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The Metamorphosis
By (Author) Franz Kafka
Translated by Stanley Corngold
Random House USA Inc
Modern Library Inc
15th December 2013
United States
Paperback
368
Width 131mm, Height 202mm, Spine 20mm
261g
Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Stanley Corngold Featuring essays by Philip Roth, W. H Auden, and Walter Benjamin "When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin." With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Franz Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing-though absurdly comic-meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction. This Modern Library edition collects Stanley Corngold's acclaimed English translation-long hailed as the gold standard by scholars and general readers alike-along with seven critical essays by writers including Philip Roth, W. H. Auden, and Walter Benjamin, background and contextual material, and a new Introduction from Corngold himself.
Kafkas survey of the insectile situation of young Jews in inner Bohemia can hardly be improved upon: With their posterior legs they were still glued to their fathers Jewishness and with their wavering anterior legs they found no new ground. There is a sense in which Kafkas Jewish question (What have I in common with Jews) has become everybodys question, Jewish alienation the template for all our doubts. What is Muslimness What is femaleness What is Polishness These days we all find our anterior legs flailing before us. Were all insects, all Ungeziefer, now.
Zadie Smith
Kafka engaged in no technical experiments whatsoever; without in any way changing the German language, he stripped it of its involved constructions until it became clear and simple, like everyday speech purified of slang and negligence. The common experience of Kafkas readers is one of general and vague fascination, even in stories they fail to understand, a precise recollection of strange and seemingly absurd images and descriptionsuntil one day the hidden meaning reveals itself to them with the sudden evidence of a truth simple and incontestable.
Hannah Arendt
Stanley Corngold is a professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at Princeton. He has published widely on modern German writers and thinkers (Nietzsche, Musil, Kraus, Mann, Benjamin, Adorno, among others), but for the most part he has been translating and writing on the work of Franz Kafka. In 2011 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.