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Top of the pile
84
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
86/100Critics
67/100Scholars
99/100Author:
Franz Kafka, Ross Benjamin
Publisher:
Schocken
Date:
January 10, 2023
A new translation of the author's complete, uncensored diaries. 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.
What The Reviewers Say
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.
Brod’s edition reads something like a finished work, Mr. Benjamin’s... like, well, a diary. In a departure from the elevated tone of Kafka’s previous English translators... Mr. Benjamin’s English sticks closer to the texture of the German original, much less polished than the crystalline prose of his published works, in an effort to 'catch Kafka in the act of writing.' As might be expected of a critical edition mainly intended for a scholarly audience, it’s harder to read, and stylistically not quite placeable (there are many instances where the translation could have been relaxed even further). But, in prioritizing transparency above all, Mr. Benjamin’s translation doesn’t just supplant the previous edition—it inaugurates a new phase of Kafka’s afterlife in English..
This new edition restores the variegated richness – and, at times, the tedium – of the diaries.
Ross Benjamin’s momentous new translation... is the first to convey the full extent of their twitchy tenuousness.
