed into one rainy morning. The most well-known English translators of Kafka were a Scottish couple, Willa and Edwin Muir. They translated the phrase as "a gigantic insect," which is at least a little bit interpretive. The translation we are using is by David Wyllie. He translates it as "a horrible vermin," which is a little closer to a direct translation, but isn't able to keep the beautiful repetition of sounds that the original German has.

But what kind of insect or vermin has Gregor turned into? Is he a cockroach? Is he a beetle? The way Kafka describes the creature throughout the story gives contradictory, even incompatible images of what precisely this vermin might look like. We will talk about these images as we go through the text, and it's going to be fun. But Kafka wanted the ambiguity. He didn't want us to be able to settle on a precise image in our minds. He rebelled when his publisher wanted to put a picture of the vermin on the cover of the book. "Anything but that," he said. However one imagines this bug, there can be no doubt that the shifting and developing image of it is the supreme device of the story. That image is the engine that starts the story, that drives it, that motivates every turn in the plot. The image of the insect is what stays with us when we put the story down, this impossible-to-describe animal that strikes horror and pain in all hearts.

In fact, the story has an incredibly simple structure. A man turns into an insect. Now what? When he originally wrote it, the story was so connected to his experience, it was practically autobiography. He wrote it about a month into what scholars call his great breakthrough as a writer. We will talk more about that. He wrote it in three weeks, after struggling for years to teach himself to write. When he read it aloud to his friends, they couldn't stop laughing, which is just what he wanted. But there is no doubt in anyone's mind that he was turning to much bigger themes and ideas about social and philosophical alienation as it pertains to the human condition, to animals, and perhaps to all living beings. So let's get to reading.