A writer’s published diary is a study in contradictions—not entirely fact nor fiction, public nor private. Moreover, it is a topiary art form, the emotional and intellectual life sheared according to the writer’s sensibility. Yet the literary diary, for all its ambiguity and artifice, retains an aura of authenticity. The temptation to read this genre as the final word on a given author is especially precarious when it comes to Franz Kafka. After his death in 1924, Kafka’s literary executor Max Brod trimmed and pruned the diaries to such an extent that he produced what amounted to a different version of both the diaries and of Kafka. Schocken Books published them in English in 1948 and 1949, with translations by Joseph Kresh and Martin Greenberg. Consequently, the Kafka you know is the one that Max Brod helped fashion with the bowdlerized diaries. In his hands, Kafka’s prose became less transgressive and less homoerotic, more polished and more conventional.
Kafka’s original, unexpurgated diaries still exist, and translator Ross Benjamin has returned to give us them in their full, uncensored form. As Benjamin puts it, these diaries offer a “glimpse into Kafka’s workshop” and will be invaluable to scholars, artists, and anyone interested in Kafka’s life and work. Coming full circle, Schocken Books will publish Benjamin’s translation in summer of 2022. While the following interview focuses on Benjamin’s translation of Kafka’s diaries, he has also translated numerous works, including Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion (Archipelago), Clemens Setz’s Indigo (Liveright/Norton), and Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll (Pantheon), which was shortlisted for the Booker International Prize.
Eric Trump (ET): What is your connection to German? How did you become interested in translation?
Ross Benjamin (RB): At first I wanted only to be able to read German-language literature and philosophy—which had strongly appealed to me ever since I discovered Kafka and Nietzsche in high school—in the original. But when I was spending my junior year of college in Prague, I visited Berlin, and that at once vibrant and haunted city spurred my interest in actually immersing myself in the language and culture, actively engaging with it in the present, which I did after graduation, living there for a year on a Fulbright. I wrote my undergrad thesis on Paul Celan, and you can’t really talk about Celan without talking about translation. I was riveted by Celan’s translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets—and Peter Szondi’s reading of those translations, particularly in the essay “Poetik der Beständigkeit”—which were at times radically transformative. But it wasn’t that Celan was taking undue liberties; rather, he was reckoning with the crisis of German poetic language after Auschwitz, and finding a way to maintain a profound fidelity to Shakespeare in the midst of it. John Felstiner’s biography, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, which explored the poet’s life and work while at the same time offering insights into Felstiner’s own process of translating Celan, also really opened up the art of translation to me in all its richness. Meanwhile, I’d always written fiction, but I struggled with the question of what kind of writer I wanted to be, and an anxiety of pinning myself down. Translation seemed liberating in that respect, since I could channel other writers to whom I felt an affinity without defining myself in a particular way. Even now, translation allows me to keep reaching beyond and redrawing the boundaries of myself.
ET: In “Eleven Pleasures of Translating,” Lydia Davis writes that in translating you are “not beset by . . . the anxiety of invention, the commitment to invent a piece of work yourself.”
RB: I agree. Translation eliminates certain difficulties of doing your own writing, while substituting other difficulties. Above all, it eliminates the difficulty of the blank page and not knowing where to begin.
ET: How do you translate? What is your process?
RB: I translate a few pages at a time as a rough draft, then go back and revise. I like to have a separate document open where I note down questions, unresolved conundrums, alternative possibilities. These documents sometimes spawn other documents. Questions generate questions. This process sometimes risks spiraling out of control, but I need to get through the first draft as quickly as possible, leaving the hang-ups for revision. That’s when I try to solve problems and make choices—after I have the basic tissue of the text. If an author is alive, I like to get in touch and discuss specific passages at a fairly granular level. Many of these discussions have been rich and rewarding. With Kafka, I didn’t have that opportunity.
When I can help it, I don’t work evenings or weekends. During those times I read as much as I can for pleasure, whether in German or English. I think it’s important to be constantly infused with great literature in your own language and the language you’re translating into. It gives you a sense of what’s possible. It helps inoculate you against conventional thinking about style and technique, against believing that English can sound only one normative way or that there are fixed limits to what you can do in English.
