Sunday With Kafka

My homework was to read the beginning of Kafka's The Metamorphosis.

It is a long way from Urmel Aus Dem Eis to Die Verwandlung. 

Although both involve a large change to an individual, in Urmel a prehistoric egg hatches into a talking dinosaur and in die Verwandlung Georg Samsa change into a giant disgusting something.

That "something" is one of the problems of translating Kafka - the German word in the book is das Ungeziefer which is "vermin" in English and I don't think I could accurately describe a vermin.  Some translations of "zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer"

    "gigantic insect" (Muir, 1948)
    "monstrous vermin" (Corngold, 1972, Neugroschel, 1993/1995, Freed, 1996)
    "giant bug" (Underwood, 1981)
    "monstrous insect" (Pasley, 1992)
    "enormous bug" (Appelbaum, 1996)
    "monstrous cockroach" (Hofmann, 2007)

And because it's late and my brain is full after 3 hours of working to read 8 pages, here's someone else explaining why Kafka is tough

"Kafka often made extensive use of a characteristic particular to the German language allowing for long sentences that sometimes can span an entire page. Kafka's sentences then deliver an unexpected impact just before the full stop—that being the finalizing meaning and focus. This is achieved due to the construction of certain sentences in German which require that the verb be positioned at the end of the sentence. Such constructions are difficult to duplicate in other languages, so it is up to the resourceful translator to provide the reader with the same (or at least equivalent) effect found in the original text.  German's more flexible word order is not the only problem translating German into other languages. German also lacks an informal language register, uses modal connectives, and syntactic structures which can be translated in more than one way."

If you go 1:1 with the translation of the first sentence, you can maybe see the problem -

Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Traumen erwachte fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt. (Original)
As Gregor Samsa one morning from restless dreams awoke, found he himself in his bed into an enormous vermin transformed. (literal word for word translation)

There's a long, long way to go.