Kafka wrote to his publisher asking that the creature not be drawn. Not on the cover, not even glimpsed at a distance — something like: the insect itself can't be depicted. He suggested a door, a dark empty room, instead. Which makes sense once you look at the first sentence, where Gregor wakes from troubled dreams and finds himself changed into — and here the translators start sweating — ein ungeheueres Ungeziefer. Vermin. Not beetle, not cockroach, nothing with a Latin name you could look up.
Ungeziefer is an old word with sacrifice buried in it; the unclean animal, the one unfit for the altar. English gives you monstrous vermin, or gigantic insect, and each is a small narrowing. The journal run was October 1915. I have two copies on the shelf; one is in English and much read, the other German and stiff in the spine, and I keep the stiff one for the first line alone.
Ottomar Starke did that cover for Kurt Wolff, and he solved it the way a stage designer would: a man in a dressing gown, hands over his face, stepping away from a door that stands open onto black. You look at the dark rectangle and the room fills itself in. Nothing to draw, so he drew the turning-away.
Jun, the stage people took him at his word — the usual solution now is no costume at all, just the actor and a change in the light, and the family's faces doing the describing. I've watched an audience flinch at a man in a plain shirt because the sidelight came up low and green. Cheapest effect in the house and the hardest to get right.