Gregor Samsa didn't metamorphose. He simply changed. In this essay, I dismantle the linguistic violations committed by prestigious translations and introduce my new, Kafka-true Norwegian translation.
We have a long history of audiences getting served by incompetent localizers and everyone follows the lead with no due verification. It was "A Metamorfose" in Portugal too and I didn't catch an English version, so that probably sucked even worse in relation to the source material.
They romanticize the text. Where Kafka is bureaucratic, they make him Victorian. Disgraceful. It has wrecked 100 years of criticism on Kafka. They insist on reading him wrong. It's a procedural change-of-status. Not a beautiful thing.
A lot of translations are bad. It's not just translation of vocabulary, it's also intention too. I've read translations that are bad due to changing the intention of the author.
We have a long history of audiences getting served by incompetent localizers and everyone follows the lead with no due verification. It was "A Metamorfose" in Portugal too and I didn't catch an English version, so that probably sucked even worse in relation to the source material.
They romanticize the text. Where Kafka is bureaucratic, they make him Victorian. Disgraceful. It has wrecked 100 years of criticism on Kafka. They insist on reading him wrong. It's a procedural change-of-status. Not a beautiful thing.
You suspect it was an intentional revisionist push?
Probably unintentional.
And then nobody dared going against it. I read Nabokov did, but I couldn’t find verified sources.
A lot of translations are bad. It's not just translation of vocabulary, it's also intention too. I've read translations that are bad due to changing the intention of the author.