The Diaries of Franz Kafka - Rilegato

Kafka, Franz

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0805243550 ISBN 13: 9780805243550

Casa editrice: Schocken, 2023

Riassunto

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • An essential new translation of the author’s complete, uncensored diaries—a revelation of the idiosyncrasies and rough edges of one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers.

“An invaluable addition to Kafka’s oeuvre.”—The New York Times

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.

By faithfully reproducing the diaries’ distinctive— and often surprisingly unpolished—writing as it appeared in Kafka’s notebooks, translator Ross Benjamin brings to light not only the author’s use of the diaries for literary invention and unsparing self-examination but also their value as a work of genius in and of themselves.

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Informazioni sull?autore

FRANZ KAFKA was born in Prague in 1883 to German-speaking Jewish parents. During his lifetime, he published groundbreaking short stories, including “The Judgment,” “The Stoker,” and “The Metamorphosis.” After his death in 1924, his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, defied his testamentary instructions to burn all his unpublished writing. Kafka’s posthumous work— including three unfinished novels, The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika—brought him worldwide renown.

ROSS BENJAMIN’s translations include Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion, Joseph Roth’s Job, and Daniel Kehlmann’s You Should Have Left and Tyll. He was awarded the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his rendering of Michael Maar’s Speak, Nabokov, and he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on Franz Kafka’s diaries.

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An essential new translation of the author's complete, uncensored diaries--a revelation of the idiosyncrasies and rough edges of one of the twentieth century's most influential writers.

Dating from 1909 to 1923, the handwritten diaries contain various kinds of writing: accounts of daily events, reflections, observations, literary sketches, drafts of letters, accounts of dreams, as well as finished stories. This volume makes available for the first time in English a comprehensive reconstruction of the diary entries and provides substantial new content, including details, names, literary works, and passages of a sexual nature that were omitted from previous publications. By faithfully reproducing the diaries' distinctive--and often surprisingly unpolished--writing in Kafka's notebooks, translator Ross Benjamin brings to light not only the author's use of the diaries for literary experimentation and private self-expression, but also their value as a work of art in themselves.

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

First Notebook


The spectators stiffen when the train passes.

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“Whenever he ahsks me” the ah broken free from the sentence flew away like a ball in the meadow.

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His seriousness is killing me. His head in his collar, his hair arranged immovably around his skull, the muscles at the bottom of his cheeks tensed in place

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Are the woods still there? The woods were still more or less there. But scarcely had my gaze gone ten paces when I gave up ensnared again by the boring conversation.

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In the dark woods in the sodden ground I found my way only by the white of his collar.

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In a dream I asked the dancer Eduardova to dance the czardas one more time. She had a broad streak of shadow or light in the middle of her face between the lower edge of her forehead and the center of her chin. Just then came someone with the disgusting movements of an unconscious intriguer to tell her the train was about to depart. The way she listened to the message made it terribly clear to me that she would no longer dance. “I’m a bad awful woman am I not?” she said. Oh no I said not that and turned in no particular direction to leave.

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Beforehand I questioned her about the many flowers stuck in her belt. “They’re from all the princes of Europe” she said. I wondered what it meant that those flowers stuck fresh in her belt had been given to the dancer Eduardova by all the princes of Europe.

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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.

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In the open air the dancer Eduardova is not as pretty as on stage. Her pallor, those cheekbones of hers, which stretch her skin so taut that scarcely more than a faint movement appears in her face, her big nose—which rises as if from a hollow—with which one can’t make jokes like testing the hardness of the tip or lightly grasping it by the bridge and pulling it back and forth while saying “come along now,” her broad high-waisted figure in overly pleated skirts, who can find that appealing—she almost resembles one of my aunts an elderly lady, many aging aunts of many people resemble her. But in the open air Eduardova reveals, apart from her very good feet, no compensation for these disadvantages, there’s really nothing that would give rise to enthusiasm astonishment or even respect. And so quite often I’ve seen Eduardova treated with an indifference that even gentlemen who were usually very adroit, very correct, couldn’t conceal, although naturally they took pains to do so in the presence of a dancer as famous as Eduardova was all the same.


My ear felt fresh rough cool juicy to the touch like a leaf.

I write this most definitely out of despair over my body and over the future with this body

When despair presents itself so definitely, is so closely bound to its object so firmly held back, as if by a soldier who covers the retreat and for this purpose lets himself be torn to pieces, then it is not real despair. Real despair has immediately and always overtaken its goal, (At this comma it became apparent that only the first sentence was correct)

Are you in despair?
Yes? you are in despair?
Run away? Want to hide?

I walked past the brothel as if past the house of a beloved.

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Writers speak stench

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The seamstresses in the downpours.

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From the train compartment window

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At last after five months of my life in which nothing I wrote could satisfy me and for which no power will compensate me, though all would be obligated to do so, it occurs to me to speak to myself once again. When I really asked myself a question, I still responded, here there was still something to be wrested from me, from this heap of straw that I have been for five months and whose fate, it seems, is to be set alight in the summer and to burn away before the spectator can blink. If only that would happen to me! And it should happen to me ten times over, for I don’t even regret the unhappy time. My condition is not unhappiness, but it’s not happiness either, not indifference not weakness, not fatigue, not interest in anything else, so what is it then? The fact that I don’t know is probably connected with my inability to write. And this is something I think I understand without knowing its cause. For whatever things occur to me occur not from the root, but beginning somewhere toward their middle. Just let someone try to hold them, let someone try to hold and cling to a blade of grass that only starts growing from the middle. Perhaps some can, Japanese acrobats, for example, who climb a ladder that isn’t resting on the ground but on the upturned soles of a partner lying on his back and isn’t leaning against a wall but goes straight up into the air. This is more than I can manage, not to mention the fact that my ladder doesn’t have even those soles at its disposal. That’s not all, of course, and such a question still isn’t enough to make me speak. But each day at least one line should be pointed at me as people are now pointing telescopes at the comet. And if I would then appear once before that sentence, lured by that sentence, as I was last Christmas, for example, when I had gone so far that I could only barely contain myself and when I really seemed to be on the last rung of my ladder, which, however, stood steadily on the ground and against the wall. But what a ground! what a wall! And yet that ladder didn’t fall, so firmly did my feet press it against the ground, so firmly did my feet raise it against the wall.

Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Schocken
• Data di pubblicazione: 2023
• ISBN 10: 0805243550
• ISBN 13: 9780805243550
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 704
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile