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Franz Kafka – Diaries
Translator Ross Benjamin in Conversation with Clara Louden (SCR β25) and Alexej Latimer (POM β24) about the first complete translation of Franz Kafkaβs Diaries.
February 22, 2023, 6 PM
Clark Humanities Museum
(HUM 225)
Book Raffle and Refreshments
ABOUT ROSS BENJAMIN
ROSS BENJAMINβs translations include Friedrich HΓΆlderlinβs Hyperion, Joseph Rothβs Job, and Daniel Kehlmannβs You Should Have Left and Tyll. He was awarded the 2010 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translatorβs Prize for his rendering of Michael Maarβs Speak, Nabokov, and he received a Guggenheim fellowship for his work on Franz Kafkaβs diaries.
ABOUT FRANZ KAFKA
FRANZ KAFKA was born in 1883 in Prague, where he lived most of his life. During his lifetime, he published only a few short stories, including βThe Metamorphosis,β βThe Judgment,β and βThe Stoker.β He died in 1924, before completing any of his full-length novels. At the end of his life, Kafka asked his lifelong friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn all his unpublished work. Brod overrode those wishes.
ABOUT THE DIARIES OF FRANZ KAFKA
An essential new translation of the authorβs complete, uncensored diariesβa revelation of the idiosyncrasies and rough edges of one of the twentieth centuryβs most influential writers.
βMomentous… Everything in the diaries thrashes.β (The New Yorker)
βThe new volume, in a sensitive and briskly idiomatic translation by Ross Benjamin, offers revelation upon revelation. Itβs an invaluable addition to Kafkaβs oeuvre.β
(The New York Times)
Dating from 1909 to 1923, the handwritten diaries contain various kinds of writing: accounts of daily events, reflections, observations, literary sketches, drafts of letters, accounts of dreams, as well as finished stories. This volume makes available for the first time in English a comprehensive reconstruction of the diary entries and provides substantial new content, including details, names, literary works, and passages of a sexual nature that were omitted from previous publications. By faithfully reproducing the diariesβ distinctiveβand often surprisingly unpolishedβwriting in Kafkaβs notebooks, translator Ross Benjamin brings to light not only the authorβs use of the diaries for literary experimentation and private self-expression, but also their value as a work of art in themselves.