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.

Ross Benjamin has done an admirable job of bringing readers the full text of these many journals, reflecting accurately the obsessive nature of Kafka’s thinking.

The result is a text more faithful to Kafka’s handwriting but also more difficult to read. This is due not to Benjamin’s prose, which is consistently elegant and precise, but to the nature of the edition.