1.
His initial attraction to Kafka, he said, came partly from overlapping backgrounds.
"Mine is Polish-Russian-Lithuanian Jewish," Mr. Karl explained, "and therefore someone who can get into that Kafka family life. I know how it works. I don't have his hang-ups, but I do have the understanding of somebody who decided to devote himself completely to one thing, which was to be a writer.
"And I do understand a family where it becomes oppressive to the point where you feel that if you don't escape, you're going to be crushed. Kafka never left his family, of course, he stuck.
"He needed it as something to struggle against and that he could hate, and define himself by way of his hatred. That's how he felt toward his father. His father was not that unusual a man; he was a typical Middle European father.
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2.
"what I'm against is someone going to catch a bus and finding that all the buses have stopped running and saying that's Kafkaesque. That's not."
"What's Kafkaesque," he said in an interview in his Manhattan apartment, "is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behavior, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world.
"You don't give up, you don't lie down and die. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But of course you don't stand a chance. That's Kafkaesque."
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3.
"He absorbed into himself everything that was happening," Mr. Karl said. "Not directly, for he makes very few comments on politics, for example. The entire European world was changed, and indirectly the American world.
"Kafka seems to me to have understood this better than anybody else alive, and in that sense he becomes the person who absorbed the whole historical lesson before most people realized it was a historical lesson. A great writer does this.
"What he also saw was something else -- that history was going to roll over everybody, that everybody was going to become a victim of history. That's Kafkaesque. You struggle against history and history destroys you."
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4.
One leitmotif I was unable to preserve in translation is the theme of ruhig/unruhig. Ruhig denotes “calm,” “peaceful,” “quiet,” “tranquil,” “at ease,” and unruhig its opposite. Starting with the unruhigen Träumen (“troubled dreams”) in the first sentence, the narrative oscillates between untroubled and troubled, tranquil and harried, peaceful and unsettled.
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5.
The post-metamorphosis activity that gives Gregor the greatest sense of freedom appears in my translation as “crawling”: he enjoys crawling around the walls and ceiling of his room. Ironically, the German verb kriechen (which also translates as “to creep”) has the additional meaning of “to cower.” To kriechen before someone is to act sycophantically toward him. In this sense, too, Gregor’s new physical state appears as a representation of his long-standing spiritual abjectness.
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6.
Unlike the English “metamorphosis,” the German word Verwandlung does not suggest a natural change of state associated with the animal kingdom such as the change from caterpillar to butterfly. Instead it is a word from fairy tales used to describe the transformation, say, of a girl’s seven brothers into swans. But the word “metamorphosis” refers to this, too; its first definition in the Oxford English Dictionary is “The action or process of changing in form, shape, or substance; esp. transformation by supernatural means.” This is the sense in which it’s used, for instance, in translations of Ovid.
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7.
At the same time Kafka’s tragicomic tale—unlike Miller’s—is very often hilariously funny. I imagine Kafka laughing uproariously when reading the story to his friends. Gregor’s naiveté (one might also call it gullibility) combined with his earnestness and his tendency to sound somewhat overwrought in his assertions is perfectly risible. To bring out this side of the story, I’ve emphasized the slight tone of hysteria in Gregor’s voice wherever it seemed justified.
The story is brutally comic in parts, and never more so than at the moment when it is revealed that—despite the fact that Gregor has been living more or less as an indentured servant to pay off his parents’ ancient debts—the family has plenty of money; not enough to allow them to stop working altogether, but a proper little nest egg. And although they are described as poor, they are never too hard up to retain the services of at least one domestic servant.
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8.
Finally Gregor has only himself to blame for the wretchedness of his situation, since he has willingly accepted wretchedness as it was thrust upon him. Like other of Kafka’s doomed protagonists, he errs by failing to act, instead allowing himself to be acted upon. Gregor Samsa, giant bug, is a cartoon of the subaltern, a human being turned inside out. He has traded in his spine for an exoskeleton, but even this armorlike shell (“carapace” and “armor” are the same word in German, Panzer) is no defense once his suddenly powerful father starts pelting him with apples—an ironically biblical choice of weapon.
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