![]() ![]() There is no single English word for this, and as a result, translations of The Metamorphosis are stuck with vague imitations, the most accurate being “ vermin” (which also evokes both Nazi anti-Semitism and Yosemite Sam).īernofsky has addressed this problem by committing what Kafka purists may decry as an unforgivable sin: adding three words to the first sentence that aren’t there in the German. Ungeziefer is a necessarily vague word for something repulsive and unwelcome in the house, whose repulsiveness is defined through the eyes of its human beholder. And yet it does not merely mean “insect” or “bug,” “beetle” or “cockroach,” because there are German words for those ( Insekt, Wanze, Käfer, Kakerlak). ![]() ![]() But the biggest challenge is indeed Ungeziefer (OON-gee-tsee-fir), a descendant of the Middle High German for “creature unfit for sacrifice.” It is used in modern German to describe household pests, particularly of the multilegged variety. The Metamorphosis is, in fact, full of untranslatable terms (beginning with its title, Die Verwandlung, which as Bernofsky points out in her translator’s note “does not suggest a natural change of state” in the way the English “metamorphosis” does). ![]()
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