As transformações de Gregor Samsa entre o texto original e os textos traduzidos

Abstract

In Kafka’s novella Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) a young man named Gregor Samsa awakes one morning from troubled dreams, and he suddenly finds himself changed into a monstrous insect in his bed. Over several decades this narrative by Franz Kafka has been translated into many languages, and generally the translators have preferred the generic term “insect” to designate what the author called “Ungeziefer” in the opening sentences of his novella. Especially in Brazil there has been a somewhat prevailing tendency – though not necessarily in the translations of Die Verwandlung – to identify the result of Gregor Samsa’s transformation with a “cockroach”. This article aims to compare and analyze 31 different translations of Die Verwandlung into Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French and English, especially focusing on the translation suggestions for the word “Ungeziefer”, as well as on trying to explain the use of a cockroach image or of any other insect as a probable means of cultural transfer.