Ahead of acclaimed actor Josh Hamilton’s reading from Franz Kafka’s magnetic, riveting diaries on Monday, March 13, we talked to translator Ross Benjamin — who has brought Kafka’s complete diaries into English for the first time ever — about the inherent drama of Kafka’s style, why it demands performance, how translating has altered Benjamin’s perception of the writer, and more.
Diaries serve all kinds of functions, but most of them start from the premise of privacy — that they are not to be read by others. Your translation of Kafka’s will be read next week by Josh Hamilton in a very public setting. What is it about Kafka’s diaries that demand this kind of performance?
I’m not sure whether Kafka ever wrote without some kind of audience in mind. It’s possible that at certain points he was using his diaries to record his private life, but at various moments he mentions leafing back through them to find entries to read to his friends. He also drew literary works from diary entries. The diaries were where he wrote some of his most famous stories, like “The Judgment,” which he read aloud to his sisters. When he died, he left a letter to his friend Max Brod, his literary executor, to burn his diaries and unpublished works — never mind that Brod was the one person he knew would never do that. He also writes about what it’s like to write a diary while reading Goethe’s diary; he surely didn’t anticipate becoming the iconic genius of modernism, but as an avid reader of writers’ diaries and letters himself he knew well the relationship between these literary forms and posterity. That attitude is present in the self-dramatization of the writing — he doesn’t just say, “I have a headache,” he describes it with extraordinary metaphors and imagery, like having “boards screwed into my temples.” I think this theatricality lends itself well to the kind of reading that Josh Hamilton will be doing.
Kafka is one of the most widely-read and discussed writers of the 20th century, and his diaries contain (arguably) some of his most audacious and inventive writing — but they haven’t been available in a full English translation until now. Why is that? In what other ways does your translation differ from previous efforts?
The German edition that I translated came out in 1990, and that was the first time readers saw what Kafka had been up to in his diaries, unaltered and uncensored. For a long time, Max Brod exerted control over what was published and how it was presented. Until Brod’s death in 1968, no one else had access to the full German text of the diaries — they had access to Brod’s edition, and Brod manipulated it substantially. He intrusively reshaped the text. He cut a number of literary drafts, including “The Judgment” and “The Stoker,” and sometimes fabricated composites out of Kafka’s false starts and stabs in the dark, jettisoning the wealth of revisions and reinventions in favor of a single cohesive whole. He rearranged and polished the writing, and censored material that he considered unflattering to Kafka, such as certain lewd or homoerotic passages. I saw the value in restoring all this material, as an embodiment of an ongoing creative process and as a reflection of a more multifaceted version of a writer who had been sanctified by his friend.
Over the course of your translation, did you find anything that surprised you?
Reading the complete German edition was eye-opening — Kafka was far more alive than he had seemed in the older edition. One example: at one point he wrote about “the literature of small nations,” Czech literature and Yiddish literature, and some advantages of writing in those languages rather than in German, where you were always in the shadow of a major writer like Goethe. Brod edited these entries into something closer to a coherent argument. But when I read the complete German edition, I saw that it was much more fractured than it had appeared to be — which doesn’t make it any less interesting or potent, it just makes it feel more open. All the different possibilities for where the argument might go are still there, undetermined. I’ve always loved Kafka, but seeing the unpolished, open-ended nature of the diaries liberated him, for me, from his fixed, monumental, and, as a result, potentially forbidding reputation. He feels more human in these pages.
Has working on the performance changed your perception of the writing?
It’s been an interesting process because, as we’ve discussed, so much of the raison d’être of this translation project is to refrain from Brod’s style of editorial intervention — to be faithful to every comma — and for this performance I’ve hacked it up. Which has proven to me that there’s nothing wrong with that in itself. What Brod did is to try to pass off a sanitized, falsely idealized product as the diaries themselves. But if you embrace the provisional nature of these diaries, you can cut them up and put them back together in any number of ways. Kafka’s struggle with his own writing is one recurrent theme. He has this epiphanic moment where he writes “The Judgment” in a single sitting, which he likens to a birth, and he spends the rest of his life chasing that creative highpoint but never quite finds it again. That is just one dramatic arc of many that can be traced in the diaries. There’s so much material that, when read aloud, is really powerful.
What do you hope audience members will come away with after seeing this performance?
I hope they come away with a sense of Kafka’s writing as being in a state of flux. He has historically been presented to us as a mythologized, finished product, but in his own lifetime there was so much that was unfinished. The diaries open a window into his creative process. This performance is meant to show him wrestling his literary persona into being; he is in the midst of becoming who he is. I hope that audience members find that as captivating as I do, and that it loosens the Kafka myth enough to show that he was even more inventive than we previously knew him to be.
Josh Hamilton’s reading of Franz Kafka’s Diaries, followed by a conversation with Ross Benjamin and Veronika Tuckerova, is on Monday, March 13. Get your tickets today.