Metamorphosis has been translated into English at least twenty times. In Kafka's original, the opening sentence is "Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt". In their 1933 translation of the story — the first into English — Willa Muir and Edwin Muir rendered it as "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect".[17]
The phrase "ungeheuren Ungeziefer", describing the creature into which Gregor Samsa metamorphoses, has been translated in at least sixteen different ways.[18] These include the following:
- "gigantic insect" (Willa and Edwin Muir, 1933)
- "monstrous kind of vermin" (A. L. Lloyd, 1946)
- "monstrous vermin" (Stanley Corngold, 1972, Joachim Neugroschel, 1993, Donna Freed, 1996)
- "giant bug" (J. A. Underwood, 1981)
- "monstrous insect" (Malcolm Pasley, 1992, Richard Stokes, 2002, Katja Pelzer, 2017)
- "enormous bug" (Stanley Appelbaum, 1996)
- "gargantuan pest" (M. A. Roberts, 2005)
- "monstrous cockroach" (Michael Hofmann, 2007)
- "monstrous verminous bug" (Ian Johnston, 2007)
- "a vile insect, one of gigantic proportions" (Philip Lundberg, 2007)
- "some kind of monstrous vermin" (Joyce Crick, 2009)
- "horrible vermin" (David Wyllie, 2011)
- "some sort of monstrous insect" (Susan Bernofsky, 2014)
- "some kind of monstrous bedbug" (Christopher Moncrieff, 2014)
- "large verminous insect" (John R. Williams, 2014)
- "a kind of giant bug" (William Aaltonen, 2023)
In Middle High German, Ungeziefer literally means "unclean animal not suitable for sacrifice"[19] and is sometimes used colloquially to mean "bug", with the connotation of "dirty, nasty bug". It can also be translated as "vermin".[18][20] English translators of The Metamorphosis have often rendered it as "insect".
What kind of bug or vermin Kafka envisaged remains a debated mystery.[17][21][22] Kafka had no intention of labeling Gregor as any specific thing, but instead was trying to convey Gregor's disgust at his transformation. In his letter to his publisher of 25 October 1915, in which he discusses his concern about the cover illustration for the first edition, Kafka does use the term Insekt, though, saying "The insect itself is not to be drawn. It is not even to be seen from a distance."[23]
Vladimir Nabokov, who was a lepidopterist as well as a writer and literary critic, concluded from details in the text that Gregor was not a cockroach, but a beetle with wings under his shell, and capable of flight. Nabokov left a sketch annotated "just over three feet long" on the opening page of his English teaching copy. In his accompanying lecture notes, he discusses the type of insect Gregor has been transformed into. Noting that the cleaning lady addressed Gregor as "dung beetle" (Mistkäfer), e.g., 'Come here for a bit, old dung beetle!' or 'Hey, look at the old dung beetle!'", Nabokov remarks that this was just her way of friendly addressing and that Gregor "is not, technically, a dung beetle. He is merely a big beetle."[24]
