This event will explore the challenges and rewards of translating Franz Kafka’s diaries and what these diaries reveal about Kafka’s writing and reading life.

Kafka’s 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 and unfinished stories. Ross Benjamin’s acclaimed new translation makes available for the first time in English a comprehensive reconstruction of the diary entries, which date from 1909 to 1923. It 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 diaries’ distinctive—and often surprisingly unpolished—writing in Kafka’s notebooks, Benjamin brings to light not only the author’s use of the diaries for literary experimentation and private self-expression, but also their value as a work of art in themselves.

Join us to hear Ross Benjamin read from his new translation, after which he, Carolin Duttlinger, and Daniel Medin will be in conversation with Ian Ellison.