Q: Your German translation work is prolific; from Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion to Auma Obama’s And Then Life Happens (a German-language memoir written by Barack Obama’s sister) to most recently translating Daniel Kehlmann’s You Should Have Left and Tyll. What called you to translating Franz Kafka’s diaries?

A: I discovered Kafka in high school, beginning with his stories and unfinished novels, and was soon drawn to his diaries and letters, where I found some of his most brilliant, inventive, and revealing writing. I never stopped reading and rereading him, and in college I spent a semester in Prague, retracing his steps in his native city, where he’d spent most of his life. It was also during that time in Prague that I began learning German, in large part because I wanted to be able to read Kafka in the original – as well as several other writers who had similar significance to me, among them Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Celan. As it turned out, German opened the way to an even more exciting rediscovery of Kafka than I’d anticipated, since it gave me access to newer German editions that hewed more closely to his manuscripts, with all their idiosyncrasies and rough edges, than what had yet been translated into English. Reading the diaries in the form of a faithful transcription of Kafka’s handwritten notebooks allowed me to see him and his writing anew. And once I became a literary translator and had enough experience to feel at least halfway equal to the task, the temptation to make something similar possible for English-speaking readers was irresistible.

Q: The Diaries of Franz Kafka gives readers an intimate glimpse into the mind of the human behind such works as The Trial and The Metamorphosis. What is something readers will be surprised to find in his now complete and uncensored diaries?

A: There’s a popular image of Kafka as a saintly genius whose purity placed him at a remove from the world. In the sole English edition of the diaries available until now, much of what was censored is precisely what complicates that picture. Notably, this includes the complexity of Kafka’s relationship to sex. In the former edition, several passages on visits to brothels were camouflaged or sanitized. In one description of a prostitute, for example, the line “Hair runs thickly from her navel to her private parts” was deleted, presumably because the lewd carnality of the diarist’s gaze was deemed unbefitting of the pious Kafka myth. Some of the previously omitted material was homoerotic, such as an entry Kafka wrote during his stay at a nudist sanatorium: “two beautiful Swedish boys with long legs, which are so formed and taut that one could really only run one’s tongue along them.” My translation of the restored text brings to light facets of Kafka’s life and work that had been obscured, skewed, and neglected in the service of his sanctification. To desanctify Kafka is not to diminish him, but to give a realer, fuller, richer, and more nuanced sense of who he was, as a human and a writer.

Q: Franz Kafka’s friend and biographer Max Brod famously published his diaries, with translations by Joseph Kresh and Martin Greenberg. How is your translation of Kafka’s diaries different from those that came before yours?

A: Some of the most essential differences can be traced back to the fact that my translation is based on the critical edition of the diaries published by S. Fischer Verlag in 1990 rather than Max Brod’s earlier version, which was the basis for the Kresh and Greenberg translations. Brod’s heavy-handed editorial interventions went beyond bowdlerization. They reflected his commitment to minimizing the fragmentary, unpolished nature of Kafka’s diary writing and effacing its peculiarities and unorthodoxies. In doing so, Brod fabricated a more cohesive whole in a more smoothly readable and uniformly “literary” idiom – which was a misrepresentation of the very character of what Kafka had written. In contrast, the critical edition reproduced Kafka’s handwritten notebooks in all their untidiness. In his diaries, Kafka was all over the place, proceeding in fits and starts, taking stabs in the dark, backtracking and reworking, leaping from one mode of writing to another and blurring the lines between them. The resulting disarray was strewn with mistakes, misspellings, repetitions, abbreviations, contractions, regionalisms, and other quirks and infelicities. By leaving all this untouched, the critical edition made visible the provisionality and open-endedness of Kafka’s writing in his diaries. For me, this inside view of Kafka’s workshop, his spontaneously unfolding creative process, is key to the appeal, interest, and value of the diaries. Which is why in my translation I resisted any urge to make Kafka’s writing appear more “correct” or “natural” than it struck me as being in German. In places where the original seemed hasty, scattershot, disjointed, groping, stumbling, or stuttering, where the punctuation was sparse or unconventional, the syntax muddled or mangled, the thoughts only semi-articulated, inchoate, irreducibly ambiguous, I sought not to downplay these qualities but to bring them out in the English.

Q: The Diaries of Franz Kafka is an impressive 700+ pages. What is your process like and how do you translate?

A: From start to finish, this translation took me eight years. I typically translate slowly, carefully, and meticulously, going over the text as minutely as possible and as many times as it takes to feel convinced of my choices. But in the face of the unique difficulties of Kafka’s diaries, this process threatened to spiral out of control. With this project, not only could I not always – or even often – be certain that I knew what Kafka meant, but I also didn’t know whether at any given moment he himself knew what he meant. After all, his diaries were where he made an ongoing effort to work out what he meant without necessarily having pinpointed it yet. My tendency to agonize over every translation decision and the trouble I have moving on from unresolved quandaries put me in the same predicament that afflicts many of Kafka’s protagonists: the more tenaciously certainty is sought where there’s none to be found, the more relentlessly doubt and frustration are sown. It’s a self-perpetuating, potentially interminable cycle. Escaping it meant letting go of a fantasy of omniscience, which might be particularly destabilizing for a translator – that is, the idea that you really can’t make sense of everything.

Q: What do you most hope readers take away from The Diaries of Franz Kafka?

A: In the near-century since Kafka’s death, countless readers all over the world have been thrilled, inspired, fascinated,and mystified by Kafka. I hope that they, and any reader opening the diaries to encounter Kafka for the first time, find there an inexhaustible source of new ways to be thrilled, inspired, fascinated, and mystified by Kafka.