The Diaries of Franz Kafka (The Schocken Kafka Library)

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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. For the first time, Ross Benjamin’s new translation gives English readers access to the entirety of the Diaries, with Kafka’s fragmentary structure and idiosyncratic grammar preserved. The result is the most intimate glimpse possible into the process of this singular writer.”—Ruth Franklin La centralidad que la literatura ocupa en su vida comienza a ser plasmada en las páginas de sus Diarios sea tanto para reflejar los avances de sus borradores o ideas conceptuales para futuras narraciones como lo opuesto, o para confesar su falta de inspiración, frustración, carencia de ideas argumentales o bloqueos temporales de escritura. The author of “The Metamorphosis,” “The Trial” and “The Castle” was raised by a non-observant father in Prague, and he hated the small amounts of Jewish culture he was exposed to at a young age, including his own bar mitzvah. In addition, the city’s largely assimilated German-speaking Jewish population tended to look down on poorer, Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews.

He was born on July 3, 1883, in Prague, then in the Austro-Hungarian province of Bohemia. Formerly a cultural capital, the city had long since surrendered its prestige to sleek Vienna and gritty Berlin. The teen-age Kafka grumbled in a letter to a friend that “Prague doesn’t let go. . . . This old crone has claws.” The complaint proved prophetic: despite his many attempts to flee, he managed to move for only a short period during the last year of his life. I can’t understand and can’t even believe it. I live only here and there in a little word, in whose vowel (“thrusts” above), for example, I lose my useless head for a moment. First and last letter are beginning and end of my fishlike feeling.

Cada momento de imposibilidad de escritura es anotado e indica claramente que atenta contra sus aspiraciones de escritor. El 20 de diciembre de 1910 se pregunta «¿Cómo puedo disculparme por no haber escrito todavía nada el día de hoy?» 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.” El texto "El Mundo Urbano" es considerado el escrito más antiguo de Kafka en donde se establece la conflictiva relación entre un padre y un hijo, lo que supone que junto a la experiencia de noviazgo con Felice y las rispideces con su padre Herman apuntaló la inspiración de su relato La condena. En el fragmento "Seducción en la Aldea" prefigura lo que será su novela El castillo, así también como el apunte narrativo “Josef K., hijo de un rico comerciante…” que indefectiblemente alude al inicio de su novela El proceso.

A captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker.” —Claire Messud, Harper's Con su característica capacidad para establecer conexiones inesperadas, Solnit entremezcla la vida y la obra literaria del autor de 1984 , y su vínculo con la naturaleza y el mundo de los sentidos, con otras historias como las de las rosas de la fotógrafa Tina Modotti, la obsesión de Stalin por hacer crecer limones en condiciones de frío extremas, la Guerra Civil española, la crítica de Jamaica Kincaid al colonialismo o la industria del cultivo de rosas en Colombia, y da pie a una reflexión sobre el placer, la belleza, el lenguaje, la escritura, la esperanza y la verdad como actos de resistencia. An essential new translation of Franz Kafka’s complete, uncensored diaries—a revelation of the idiosyncrasies and rough edges of one of the twentieth century’s most important, influential, and visionary writers Dating from 1909 to 1923, Franz Kafka’s Diaries contains a broad array of writing, including accounts of daily events, assorted reflections and observations, literary sketches, drafts of letters, records of dreams, and unrevised texts of stories. This volume makes available for the first time in English a comprehensive reconstruction of Kafka’s handwritten diary entries and provides substantial new content, restoring all the material omitted from previous publications—notably, names of people and undisguised details about them, a number of literary writings, and passages of a sexual nature, some of them with homoerotic overtones. 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 . . . [ They] are the intimate incisions of an author who could write only by etching words into the flesh.”Biography bursts into Kafka’s art at the level of content. “The Castle” and “The Trial” are full of the sorts of files and bureaucratic inanities that he would have encountered daily at the Accident Insurance Institute, and the workplace inspections that Vice-Secretary Kafka had to conduct probably inspired a bustling hotel scene in his first novel, “ The Man Who Disappeared.” I could read Kafka's thoughts and inner workings for hours and never let a drop of it go waste. I lay strewn about my own covers and twisted blankets reading his similarly unsorted feelings every night for 15 minutes. 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. For the first time, Ross Benjamin’s new translation gives English readers access to the entirety of the Diaries, with Kafka’s fragmentary structure and idiosyncratic grammar preserved. The result is the most intimate glimpse possible into the process of this singular writer.” The myth of Kafka as an inveterate melancholic has not prepared us for his endearments toward stairs. From this master of self-flagellation we expect only litanies of miseries and maladies. And the diaries do include their share of obligatory despairing. Kafka takes evident pleasure in posturing as an incurable, and he is unfailingly dramatic about minor infirmities. When he has a headache, it is as if he has “two little boards screwed against my temples”; when he cannot sleep, he feels as if he has laid his head “in a false hole.” He was keenly sensitive to sound, and in a short piece later published in a magazine he whines that his bedroom is “the headquarters of the noise of the whole apartment.” His letters have much to say about his phobia of mice. As his biographer Reiner Stach so aptly puts it, “For this man absolutely anything could become a problem.” RossBenjamin 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.”

