The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“A new, unexpurgated and essential edition of Kafka’s diaries has finally been published in English, more than three decades after this complete text appeared in German . . . 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.”

—DWIGHT GARNER, The New York Times

“Momentous . . . Life also bursts into literature at the level of form, and in Kafka’s diaries even the words are acrobatic. As Ross Benjamin notes in the thoughtful introduction to his new translation, his aim is to capture the extent to which the diaries were a ‘laboratory for Kafka’s literary production’ and thereby catch the author ‘in the act of writing.’ He has succeeded. Everything in the diaries thrashes . . . [The Diaries] are the intimate incisions of an author who could write only by etching words into the flesh.”

—BECCA ROTHFELD, The New Yorker

“One of the finest translating achievements in recent history.”

―MORTEN HØI JENSEN, Literary Review

“Readers will welcome this new edition of the Diaries, complete, uncensored, in a fluent translation by Ross Benjamin and supplemented with seventy-eight pages of invaluable notes, the fruit of half a century of Kafka scholarship.”

—J. M. COETZEE

“Max Brod, Franz Kafka’s intimate friend and fellow writer, was, it is now understood, both his savior and his betrayer. Without his rescue of Kafka’s at-risk papers, there would be almost no Kafka at all; but in the presence of Brod’s mediating intrusions as editor, have we ever really known Kafka’s authentic voice? This new and scrupulously faithful translation of the Diaries brings us, unembellished by theory, the true inner life of the twentieth century’s most complex and enigmatic literary prophet, whose very name has come to us as symbol and vision of innocent vulnerability in the face of irrational force. Yet warns: beware interpretation!”

—CYNTHIA OZICK

Kafka’s inner life has always been a bit of a mystery. The expurgated diaries in their original German and English versions hinted at his complicated, often confused relationship to sex, politics, illness, and being Jewish. This readable new translation of the complete German version of the diary transforms the silent Kafka of a century ago into a Kafka not only of his times but of ours.”

—SANDER GILMAN, author of Franz Kafka, The Jewish Patient

“Thirty-two years after their original publication in German, Kafka’s complete Diaries are here in Ross Benjamin’s outstanding translation. A boon for the American reader! Now we have in English some of the most intimate reflections and literary experiments of one of the towering geniuses of modern literature.”

—SAUL FRIEDLÄNDER, author of Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt

“‘A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us,’” Kafka famously wrote. In his Diaries, we see him turning that axe on his own psyche, recording his dreams, jotting snatches of overheard dialogue, even drafting stories. Ross Benjamin’s new translation offers the most intimate glimpse possible into the process of this singular writer.”

—RUTH FRANKLIN, author of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

“The Diaries are a wild ride, and a recent translation by Ross Benjamin is superb. The book is handsome, the notes extensive, and Benjamin’s crisp preface is thoughtful and sincere . . . Benjamin’s research has brought the play and peculiarity of Kafka’s “method”—obsessive, cyclic, demanding, open-ended and abruptly terminative at once—into fresh light.”

—JOY WILLIAMS, Harper’s Magazine

“A fresh, unadulterated translation of Kafka’s notebooks, dense with introspection and writerly despair . . . The attraction of Kafka’s diaries has always been his coruscating descriptions of his existential struggles as a writer and human being. He captures his frustration in ways that are wrenching, vivid, and highly quotable . . . Essential reading.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Finally! Three decades after the publication of the critical edition of Franz Kafka's diaries in Germany, English readers can now ‘catch Kafka in the act of writing,’ thanks to this monumental endeavor by translator Ross Benjamin. This new volume offers us Kafka's singular perspective and delivers an expanded window into Kafka's unique personality. The intricately researched and detailed Notes (75 pages of them!) provide us with a wealth of knowledge and context. For those of us in thrall to Kafka the Man as well as the Writer, the Notes add layers of life to Kafka's world and milieu and reveal a new depth and richness to Kafka's humanity. This new volume is an essential addition to the library of every serious student and reader of Kafka.”

—KATHI DIAMANT, author of Kafka's Last Love and director of the Kafka Project

“This new edition restores the variegated richness of the diaries . . . Here Kafka seems both genius and ingenue, and the contradiction brings him closer to us .”

―CHRIS POWER, The Guardian

“Ross Benjamin has given the literary world an incredible treasure in this thoughtful edition. Kafka has never been so fully present, both as a man and a writer.”

—MARISSA MOSS, New York Journal of Books

“Mr. Benjamin’s translation doesn’t just supplant the previous edition—it inaugurates a new phase of Kafka’s afterlife in English . . . The writing glimmers with sensitivity, and openness to the world.”

—MAX NORMAN, The Wall Street Journal

“The blackest band of the barometric spectrum has never been my experience of Kafka’s diaries, which I have always found elevating, energizing, and utterly joyful, with Benjamin’s wild edition increasing my pleasure tenfold because he allows us to encounter them in their complete heroic excess….Ross Benjamin’s carnivalesque translation licenses our laughter.”

