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Someone has let me know that coincidentally — though I doubt it’s coincidence, but more on that later — The Sharp Side has posted today about, in part, the same Nabokov quote/topic as did I last. Naturally, I went there and spent considerable time reading and thinking through The Sharp Side’s take on an earlier post at This Space, Torturing hope: Kafka’s Metamorphosis, where I spent some more time reading and thinking. The chain doesn’t stop there, of course, since This Space is discussing (The Guardian’s) The Blog Books/Lee Rourke’s earlier yet, of course, post on a new translation of Kafka’s works, including and discussing specifically “The Metamorphosis”:

A new version of Kafka captures his direct manner brilliantly.

And more specifically, the discussion centers around (Rourke)

here’s Hofmann’s offering:

“When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed.”

Compare this to any previous translation, and you’ll see, for a start, that there is no dilly-dallying with style; the prose is swift, direct and without obfuscation, as, one presumes, Kafka intended.

It is the word “cockroach” that tickles me the most. At first it seems incongruous (as pointed out in Nicholas Lezard’s recent Guardian review). But it is clever. In the original Prague-German, Kafka uses the word “ungeziefer” which literally translates as “vermin”.

Neither The Sharp Side nor This Space — nor do I — think that “cockroach” is the right word. And, as The Sharp Side points out, it’s not a new idea. I am wary of the translation on the whole, as a matter of fact. Substituting  “cockroach” seems facile, a cliche of perception. Something else that I’ve been thinking about — cliches of perception (Artful articulation is better than silence; order better than chaos, for example) — as a result of another listserv topic, which I mention now because it was through a (different) listserv, that I became aware of the Christopher Plummer as Nabokov on Youtube, shared yesterday. (Details of the film available here.) It’s likely the listserv member who pointed this out on Youtube had come from the Lee Rourke blog post, so no coincidence really that I used it as a springboard to share the Nabokov quote as did The Sharp Side.

It’s been a great afternoon of reading these posts — oh, and including Spurious — if unproductive, insofar as I have no immediate product to show for the mental meanderings today (notice the hope implicit in that “today”), and then turning again to Milan Kundera’s Testaments Betrayed.

A few thoughts. I do not read German, and most likely will not come to read it well enough in this lifetime (there’s that hope again) to know if this is true: (Rourke)

These new efforts from Hofmann are heartening. His translation is less literary, less prosaic, and less … English. It is without style, form, finesse, or melody. It is, most importantly, Kafkaesque. In his introduction, Hofmann argues that “Kafka offers very little to the translator, there is no ‘voice’, no diction, no ’style’.” It is hard to disagree.

How can one agree or disagree if one does not read (translate) German as well as English? This thought led me to Kundera’s aforementioned book, which of course is also a translation (from French, Linda Asher). As did This Space’s sharing of Kafka’s horror at having the insect pictured on the title pages of the story. Kundera reminds, via his book, that

Max Brod created the image of Kafka and that of his work: he created Kafkology at the same time…Kafkology produces and sustains its own image of Kafka, to the point where the author whom readers know by the name Kafka is no longer Kafka but the Kafkologized Kafka.

Guilty! Aren’t we all? (Kundera says not and says how to tell the difference, through a thorough analysis of what Kafkology is.) This took me back to thinking about my first encounter with “The Metamorphosis,” age 8 or 9, the summer between third and fourth grade, when I also read 1984, Breakfast of Champions, Dandelion Wine, Farenheit 451, and a few other mainly sci-fi titles that were on my older brother’s bookshelf. If ever there would be a time in my life free of Kafkology, that would be it. What I remember about the story is the absurdity. It was funny. Comedy in how everyone (family members) kept on, behaving as if Samsa was not an insect. It’s been a while since I read the story; it’s due a new reading. My old copy, in which Gregory becomes an insect, possibly a beetle (after all, he does have great strong mandibles, for opening that door), who does not ever discover that he has wings. (Where would he fly to? Would his life be greatly improved having flown somewhere other?)

Here’s more Kundera, which speaks to the importance of objects and thereby the naming of such, and which has a bit to do with my current obsession (cliches of perception), and which allows me to leave this post with another idea about beauty:

In his Manifesto of  Surrealism, Andre Breton speaks severely about the art of the novel. He complains that the novel is incurably hobbled by mediocrity, by banality, by everything that is contrary to poetry. He mocks its descriptions and its tiresome psychology. This criticism of the novel is immediately followed by praise of dreams. Then he ends by saying: “I believe in the eventual fusion of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.”

Paradox: the “fusion of dream and reality” that the surrealists proclaimed, without actually knowing how to bring it about in a great literary work, had already occurred, and in the very genre they disparaged: in Kafka’s novels, written in the course of the previous decade.

It is very difficult to describe, to define, to give a name to the kind of imagination with which Kafka bewitches us. The “fusion of dream and reality”–that pharse Kafka of course never heard–is illuminating. As in another phrase dear to surrealists, Lautreamont’s about the beauty in the chance encounter between an umbrella and a sewing machine: the more alien things are from one another, the more magical the light that springs from their contact. I’d like to call it a poetics of surprise; or beauty as perpetual astonishment. Or to use the notion of density as a criterion of value: density of imagination, density of unexpected encounters.