![]() ![]() ![]() Kafka and Freud, Kafka and Nietzsche, Kafka and Marx but not Kafka and Groucho Marx, or Chaplin – and he was a fan of Chaplin". The novelist and short-story writer Clive Sinclair, who says that he owes a "particular debt" to Kafka and to Prague, regrets that "you don't see any books on Kafka and humour. Crucially, he could have flown out the window, had he wished. In a lecture, Vladimir Nabokov – lepidopterist as well as novelist – brought his expertise to bear and dubbed Gregor "a scarab beetle with wing-sheaths". For Malcolm Pasley, he was a "monstrous insect" for Stanley Corngold, "a monstrous vermin". ![]() To Willa and Edwin Muir, the Scottish bohemians who first translated Kafka into English, Gregor has turned into "a gigantic insect". The readers who must delve into their own many-legged mental bestiary include Kafka's swarm of English interpreters. But Dr Kafka, a promising young claims assessor at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, wrote it in late 1912 at the time, he simply told literary friends about his forthcoming "bug piece" (Wanzensache). The story first appeared in October 1915, in a magazine called Die weissen Blätter, then in December as a slim volume from Kurt Wolff Verlag of Leipzig. "When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into…" What, exactly? Over the century since Franz Kafka published The Metamorphosis – and the original German does have that definite article – readers have had to imagine the hideous beastie for themselves. ![]()
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