The Diaries of Franz Kafka (The Schocken Kafka Library) Hardcover – January 10, 2023

Stellar work from Ross Benjamin. The diaries come alive like never before in English.

It is an important development to have Kafka’s diary translated in full. You receive a better understanding of his time and place as well as how his literary mind worked.

Kafka’s Diaries make for difficult reading; not least because of the fact that they’re not really diaries but more of a writer’s journal. Combined within one text are drafts of short stories, reviews of theater, brutal self-examinations as well as what are more or less journal entries.For me, Kafka is somewhat of a paradigmatic figure. Through his novels and short stories he described the loss of the individual in the mass of totalitarian ideologies that so dominated the twentieth century. And so, this writer’s journal should enable us to see within Kafka’s soul and understand how he could express mid twentieth century experience some forty years before it transpired.To some extent, it does. His agonizingly broken relationship with his father, his feeling as both an insider and outsider due to his Jewry, his expressions of futility at establishing any kind of loving relationship…all these obviously contributed to works like the Trial and the Castle.But either because the journal is so disjointed—for example, literary criticism followed immediately by extraneous autobiographic details—or because of the fundamental complexity of his makeup, Kafka’s work does remain somewhat enigmatic. Its indisputable worth as literature surpasses the man making casual remarks about life in early twentieth century Prague.Despite its difficulty, despite the depressing tone of a man gradually succumbing to Tuberculosis while failing in all his human relationships, it’s a work worth reading for all trying to see into the darkness that was much of twentieth century Europe. Not an uplifting read, but an invaluable one.

Translations are fascinating, and they can change everything. When you've worked long enough in a field that runs on translation, you become painfully aware of that. This is nothing new in the world of literature. Any translator who touches a project, either through action or inaction, makes a statement about the work they're doing. The first translation of Franz Kafka's diaries, as we learn from Ross Benjamin's foreword, took liberties. Removing less "acceptable" thoughts, tweaking unfinished work to tuck in the frayed edges... all things deeply misrepresentative of an author in the midst of his own thoughts.This new translation is a ramble—a series of rambles. There's joy in the disjointed, meaning in the meaninglessness. Ideally, a reader sees a writer at their best, with their tags tucked in and their hair brushed and the lipstick stains off their teeth. But The Diaries of Franz Kafka is glorious in its honesty.At times, he rambles to himself about his inability to love or be loved. Some days are people-watching: snippets of description, like an artist capturing a pose. Some entries are the same passage, over and over, refining the prose. Occasionally there are careful account of Kafka's day. The plays he takes in, the reading he himself is doing, vacations he's taken.Sometimes—most meaningful of all—are short, agonized sentences admitting to once again having written nothing.Benjamin has done a beautiful, difficult service: knowing when is the time to straighten an author's tie, and when to let him appear as he is, real and disheveled, to the world. There's something beautiful and personal in seeing this reality. For the authors among this book's readership, it's relatable and a relief. Writers are writers, no matter the level of fame, no matter the time period.For a scholar of Kafka's works, it is likely a must-read. But for any author at all, of any level, it is hugely important. In these pages, Kafka ceases to be an untouchable luminary and becomes what we all are: a person doing their best in the world, navigating turbulent feelings day to day, and wondering what mark they'll eventually leave.

I read this book because Kafka has been my all-time favourite writer since I was a teenager and I wanted to be reading Kafka during the centenary of his death from TB on June 3rd 1924.One of the technical difficulties in reading Kafka translated into English is you never know how accurate the translation is linguistically or which version of which manuscript or notebook the translator has used, given that very little of Kafka’s work was published in his lifetime. Readers may be aware of the battles that have raged over Kafka’s manuscripts for decades. His friend and first editor, Max Brod, refused to follow Kafka’s deathbed injunction to burn all his manuscripts “unread and in their entirety.” Brod then went on to publish as much as he could but had a habit of meddling with some texts – especially notebooks and letters. The translator here, Ross Benjamin, makes it clear in his introduction that he has worked on all the surviving notebooks and has attempted to translate them accurately, word for word, and without omitting any awkward bits – as previous translators have done.The result is Kafka warts and all, a Kafka I glimpsed a few years ago in Reiner Stach’s three volume biography. What we saw there – and again in the Diaries – is a bloke whose “tortured state” appears to be largely self-inflicted and self-indulgent. Kafka was in awe of just about all the quack medical fads doing the rounds in the early twentieth century: vegetarianism, nude swimming, sleeping with the window wide open in the middle of winter. Even the TB that eventually killed him seems to have been almost self-inflicted. Kafka clearly had issues about “body image” and these largely account for his failure to marry any of his fiancées as much as his claim that he was pure literature and couldn’t allow family life to interfere with his vocation. He allowed his job and his passion for extended holidays in sanatoria to interfere but not a wife and children.Speaking of families, I was brought up to believe that Kafka’s father was a callow, philistine tyrant who didn’t have the artistic sensibility to understand that his son was a literary genius. That’s what you get from the blurb on the inside covers of the old Penguin Modern Classics editions of Kafka. Reiner Stach presents a different perspective: all old Mr Kafka and his wife were asking was for Franz to pull his weight a bit more. He refused to help out in the family shop and although he was a shareholder in another business venture – an asbestos factory – he insisted that he should be very much a sleeping partner. That asbestos factory is one of the many ironies of Kafka’s life. His day job as an insurance clerk was to ensure that workers injured in industrial accidents got fair compensation. In fact, he became quite an expert in what we now call health and safety risks. But in those days asbestos was considered a wonder material for preventing fires – and risk free – and Kafka couldn’t be bothered to deal with the details about how the factory was being run.It’s often said that Kafka foresaw the totalitarian horrors of the mid-twentieth century, and his continuing relevance has been debated in the past few days in light of Putin, Trump and the Horizon scandal in the UK. When Kafka died, Nazism was on the rise, and he must have been aware of this as he had been living in Berlin for some time when he died. He may also have been aware of events in Italy and Russia, although these aren’t mentioned in the notebooks. He had an interest in Zionism but despite whatever foresight he had, he was not motivated to leave Europe, neither were his family. The end result of that was that his three sisters all became victims of the Holocaust. The two older sisters, Elli and Valli, both died in the Lodz ghetto in Poland. His youngest sister, Ottla, was murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Kafka was especially close to Ottla. Whereas Elli and Valli seem to have followed convention and become housewives and mothers, Ottla was determined to become a farmer – a very unusual career choice for a young woman at the time. Reading about Kafka has always made me want to know more about his sisters, and especially about the paths that led them to their deaths. May sound morbid, but what happened to them was reality, not fiction.This is a fascinating book and I would recommend it to anyone who admires Kafka’s writing and wants to learn more about him.