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 ... This edition scuffs him up and returns him to earth, in an intimate manner that does no injury to our sense of his suffering, or his profound and original gifts.
Brod’s edition reads something like a finished work, Mr. Benjamin’s... like, well, a diary. In a departure from the elevated tone of Kafka’s previous English translators... Mr. Benjamin’s English sticks closer to the texture of the German original, much less polished than the crystalline prose of his published works, in an effort to 'catch Kafka in the act of writing.' As might be expected of a critical edition mainly intended for a scholarly audience, it’s harder to read, and stylistically not quite placeable (there are many instances where the translation could have been relaxed even further). But, in prioritizing transparency above all, Mr. Benjamin’s translation doesn’t just supplant the previous edition—it inaugurates a new phase of Kafka’s afterlife in English.
This new edition restores the variegated richness – and, at times, the tedium – of the diaries ... The diaries, in which fiction, confession, dreams, wry humour, and despair combine in a messy, hypnotic network, feel like the closest thing to a path, so like a tripwire, that leads to the threshold of Kafka’s abiding mystery.
Ross Benjamin’s momentous new translation... is the first to convey the full extent of their twitchy tenuousness ... 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.
Ross Benjamin has done an admirable job of bringing readers the full text of these many journals, reflecting accurately the obsessive nature of Kafka’s thinking ... Kafka has never been so fully present, as both a man and a writer.
The result is a text more faithful to Kafka’s handwriting but also more difficult to read. This is due not to Benjamin’s prose, which is consistently elegant and precise, but to the nature of the edition ... Benjamin presents the notebooks as they were written, with the repetitions, opacities, and grammatical errors that are characteristic of the drafts of even the most skilled of writers ... I have not the slightest doubt that this is the edition that should be used in classes where Kafka is taught, and its excellent apparatus of notes will illuminate references that otherwise would be completely illegible. As for the reader looking for pleasure, the decision seems to me a harder one ... When the desire to read this or that passage of Kafka’s notebooks arises, I will resort to Benjamin’s translation—but I’m glad that my first introduction to them as an adolescent was through Max Brod.