And Kafka was too devoted a Lebensreformer to remain sequestered in a lightless, airless basement. In the diaries, he waxes with uncharacteristic sentimentality after a stroll outside, “On the garden path the goddess of happiness drifts toward you.” In an entry from August, 1911, he reports that he does not regret spending the summer swimming rather than writing: “the time that has now gone by, in which I haven’t written a word, has been important for me because at the swimming schools in Prague, Königssaal and Czernoschitz I have stopped being ashamed of my body.” Luego de la ruptura final con Felice en ese año y el hecho de saber que ya tiene tuberculosis hacen que sus anotaciones disminuyan notablemente, siendo el año 1918 del que menos podemos leer. Mismo caso para el año 1919, año en el solo escribió una hoja. Kafka desiste de tomarse el tiempo de sentarse a escribir para ocuparse de su decreciente salud y sus curas en sanatorios naturistas o de descanso. Las pocas entradas de esta época tienen un marcado tono lúgubre y depresivo. Apart from raw authenticity, ( ofcourse this was his diary) a candid account of his day-to-day life, including the monotonous details, mundane chores, and his innermost struggles. Some of it I tried to skip to be honest. But some of it was so intense. Su imposibilidad de escribir, lo asfixia, lo frustra y cae en una alienación que lo aleja de todo ser humano y naturalmente esto termina eclosionando en sus escritos.

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The beautiful strong separations in Judaism,” he praises at one point, in a disjointed style that is a hallmark of his diaries. “One gets space. One sees oneself better, one judges oneself better.” This particular piece never reappears, but many similar fragments are reworked and regurgitated with minor revisions, often in the course of several years. Six times Kafka fiddles with a sketch about the adverse effects of education, which he ultimately abandons. Occasionally, there are first drafts of full works, including “ The Judgment,” the story that Kafka completed in a surge of ecstasy in a single night.

En el año 1936, un escritor plantó unas rosas». Así comienza el nuevo libro de Rebecca Solnit, una reflexión sobre un jardinero apasionado que fue, además, la voz más importante del siglo XX frente a la mentira y el George Orwell. A partir de su inesperado encuentro con aquellas rosas que Orwell cultivó hace más de ochenta años y que siguen hoy rebosantes de vida en su jardín, la autora indaga en ese aspecto más desconocido de la vida del escritor para descubrir en qué medida su devoción por las flores puede iluminar sus compromisos éticos y estéticos como escritor y como luchador antifascista. El secreto de Kafka reside en esta ambigüedad fundamental. Estas oscilaciones perpetuas entre lo natural y lo extraordinario, el individuo y lo universal, lo trágico y lo cotidiano, lo absurdo y lo lógico vuelven a encontrarse en toda su obra y le dan a su vez su resonancia y su significación.” Albert Camus, El mito de Sísifo. Some of Kafka’s more ambiguous comments about his Jewish brethren were previously removed by Brod, according to Benjamin’s introduction to the diaries. At one point while hanging out with Löwy, Kafka invokes antisemitic stereotypes about Jewish uncleanliness: “My hair touched his when I leaned toward his head, I grew frightened due to at least the possibility of lice.” Benjamin notes: “Here Kafka confronts his own Western European Jewish anxiety about the hygiene of his Eastern European Jewish companion.” La lectura de estos otros diarios es tal vez más placentera, puesto que la experiencia de viajar es una de las más gratificantes que un ser humano pueda tener en la vida y Kafka se encarga de contarlo con todo lujo de detalles. The dancer Eduardova, a lover of music, travels on the tram as everywhere else in the company of two violinists, whom she often has play. For it’s not prohibited to play on the tram if the playing is good, is pleasant for the fellow passengers and costs nothing, that is, if afterward there’s no collection. At first it’s a bit surprising, to be sure, and for a little while everyone finds it inappropriate. But at full speed, in a strong breeze and on a quiet street it sounds pretty.

Not that all of Kafka’s grievances were so trivial. He certainly had reason to rail against the monotony of his deadening office routine, and it is hard not to sympathize when he laments that his life “resembles the punishment in which the pupil has to write down the same sentence, senseless at least in its repetition, ten times, a hundred times or even more depending on his offense”—except in his case “it’s a punishment under the condition ‘as many times as you can stand it.’ ” There are periods when his depression darkens around him so densely that it blots out even the possibility of light: “Some deny the misery by pointing to the sun, he denies the sun by pointing to the misery.” The only thing that the dusk could not reach was his writing, or so he was convinced. “When it had become clear in my organism that writing was the most productive direction of my being,” he confesses, “everything thronged there and left empty all the abilities that were directed toward the pleasures of sex, eating, drinking, philosophical reflection music first and foremost. I wasted away in all these directions.” And yet even here, in this wail of anguish, he regards his writing as something writhing in his “organism,” in his viscera, not something anemic and apart. El variado material de los Diarios se compone de una serie de doce cuadernos que oscilan entre las veinte y las cincuenta y ocho páginas, todos ellos en cuarto, además de dos legajos de hojas con muchas anotaciones. Franz 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.” Kafka también llevó un diario en los que anota sus experiencias en los viajes que realizó junto a Max Brod por ciudades de Austria, Alemania, Francia, Italia y Suiza en el período comprendido entre los años 1911 y 1913. I sensed at the sight of him what pains he had taken for my sake, which now—perhaps only because he was weary—gave him this certainty. Wouldn’t another little exertion have sufficed and the deception would have worked, perhaps worked even now. Did I defend myself, then? I did stand stubbornly here outside the house, but just as stubbornly I hesitated to go up. Was I waiting until the guests would come, singing, to fetch me?