—FRANCES WILSON, The New York Review of Books

“Ross Benjamin’s new translation, the first in 75 years, has relevance extending beyond the rarefied air of Kafka scholarship. Benjamin has restored Kafka’s diaries to their messy original format, undoing virtually every editorial decision of Kafka’s longtime friend, executor, and biographer, Max Brod….Where Brod tried to clean up Kafka’s diaries for academics, Benjamin has recreated the thrill of discovering Kafka’s diaries for anyone interested in snooping.”

—GIDEON LEEK, The Village Voice

“The complex nature of Kafka’s agony around work is made freshly discernible in Ross Benjamin’s new translation of the author’s diaries. By giving us a more bodily Kafka than has hitherto been available, Benjamin helps us sense the author’s pleasures and pains with greater clarity….With this new rendition of Kafka’s diaries, Benjamin escorts us inside the burrow, showing us the artist at work. At once disturbing and humanizing, these unexpurgated notebooks remind us that the achievements of this singular writer were unlikely, precarious, and paid for with great pain.”

—CHARLIE TYSON, Bookforum

“Ross Benjamin’s translation of the diaries offers us a sense of the unpolished, the unfinished, which seems entirely appropriate to the kind of writer Kafka became.”

—DAVID MASON, The Hudson Review

“Here we can gain access to one of the most bizarrely complex and tormented literary minds, ever. It is fascinating. And so brilliantly translated, you would think Kafka was writing in impeccable English.”

—WILLIAM BOYD, The Times Literary Supplement, Books of the Year 2023

“The new translation restores the diaries to how Kafka wrote them: fragmentary, sometimes incoherent and disordered. It’s not unusual to find a sketch continued 100 pages later—or even 100 pages earlier, so chaotic was the way he filled the pages . . . It’s thrilling to turn the page after acres of Olympic-standard bellyaching and find the entire text of Kafka’s extraordinary short story “The Judgement” presented just as he wrote it, in one long overnight blizzard of creativity . . . The Diaries will open your eyes—but the stories will blow your mind.”

—JOHN SELF, The Times (UK)

“This edition of the Diaries seems a model of both scrupulousness and generosity. Here we find the unpolished inner life of one of the most significant writers that ever lived; and the entries, which come from the mind of an ordinary human being and not from some otherwordly realm of inner consciousness, do not in any way detract from Kafka’s work.”

—NICHOLAS LEZARD, The Spectator

“Freshly and vividly translated by Ross Benjamin with an illuminating introduction and more than 1,400 explanatory notes, this definitive edition of Kafka’s diaries, written between 1909 and the year before he died aged 40 from complications of tuberculosis in 1924, recovers Kafka’s authentic voice. Where Brod’s entries were polished artefacts, here they are like the life they record – disjointed, fragmentary and unfinished. As Benjamin puts it, the diaries are “a laboratory for Kafka’s literary production”. Text expurgated from Brod’s version is fully restored. In Benjamin’s historic edition, the shape of Kafka’s days can be seen for the first time.”

—JOHN GRAY, The New Statesman

“In his mid-twenties, Kafka began writing his diaries, keeping at it until death. They are finally published unexpurgated, in a frank new translation by Ross Benjamin. The previous translation, overseen by philosopher Hannah Arendt, was in multiple volumes and somewhat bowdlerised. The whoring and homoeroticism are now restored, along with verbal infelicities, creating an unprecedented, almost 600-page peephole into the mind of a writer whose published prose is otherwise classically abstract and inscrutable. It’s some secret to be let into. “

—TANJIL RASHID, Financial Times

“What is so interesting about his newly translated diaries is that they open up fascinating new perspectives on Kafka’s life and work that challenge our assumptions and make us look at Kafka very differently. . . This new translation is based on the German critical edition first published in 1990 and is very different from the first English version, published in 1948-9, based on the original German version edited by Max Brod, Kafka’s close friend and literary executor. Benjamin is scathing about Brod’s “inadequacies, inaccuracies, and distortions”, in particular how Brod suppressed sexual references, imposed “an artificial chronology on the entries” and created a “sanctified” image of Kafka that endured for years. Above all, Benjamin has set out to give us a front row-seat reading about Kafka as he tries to find his voice as a writer.”

—DAVID HERMAN, The Jewish Chronicle

“Ross Benjamin’s complete translation gives us back Kafka in all his sprawling and cranky glory. . . [T]hey are a fitting challenge to any glib attempt to distil the nature of the Kafkaesque, showing us instead the lightning shifts and transformations that have offered so much to later readers and writers, and the immense cost that these exacted upon him.”

—JOE MOSHENSKA, The Guardian