ET: Are there any theoretical texts on translation you find particularly rich?
RB: Walter Benjamin’s writings on translation, especially the seminal “The Task of the Translator,” were pivotal in shaping my sense of the role of translation. He says at the beginning of that essay that translation is a “form,” meaning a form like poetry or the novel. This elevates it from a merely derivative status to a form of literature in its own right. He redefines the whole relationship between translation and original—reversing the dependency, or at least making it mutual—by arguing that the translation is an essential part of the afterlife of the original. If we look at a literary work not as a self-contained entity but as something that has an afterlife and a history, this makes translation key to the whole legacy of literary works. Benjamin stresses how the continued life of a work is always an open-ended process of transformation. For a work to live on, it needs to be actively and creatively re-engaged with. Reading Benjamin gave me a perspective on translation that empowered and liberated me as a translator.
ET: In the same essay, Benjamin says that a common mistake in translation is to fail to allow one’s own language be influenced by the foreign one, that we should expand and deepen our own language through translation.
RB: Right. In Benjamin’s framework, the translator is not some passive vessel, but an active agent in the perpetuation of the original. As a translator, I’m not simply trying to extract the meaning from the foreign words and then put it into English words. I’m trying to make English words and sentences mean in the same way as the foreign text. In practice, this means paying attention to everything the language is doing or the writer is doing with the language—syntactically, rhythmically, sonically, figuratively, tonally, and so on. This also requires looking at meaning not as fixed or already-there, but as something the translation is part of the process of creating. That’s why it’s possible for a translator to find something in a text that maybe wasn’t so widely recognized before, or some dimension of a previously translated text that was insufficiently brought out in the old translation.
ET: Do you have any advice to people who want to be literary translators?
RB: I have creative advice and practical advice. Translating should be an act of love because, if it’s not an act of love, translation can be a wearying and unrewarding activity. It’s exactly the opposite if you translate what you love. When it comes to translating itself, as with writing, I think to translate well you have to revise, going over it again and again. Revision is ninety-eight percent of the creative process. Practically speaking, find another source of income. Have a different profession, a supportive spouse or family members, or be independently wealthy. It’s hard to make a living at it.
ET: Can you talk a bit about Kafka’s diaries?
RB: Kafka kept his diaries from 1909 to 1923. The German critical edition of the diaries, published by S. Fischer Verlag in 1990, is just under a thousand pages. This edition, a faithful, unexpurgated transcription of the handwritten diaries, is the basis of my translation. The original diaries consist of twelve quarto notebooks and two bundles of loose papers. The handwriting is dense. Kafka crosses out, corrects, writes in the margins. He tore pages out. He would write in one notebook, stop, and then continue in a new one, only to return later to the earlier notebook. Or he might resume writing in a notebook from the back. So, for example, in a rough draft of Der Verschollene (The Missing Person, also titled Amerika) that he composed in his diary, the first half of the draft begins in 1912, but then he grabs an earlier notebook he’d broken off in 1911 and continues there. Instead of imposing a false chronology, I follow the critical edition in keeping to the sequence of the notebooks. The writing in the diaries is extremely heterogeneous, containing everything from daily observations and reflections to drafts of letters, articles, and stories to aphorisms and accounts of dreams.
ET: How long did the diaries take you to translate?
RB: I averaged two or three pages a day. I started in 2014, and my first draft was done by 2016. By 2018, I had gone through it twice. Then I needed to go through the diaries one more time. A lot of backtracking was involved. All told, it took seven years to reach the finished text.
ET: An English translation of the diaries already exists. How does yours differ?
