Another out-of-date sighting, from a 2007 Penguin Classic
Deluxe edition of "Franz Kafka - Metamorphosis and other stories"
newly translated with an introduction by Michael Hofmann. While the
translator was writing about "diction, alliteration and the twos and threes
of rethorical structures" in the sentence 'Gregor lag breit, verbittert und
unbeweglich auf dem Kanapee,' he "caught a brief glimpse of Baudelaire
or a spotty teenager supine with cafard. And that in turn reminded
[him] of Kafka's suggestion as to how his story might be illustrated. - not,
pace Nabokov, with an entomologically or coleopterically correct
beetle (attentive readers will notice that [he uses] 'cockroach' in the
opening paragraph, because the German Ungeziefer ('vermin') is a
flat-out rejection that denies all possible scientific curiosity), but with a
picture of a man lying in bed."
In relation to a past posting about Nabokov's commentary to Eugene
Onegin, another trip to the book-store allowed me to copy the reference more
precisely.
In Nabokov's Russian translation to his Comientárii a Ievguêniu
Oniéguinu Aleksandra Puschkina Moscou: NPK "Interval", 1999 the
editors substituted the word "bottom." by a dash (Boris Schnaiderman
observes that in the Soviet editions a censored word has its first letter
printed out to be followed by dots)