Just the facts, please (continued)
For nearly a century, translators have wondered what to do with the word Ungeziefer in the opening line of Franz Kafka's Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis):
Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt.
Or:
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
Ungeziefer doesn't mean "insect", though. It means something like "vermin", but you can't talk about "a giant vermin" and even if you could, it isn't quite right. The monstrous creature that Gregor Samsa becomes is deliberately unspecified.
Dawkins and others, with their insistence on facts and only facts, have solved this problem at a stroke: it wouldn't happen. There's no such thing. Woke up as an Ungeziefer? A likely story. Found himself transformed? Pull the other one.
Posted on 10/28/2008 8:34 AM by Mary Jackson
