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.” 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.” What a talent, what a career, what a life, and what a treat to relive it all with this most down-to-earth of demigods. Throughout his adult life, Kafka equated being a bachelor with being condemned to stagnation. At the age of 28, he wrote in his diary: An unhappy person who is to have no child is terribly confined in his unhappiness. Nowhere a hope for renewal, for help from happier stars. He must make his way afflicted with unhappiness when his circle is finished, content himself and no longer take up the thread to test whether on a longer path, under different circumstances of body and time, this unhappiness he has suffered could disappear or even bring forth something good After all, Kafka’s parents hailed from small towns in the countryside and attained bourgeois respectability and mainstream acceptance only when they opened a fancy-goods store in the heart of the city. No wonder they were so flummoxed by their obstinately impractical son, who refused to take an interest in the business. As he wrote in that intercepted letter to Felice’s father, “I live within my family, among the kindest, most affectionate people—and am more strange than a stranger.”

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.”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

Unos de los aspectos más sorprendentes de Kafka es su increíble y detallado poder de observación hasta el más mínimo detalle. Desde una arruga en la cara, la sombra proyectada de una nariz, la manera en que se remanga una persona o hasta la posición de un dedo meñique. Kafka era un observador implacable. Esto se hace fuertemente evidente en sus "Diarios de viaje". Todas sus descripciones en esos diarios son prueba de ello. 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. The Kafka world has a fraught relationship with Max Brod. On the one hand, we owe Brod the existence of Kafka as “the representative genius of the modern age” (as you put it). But the liberties he took with the work warped it in a way that may be indelible, despite decades of labor to remove his imprint. Tell me a little bit about the pressure you, in turn, have felt as essentially the sole facilitator of the “unsanitized” Kafka into the English-speaking world. Kafka himself would even write and deliver an introduction to these performances in Yiddish. He would also witness his own father harboring prejudices towards his new friend Löwy: “My father about him: He who lies down in bed with dogs gets up with bugs.” 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.Volviendo al aspecto literario es maravillosos encontrar gran cantidad de esbozos literarios que no llegaron ser ni relatos terminados o borradores de lo que serían sus novelas más famosas. Algunos de los relatos inéditos como "Recuerdos del ferrocarril de Kalda" que ahonda en la soledad que él mismo vivenciaba como escritor, narrado a partir de un personaje que decide tomar un trabajo en una solitaria oficina de ferrocarril perdida en el medio de Rusia. A fresh, unadulterated translation of Kafka’s notebooks, dense with introspection and writerly despair. And yet the diaries reveal that Kafka made no effort to live ascetically. He is busy attending plays and lectures, and, in later years, the newfangled institution of the cinema. Nor was he ever the solitary hermit of his imaginings: “Wonderful evening yesterday with Max. If I love myself, I love him even more strongly.” In his notes from a 1911 trip to Paris that he took with Brod, he writes, “How easily grenadine with seltzer goes through one’s nose when one laughs.” 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.” August 1911 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. How late I catch up on my education now at the age of 28, it would be called a delayed start in a race. And perhaps the harm of such a misfortune consists not in the fact that you don’t win; that is actually only the still visible, clear, sound kernel of the misfortune, which goes on to blur and become boundless, driving you, who should run around the circle, into the interior of the circle. Aside from that I have also noticed many other things about myself in this time, which has to a small extent also been happy, and will try to write them down in the next few days.

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.” Algunos son proféticos, otros un tanto patéticos; los encontramos profundos y en otros casos llenos de información innecesaria, pero lo cierto es que junto con el género epistolar se han transformado en algo indispensable para los lectores.

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Once wrought, these tropes were available to be repurposed and refashioned. Untethered from their initial association with the distress of ‘an inner leprosy’, they became components of Kafka’s poetics of corporeality. In a letter to his future fiancée Felice Bauer in February 1913, Kafka accentuated his perverse gratification in visualising himself being carved by a knife: Such are the fantasies or wishes in which I indulge when I lie sleepless in bed: To be a coarse piece of wood and to be braced by the cook against her body as she draws the knife toward her with both hands along the side of this stiff piece of wood (that is, somewhere around the area of my hip) and with all her strength cuts off shavings to light the fire. 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?

Jewish middle-class family of this major fiction writer of the 20th century spoke German. People consider his unique body of much incomplete writing, mainly published posthumously, among the most influential in European literature.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 came, singing, to fetch me? Aside from these forays into fiction, the diaries’ most arresting writing is clinically visual. Kafka’s many meticulous descriptions of acquaintances, strangers, and urban tableaux are as cruelly observant as a portrait by Lucian Freud. “Artless transition from the taut skin of my boss’s bald head to the delicate wrinkles of his forehead,” one reads. “An obvious, quite easily imitated failing of nature, bank notes should not be made in such a way.” A Yiddish actor reciting a monologue “clenches the skin of his forehead and of the root of his nose as one believes only hands can be clenched.” Kafka writes unsentimentally about his lovers, but he displays incongruous tenderness about striking scenes around the city: at one point, he effuses, “The sight of stairs moves me so much today.”