Book Interview: The translated diaries of Franz Kafka - seeker and explorer
Headshot portrait of Austrian writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924) as a young man, circa 1910. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
- The Diaries of Franz Kafka
- Franz Kafka
- Translated by Ross Benjamin
- Schocken Books, €22.99
In 1915 the Prague based German-speaking Jewish Bohemian writer, Franz Kafka, read two draft chapters of his novel in progress, , to his close friend and fellow writer, Max Brod. remained uncompleted when Kafka died in June 1924, aged 40, from tuberculosis. During his own lifetime Kafka published a few short stories. Mostly in Prague literary journals. But it bequeathed him no recognition, no fame, no notoriety, and no literary prizes. Prior to his death, Kafka left strict written instructions for Brod to burn all of his literary manuscripts — with the exception of three or four short stories.
Brod betrayed his friend’s last wishes. Brod fled the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, emigrated to Mandatory Palestine, and died in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1968. Much of his life was spent promoting Kafka. As Kafka’s sole literary executor, Brod edited and prepared posthumous editions of Kafka’s unpublished novels. came out in 1925, followed by (1926) and which Brod retitled (1927). Today, Kafka is one of the most celebrated writers in modern European literature.
Between 1909 and 1923, Kafka kept various notebooks he called his Tagebücher “or diaries”, which recorded daily events; reflections and observations, literary sketches, letters and reviews; accounts of dreams; outlines for planned works, and descriptions of people with whom Kafka crossed paths. In 1913, aged 29, Kafka wrote in one diary entry: “I am made of literature. I am nothing else and cannot be anything else.”
Brod published two volumes of Kafka’s diaries, in English, in 1948-49. The first volume was translated by Joseph Kresh. The second by Martin Greenberg, in cooperation with the German Jewish philosopher and political theorist, Hannah Arendt, who was then an editor at Schocken Books in New York. In the postscript to volume one, in 1948, Brod claimed the diaries were as complete as it was possible to make them. “A few passages, apparently meaningless because of their fragmentary nature are omitted,” Brod wrote.
Ross Benjamin, an award-winning American translator of German-language literature, now claims Brod was being economical with the truth.
“Besides omitting or altering the names of and details about people still living at the time of the [diaries] publication, Brod manipulated the diaries in several places that presumably seemed to him to reflect unfavourably on himself or Kafka,” Benjamin writes in the preface to The Diaries of Franz Kafka. 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.
“Brod deleted whole huge chunks of text that he thought were too personal and also deleted literary texts that Kafka had drafted in the diaries, which Brod slapped a title on and then published as fiction elsewhere,” Benjamin explains from his home in Nyack, New York. ”Brod authorised himself to take liberties with Kafka’s texts and made the decision that since he was the one who [really] knew Kafka, he knew what should be part of Kafka’s literary legacy and what should be shielded from public view.”
Benjamin says the ambiguity of Kafka’s prose make translating his work difficult in general. But translating Kafka’s diaries proved especially tricky.
“When you read the original [German] of these diaries you often get the sense that sometimes the writing may not even be intelligible or make sense to Kafka himself,” says Benjamin. “Due to the unfinished nature of the text, I realised that a definitive moment of certainty was not something that was going to be available to me with this translation. I also wanted to keep the text open to as broad a range of interpretations as possible.”
Benjamin notes that Brod — as Kafka’s sole literary executor — promoted a certain pious myth of Kafka in the literary world. Namely: the figure of a saintly prophetic genius.
“Brod idealised Kafka as a writer and he once said that ‘the proper category for understanding Kafka is the category of sainthood, not the category of literature’. Personally, I think it is the category of literature,” Benjamin explains. “New translations of Kafka’s diaries in German, and now my recent translations of the complete diaries in English, are helping us debunk this myth, bringing to light facets of the writer formerly obscured, skewed or neglected.”
Benjamin says his new translation also adds to our understanding of Kafka’s sexuality. “The [added] passages that I have included, which were cut by Brod, show clear moments of homoerotic desire from Kafka, which was less well known before [at least in English translations of the diaries],” says Benjamin.
Specifically, Brod deleted lines where Kafka described in his diary how a fellow male train passenger’s “sizeable member makes a large bulge in his pants.” In another diary entry, Kafka recalled going to a nudist spa and sees two Swedish boys. In Brod’s version it simply reads: “Two handsome Swedish boys with long legs.” Benjamin’s translation of that same diary entry, however, did not cut a crucial line, which means it reads quite differently: “2 beautiful Swedish boys with long legs, which are so formed and taut that one could really only run one’s tongue along them”.
“Kafka was always a seeker and explorer in all areas of his life,” says Benjamin. “It makes sense to me that Kafka would explore other aspects of his sexuality in his writing.”
In Brod’s memoirs he spoke about Kafka’s gentle serenity, describing their relationship almost as if they were lovers. Brod also recalled the mystical experience of both men reading Plato’s in Greek, and Flaubert’s in French, like a collision of souls.
While there is no evidence of any homosexual feeling between Kafka and Brod, their intimate relationship appeared to go beyond typical camaraderie from two straight men of their era. Brod and Kafka even visited brothels together in Prague, Milan, Leipzig, and Paris. Some of those visits were already documented in Brod’s original English version of Kafka’s diaries.
Did Brod censor any of those details? “Kafka’s visits to brothels aren't completely censored,” Benjamin explains. “They were, however, sanitised in Brod’s English translation.” Take, for example, Kafka’s diary entry regarding a visit to a Milan brothel in [1911]. Kafka wrote: “The girl by the door, whose scowling face is Spanish, whose putting her hand on her hips in Spanish and who stretches in a bodice-like dress of prophylactic silk. Hair runs thickly from her naval to her private parts.” In Brod’s version, the last line is deleted. “It’s hard to say why Brod cut this line,” says Benjamin. “Did he see it as too crudely carnal and lascivious?”
Kafka was engaged to two women over his short life: Julie Wohryzek and Felice Bauer. But for a host of complicated reasons, he married neither. “Kafka had a very fraught and tortured relationship with women in general and the word bachelor comes up hundreds of times throughout the diaries,” Benjamin explains. The translator claims that Kafka’s inner psychological conflict about bachelorhood versus marriage and having a family is constant in Kafka’s diaries, because he never fully resolved it.
Benjamin also notes, however, that Kafka’s used those moral dilemmas as a fundamental source for his creativity. “Kafka was constantly coming up with new metaphors, images, and allegories to think about these inner [psychological] conflicts, which caused him a great deal of stress,” Benjamin concludes. “Kafka suffered a lot mentally. But he used his creativity to transform that suffering into literary expression.”
