Glimpses into Kafka's Workshop

Franz Kafka’s 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 and unfinished stories. Ross Benjamin’s acclaimed new translation makes available for the first time in English a comprehensive reconstruction of the diary entries, which date from 1909 to 1923. It 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, 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.

Join us to hear Ross Benjamin read from his new translation, after which he, Carolin Duttlinger, and Daniel Medin will be in conversation with Ian Ellison, to explore the challenges and rewards of translating Kafka’s diaries and what these diaries reveal about Kafka’s writing and reading life.

“A new, unexpurgated and essential edition of Kafka’s diaries.”

DWIGHT GARNER, The New York Times

“One of the finest translating achievements in recent history.”
MORTEN HØI JENSEN, Literary Review

Ross Benjamin is an award-winning translator of German-language literature, most recently the uncensored diaries of Franz Kafka. He has also translated work by Friedrich Hölderlin, Joseph Roth, and Clemens Setz. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he won the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for his translation of Michael Maar's Speak, Nabokov and his translation of Daniel Kehlmann's novel Tyll was shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize.

Carolin Duttlinger is Professor of German Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford and the Ockenden Fellow in German at Wadham College. She co-directs the Oxford Kafka Research Centre and is the primary investigator on the AHRC-funded “Kafka’s Transformative Communities” project. She is the author of several books, including Kafka and Photography, The Cambridge Introduction to Franz Kafka, and Attention and Distraction in Modern German Literature, Thought, and Culture.

Ian Ellison is the post-doctoral researcher on the AHRC-funded “Kafka’s Transformative Communities” project at the University of Oxford, where he is based at Wadham College. He was longlisted for the 2024 Observer Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism and in 2023 he was shortlisted for the Peirene-Stevns Translation Prize. His first book, Late Europeans and Melancholy Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium appeared in 2022.

Daniel Medin is Professor of Comparative Literature at the American University of Paris, and has served as a judge for the Dublin Literary Award and the Man Booker International Prize. A former Alexander von Humboldt fellow in Berlin, he has taught German, English, and comparative literature at Stanford University and at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Three Sons: Franz Kafka and the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, and W. G. Sebald.

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