A Note on the Translation

This is a complete translation of Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung, made directly from the German. No earlier English version was used as its basis. The source is a public-domain transcription of the Kurt Wolff edition (Leipzig, in the series Der jüngste Tag), in a printing dated 1917, which reproduces the text first published in 1915.

Kafka divides the story into three parts marked only with Roman numerals; we head them “Part I,” “Part II,” and “Part III.” Each of Kafka’s ninety-seven paragraphs appears here as one paragraph, neither split nor merged, including the long ones in which several people speak in turn. His long sentences have been kept long wherever their length does the work: the hedging, self-correcting, office-minded logic of Gregor’s thinking is part of the story. Repetitions are kept as well.

In the first sentence Gregor wakes to find himself transformed into ein ungeheueres Ungeziefer. Ungeziefer is an everyday word for vermin of any kind, the unclean pests a household wants rid of; it names no species, and Kafka never says what Gregor has become. We have therefore avoided “insect,” “beetle,” and “cockroach,” each of which decides what the original leaves open, and written “a monstrous vermin.” The singular is a little strange in English, as ein Ungeziefer is a little strange in German. When the cleaning woman later calls Gregor an “old dung beetle,” that is her word, not the narrator’s.

Names are kept in their German form (Gregor Samsa, Grete). Spelling and punctuation are American. There are no translator’s notes.