The Diaries of Franz Kafka

(Paperback)

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The essential translation of the author's complete, uncensored diaries - revealing the idiosyncrasies and rough edges of one of the twentieth century's most influential writers Dating from 1909 to 1923, Franz Kafka's Diaries contains a broad array of writing, including accounts of daily events, assorted reflections and observations, literary sketches, drafts of letters, records of dreams, and unrevised texts of stories. This volume makes available for the first time in English a comprehensive reconstruction of Kafka's handwritten diary entries and provides substantial new content, restoring all the material omitted from previous publications - notably, names of people and undisguised details about them, a number of literary writings, and passages of a sexual nature, some of them with homoerotic overtones. By faithfully reproducing the diaries' distinctive - and often surprisingly unpolished - writing as it appeared in Kafka's notebooks, translator Ross Benjamin brings to light not only the author's use of the diaries for literary invention and unsparing self-examination but also their value as a work of genius in and of themselves.

Reviews

One of the finest translating achievements in recent history * Literary Review *
A new translation of the writers diaries from his twenties restores them to how he wrote them: chaotic, sometimes incoherent and full of black comedy. Thrilling The diaries will open your eyes -- John Self * The Times *
An unprecedented, almost 600-page peephole into the mind of a writer whose published prose is otherwise classically abstract and inscrutable. Its some secret to be let into -- Tanjil Rashid * FT *
This new edition restores the variegated richness of the diaries ... Here Kafka seems both genius and ingenue, and the contradiction brings him closer to us * Guardian *
This edition of the Diaries seems a model of both scrupulousness and generosity. Here we find the unpolished inner life of one of the most significant writers that ever lived; and the entries, which come from the mind of an ordinary human being and not from some otherworldly realm of inner consciousness, do not in any way detract from Kafkas work -- Nicholas Lezard * The Spectator *
Essential . . . The new volume, in a sensitive and briskly idiomatic translation by Ross Benjamin, offers revelation upon revelation. Its an invaluable addition to Kafkas oeuvre -- Dwight Garner * The New York Times *
Momentous . . . Life also bursts into literature at the level of form, and in Kafkas diaries even the words are acrobatic. As Ross Benjamin notes in the thoughtful introduction to his new translation, his aim is to capture the extent to which the diaries were a 'laboratory for Kafkas literary production' and thereby catch the author 'in the act of writing.' He has succeeded. Everything in the diaries thrashes . . . [They] are the intimate incisions of an author who could write only by etching words into the flesh -- Becca Rothfield * The New Yorker *
Benjamin, whose translation is the first complete and uncensored edition of the Diaries to be made available to an English readership . . . begins from scratch the whole business of restoring to the notebooks their 'provisionality, materiality, and mutability . . [His] aim is to give us the writer in his 'workshop,' blotting the page, changing his mind, running at a sentence a dozen times and still not getting it right -- Frances Wilson * The New York Review of Books *
Readers will welcome this new edition of the Diaries, complete, uncensored, in a fluent translation by Ross Benjamin, and supplemented with 78 pages of invaluable notes, the fruit of half a century of Kafka scholarship -- J. M. Coetzee * author of Disgrace *
This new and scrupulously faithful translation of the Diaries brings us, unembellished by theory, the true inner life of the twentieth centurys most complex and enigmatic literary prophet, whose very name has come to us as symbol and vision of innocent vulnerability in the face of irrational force -- Cynthia Ozick * author of Antiquities *

Author Bio

Franz Kafka (Author) Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was born of Jewish parents in Prague. Several of his story collections were published in his lifetime and his novels, The Trial, The Castle and Amerika, were published posthumously by his editor Max Brod. Ross Benjamin (Translator) Ross Benjamin's translations include Friedrich H lderlin's Hyperion, Joseph Roth's Job, and Daniel Kehlmann's You Should Have Left and Tyll. He was awarded the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for his rendering of Michael Maar's Speak, Nabokov, and he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on Franz Kafka's diaries.