“All of a sudden there was this material that I had never seen before that was presented in a much more unpolished, truthful way.” Then he read the later edition of Kafka’s diaries in German, which was a “complete revelation,” he says. “Instead, what was available in German were the more faithful renditions of what Kafka actually wrote.” “I thought I was learning German so I could read what I had read in English,” says Benjamin. The versions Benjamin had read in English were nothing like the ones he read in German. But the editions he found were not Brod’s but those of the later scholars who published the writer’s work in its unfiltered glory. “I didn’t know that the interest would take off from there.”ĭuring a year in Berlin after college on a Fulbright scholarship, Benjamin became immersed in the language and soon began reading Kafka in German. “I was mainly interested in being able to read in German,” he says. That tension between horror and humor really stayed with me.”īenjamin went to Vassar and spent part of his college years in Prague, where Kafka grew up, “to trace his footsteps,” he says.
“The comic elements of the horrific stories really came through. “We were always uproariously laughing while reading to each other,” Benjamin says. They found the writer’s themes of alienation and anxiety familiar while appreciating the humor that suffuses even Kafka’s darker works. Benjamin and his friends would sit in the school library reading Kafka aloud to each other. “He rose to the top of the firmament of writers I was excited by,” Benjamin says. and frequently visits Eastham, discovered Kafka in high school. Benjamin’s eight-year effort to translate more than 700 pages of Kafka’s writing will be the subject on May 27 when Benjamin discusses his work with author David Means at the Eastham Public Library - the same place where Benjamin completed the final pages of the translation.īefore Benjamin knew he wanted to be a translator, he knew he wanted to read Kafka’s work in its original form. Ross Benjamin’s 2023 translation of The Diaries of Franz Kafka is the first unexpurgated English edition of the journals, published more than three decades after the complete text emerged in German. But a German-language edition of Kafka’s uncensored diaries published in 1990 never made it into an English translation. When Brod died in 1968, German scholars revisited Kafka’s original texts, restoring unexpurgated renditions of the author’s work, and English translations of these editions soon followed.
Passages with sexual imagery and homoeroticism were bowdlerized, and unflattering renderings of both Kafka and Brod were excised to create a more polished, saintly representation of Kafka to be preserved for posterity. (Photo courtesy Ross Benjamin)īut Brod’s editorial interventions were heavy-handed, refashioning Kafka’s disorderly musings into straightforward and facile prose. The Cover of The Diaries of Franz Kafka, translated by Ross Benjamin. He also published a collection of diaries the author wrote from 1909 to 1923. Brod sifted through the thousands of unpublished pages Kafka bequeathed to him, publishing manuscripts of some of Kafka’s most celebrated works, including the novels The Castle and The Trial. EASTHAM - When the German-speaking Czech writer Franz Kafka died in 1924 from tuberculosis, he ordered his close friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn all his work.īrod, believing in the literary genius of his friend’s writing, defied Kafka’s last wishes and took it upon himself to edit and publish Kafka’s later writing.
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