RB: My translation offers English-speaking readers, for the first time, the unabridged text of the diaries. The only previous English translation was published in 1948-49 by Schocken Books. This translation was based on a German version edited by Kafka’s friend and literary executor Max Brod, which is incomplete and inadequate in various ways. For example, Brod left out or altered names of people still living at the time of publication. He suppressed certain passages of a sexual nature, particularly anything with a tinge of homoeroticism. Sometimes, if a passage did not reflect well on Kafka or on himself, he’d retouch or remove it. Brod was concerned with establishing Kafka’s reputation and influencing his reception. There’s an entry Kafka wrote during his stay at a nudist sanatorium: “2 beautiful Swedish boys with long legs, which are so formed and taut that one could really only run one’s tongue along them.” Brod changed this to “Two handsome Swedish boys with long legs.” Or, in Kafka’s description of a fellow train traveler, Brod cut the line “His apparently sizeable member makes a large bulge in his pants.” At other points, Brod left in references to visits to prostitutes, though some of these he was more censorious about than others. It’s interesting to ask why he refrained from manipulating some passages and not others.
ET: Is it in part because of Brod’s bowdlerizations that the popular image of Kafka is that of a sanctified, tormented artist?
RB: At least in part. Kafka is much more complicated than that saintly image would suggest. My translation of the diaries contributes to the rediscovery of a less sanctified Kafka, recontextualizing his genius. Brod’s construction of a pious myth of Kafka was reflected in his sanitizing of the posthumous manuscripts, ironing out whatever he saw as technical imperfections, whereas in my translation I want to restore them, down to the punctuation.
ET: What was translating like at the level of text?
RB: Kafka is a famously ambiguous author. His diaries are bristling with ambiguities, but here it’s difficult to tell, in a given passage, whether he is being ambiguous as a deliberate literary technique, or whether in this case he himself isn’t necessarily clear about what he means, or maybe he’s just hastily jotting something down without worrying too much one way or the other about its intelligibility, or he simply hasn’t found a felicitous formulation of not-fully-articulated thoughts. To what extent are a writer’s diaries geared toward public consumption? Wherever possible, I tried to preserve the unpolished elements of the text, like fragments, non-standard punctuation, inconsistencies, mangled syntax, and many other departures from traditional German. But it wasn’t only the rawness that was defamiliarizing or destabilizing in the writing—often there was no way to locate where a strange locution or manner of expression was coming from. That is, did it seem strange to me because it was written a hundred years ago? Was it the linguistic influence of Prague or Austria-Hungary, was it the singularity of Kafka, was it just the inherently erratic quality of writing in a diary? Any of this by itself or all of this together could make the language sound strange. I resisted any temptation to make Kafka sound more “correct” or “natural” in English than he did, to my ear, in German.
ET: In Kafka Translated, Michelle Woods writes that translator Mark Harman immersed himself in Samuel Beckett when translating Kafka’s The Castle. Did you develop any reading habits related to Kafka when translating his diaries?
RB: I read a lot of secondary literature to gain biographical information, aesthetic insight, and contextual knowledge. Research into Kafka’s time and place helped illuminate the background of various subjects Kafka deals with in the diaries. I also read Dickens and Flaubert, because both had an influence on Kafka. One thing I got from reading Dickens was a reminder of how singular an idiom can be. The idiosyncrasy and archaism of his language are not the same as those of Kafka’s, but they made me think about how English could accommodate the oddities of Kafka’s prose.
ET: What are your hopes for the diary once it finds a readership?
RB: I want the diaries to open a window into Kafka’s thinking, into his work, and into his complexities as a writer and a person in the process of becoming who he is. His notebooks were a laboratory of literary production and an arena of self-creation. I think readers, writers, and artists who may have found inspiration in the former translation of Kafka’s diaries will find even more in this version because it brings them closer to his creative process.
Ross Benjamin is a translator of German-language literature living in Nyack, New York. His translations include Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion, Kevin Vennemann’s Close to Jedenew, Joseph Roth’s Job, Thomas Pletzinger’s Funeral for a Dog, Clemens J. Setz’s Indigo, and Daniel Kehlmann’s You Should Have Left and Tyll. His translation of Tyll was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker International Prize. He was awarded the 2010 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his translation of Michael Maar’s Sleep, Nabokov. He also received a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship. His translation of Franz Kafka’s complete Diaries will be published by Schocken Books in 2022.
The last book Eric Trump translated is Stolen Girls: Survivors of Boko Haram Tell Their Stories by Wolfgang Bauer. The 2014 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai chose this book as the April 2021 selection of her book club, Fearless.
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