‘The Diaries of Franz Kafka,’ translated by Ross Benjamin. I am nothing else and cannot be anything else.”īenjamin’s previous translations include Daniel Kehlmann’s “Tyll” and “You Should Have Left,” and Joseph Roth’s “Job.” In 2010, Benjamin was awarded the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his translation of Michael Maar’s “Speak, Nabokov.” Benjamin’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Bookforum, The Nation, and other publications.

In 1913, Kafka wrote in one diary entry: “I am made of literature. Written between 19, the diaries contain daily events, reflections and observations, literary sketches, letters, reviews, accounts of dreams, outlines for future planned creative works, descriptions of people with whom Kafka crossed paths, and all but finished prose pieces. The book took Benjamin eight years to translate from the original German and offers English-speaking readers the complete text of Kafka’s diaries for the first time. Ross Benjamin, translator of a new version of ‘The Diaries of Franz Kafka.’ (Courtesy/ David Schloss) Ross Benjamin, an American translator of German-language literature, now claims Brod was being economical with the truth. “A few passages, apparently meaningless because of their fragmentary nature are omitted,” Brod wrote.

In the postscript to volume one of the diaries in 1948, Brod claimed the diaries were as complete as it was possible to make them. The first volume was translated by Joseph Kresh and the second by Martin Greenberg in cooperation with Hannah Arendt, who was then an editor at Schocken Books in New York. As Kafka’s sole literary executor, Brod edited and prepared posthumous editions of Kafka’s unpublished novels: “The Trial” came out in 1925, followed by “The Castle” in 1926, and “The Missing Person,” which Brod retitled “Amerika,” in 1927.īrod also published two volumes of Kafka’s diaries, in English, in 1948-49. Brod betrayed his friend’s last wishes.Ī committed Zionist, Brod fled the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, emigrated to Mandatory Palestine, and died in Tel Aviv in 1968.

Prior to his death, Kafka - who was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in what was then the Bohemian capital of Prague - left strict written instructions for Brod to burn all of his literary manuscripts, with the exception of three or four short stories. “The Trial” remained uncompleted when Kafka died from tuberculosis in June 1924 at the age of 40. In 1915, Franz Kafka read two draft chapters of his novel in progress, “The Trial,” to his close friend and fellow writer, Max Brod.

The trial kafka book