The Diaries of Franz Kafka

One of the finest translating achievements in recent history * Literary Review *A new translation of the writer’s 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. It’s 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 Kafka’s work – Nicholas Lezard * The Spectator *Essential … The new volume, in a sensitive and briskly idiomatic translation by Ross Benjamin, offers revelation upon revelation. It’s an invaluable addition to Kafka’s oeuvre – Dwight Garner * The New York Times *Momentous … Life also bursts into literature at the level of form, and in Kafka’s 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 Kafka’s 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 century’s 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 *

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 Hölderlin’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.