The year 1961 brought Anglophonic readers three newly translated and fascinating works of speculative fiction, two of which were by Jewish authors. Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung und andere Erzählungen (Metamorphosis and Other Stories), Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Der Spinozist (The Spinoza of Market Street), and Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke are concerned with the world lurking beneath what we see as reality. Dark fantasy, the occult, magic, and the grotesque come together to make these texts unsettling forays into an alternate way of seeing the world.
Though Kafka had been translated into English since the 1930s, the 1961 edition of Metamorphosis and Other Stories, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, suggests that, even in a decade that was filled with science fiction that was either written in or translated into English, there was a strong appetite for the absurd and strange. Many speculative fiction readers know the anthology’s included novella The Metamorphosis, in which a man is inexplicably transformed into a bug and must live his life within this strange limitation, unable to interact normally with other humans. Scholars have suggested that Kafka’s life as a Czech Jew writing in German enabled him to more readily explore alternate realities and unexpected points of view.
Like Kafka, Isaac Bashevis Singer was a Jewish author interested in the absurd and inexplicable. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, Singer was quite prolific and, to date, the only Nobel Prize laureate writing mostly in Yiddish. Multiple collections of his stories have been translated into and published in English in the 1960s. In 1961, Curt Leviant’s translation of The Spinoza of Market Street offered Anglophone readers a unique perspective on a vanishing world: Polish Jewry before the Holocaust. In general, Singer’s stories explore evil temptations, folklore, legends, and mysticism. The earthly and demonic battle it out in Spinoza’s stories with, in the words of Kirkus Reviews, “fanciful worlds inhabited by marriage brokers, derelicts, rabbis possessed by the devil, moneylenders, ghosts, dybbuks, attended by all the rituals, superstitions and behavior of antique Jewish custom.”
The work of Polish author Witold Gombrowicz, like the works of Kafka and Singer, is steeped in the absurd and grotesque. Gombrowicz, like other Polish fantasists writing in the early-to-mid-twentieth century, was fascinated by the world behind or beneath everyday reality, as explored in the artistic movements of Decadence, Surrealism, and Expressionism. Gombrowicz’s first novel, Ferdydurke, which was condemned as scandalous when it was first published in Polish in 1937, is the story of a man who is suddenly transformed into a teenaged boy. He then attempts to live a life without constraints but soon learns that his life is necessarily shaped by his circumstances, and he can never really banish the ghosts of tradition and social mores, no matter how hard he tries. Eric Mosbacher’s 1961 translation of Ferdyduke allowed Anglophonic speculative fiction readers a unique window into Polish life through the experiences of a man limited by the social expectations for boys in 1930s Poland.
All three of these works capture a slice of life alien to Anglophonic readers as they are pulled into foreign worlds and ways of life that were made even more unfamiliar by their slants toward surrealism, grotesquerie, darkness, and social otherness. These stories in translation are as enjoyable and as uncanny today as when they were first written or translated into English.
As you journey to and from Seattle Worldcon 2025, consider spending some of your travel time on bringing some of yesterday’s translated speculative fiction into your today and tomorrow!