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The Diaries of Franz Kafka (The Schocken Kafka Library)

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A partir de la figura de George Orwell, la gran pensadora de nuestro tiempo nos insta a la reflexión en un libro urgente, hermoso y esperanzador. Thirty two years after their original publication in German, Franz Kafka’s complete Diaries are here in Ross Benjamin’s outstanding translation. A boon for the Americanreader! The previous edition of the Diaries was egregiously censored by Max Brod who eliminated whatever, in his misdirected view, could detract from the saintly image of his friend which he chiseled for posterity. Now we have in English some of the most intimate reflections and literary experiments of one of the towering geniuses of modern literature.” A captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker.” —Claire Messud, Harper's 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.

I can’t understand and can’t even believe it. I live only here and there in a little word, in whose vowel (“thrusts” above), for example, I lose my useless head for a moment. First and last letter are beginning and end of my fishlike feeling. 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 Manifestly, writing was not an intellectual exercise for Kafka; it was a somatic shiver. Sometimes it was a spawning: “The Judgment” came out “like a veritable birth covered with filth and slime.” Sometimes it was a wounding: “I will jump into my novella even if it should cut up my face.” In one of the most often quoted passages of his letters, he compares great writing to a weapon smashing us open, insisting that “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” These are gloriously mixed metaphors, always muscling their way from one image to the next. “I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else” can mean that life is subordinate to literature—but it can also mean that literature is coaxed to breathe and bleed.

Kafka’s ultimate inability to take a decisive step on one of these two paths consigned him to painful self-division. By day an insurance official, by night an insomniac scribe of the liminal space between waking and dreaming, he denied his capacity to negotiate the conflict between his breadwinning job and his literary calling. He dramatised this dilemma in a letter of apology to his boss, written in his diary on 19 February 1911, for his absence from work that day: When I tried to get out of bed today I simply collapsed. There’s a very simple reason for it, I am completely overworked. Not by the office but by my other work. The office plays an innocent part in it only insofar as, if I didn’t have to go there, I could live in peace for my work and wouldn’t have to spend those 6 hours a day there, which have so tormented me that you cannot imagine it, especially on Friday and Saturday, because I was full of my concerns. In the end as I am well aware this is only chatter, it’s my fault and the office has the clearest and most justified claims on me. But for me it is a horrible double life from which insanity is probably the only way out. 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 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.”—Sander Gilman, author of Franz Kafka, The Jewish Patient Literature usually reaches us in its finished form, when it has already ossified into irrevocability. By the time a book is bound and printed, it is easy to forget that the words were once in motion. Franz Kafka’s fitful fiction provides a reminder. Most of his work was published posthumously, through the efforts of his best friend, Max Brod, and much of it still bears the marks of its author’s uncertainty. Kafka finished none of the three novels he started, and his final attempt, “ The Castle,” leaves off abruptly midsentence. In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses.” So be-gins Rebecca Solnit’s new book, a reflection on George Orwell’s passionate gardening and the way that his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and on the intertwined politics of nature and power.

Su imposibilidad de escribir, lo asfixia, lo frustra y cae en una alienación que lo aleja de todo ser humano y naturalmente esto termina eclosionando en sus escritos. And yet, for all his discontent with his bachelorhood, facing the prospect of matrimony, Kafka vacillated between longing and dread. Shortly before his first engagement, he staged a self-interrogation as a dialogue in his diary, prodding himself to weigh a future as a husband and father against one in which he would at last leave his post at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, move away from Prague, and devote himself wholly to literature – an uncertain existence he thought incompatible with a settled domestic life. Los Diarios nos dan las claves fundamentales de lectura para comprender gran parte de la obra kafkiana, ya que esta adquiere verdadero sentido al leerlos y son, al mismo tiempo, una conexión directa con la creación y el desarrollo de casi todos los textos que escribió, debido a que en muchos de ellos es imposible disociar lo empírico de lo ficcional cuando se intenta interpretarlos. 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. At times, he rambles to himself about his inability to love or be loved. Some days are people-watching: snippets of description, like an artist capturing a pose. Some entries are the same passage, over and over, refining the prose. Occasionally there are careful account of Kafka's day. The plays he takes in, the reading he himself is doing, vacations he's taken.Momentous. . . Life also bursts into literature at the level of form, and in Kafka’s diaries even the words are acrobatic. As Ross Benjamin notes in the thoughtful introduction to his new translation, his aim is to capture the extent to which the diaries were a ‘laboratory for Kafka’s literary production’ and thereby catch the author ‘in the act of writing.’ He has succeeded. Everything in the diaries thrashes . . . [ They] are the intimate incisions of an author who could write only by etching words into the flesh.”

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.”Gran parte de lo escrito en los años 1912, 1913 y 1914 abarcará específicamente detalles de lo que le sucede luego de conocer a Felice Bauer, intercalando con anotaciones de todo tipo de las obras que posteriormente serían publicadas por su amigo y editor Kurt Wolff (Contemplación, La condena, El fogonero, La metamorfosis), así también como y sus reflexiones e inquietudes sobre ellas.

Kafka se ha entregado completamente al oficio de escritor y lo confiesa abiertamente en unas líneas que le envía a su amigo Max Brod el 8 de febrero de 1922: « En realidad, si el escritor quiere evitar la locura, no debería alejarse jamás de su escritorio, debería aferrarse a él con los dientes». Benjamin has done a beautiful, difficult service: knowing when is the time to straighten an author's tie, and when to let him appear as he is, real and disheveled, to the world. There's something beautiful and personal in seeing this reality. For the authors among this book's readership, it's relatable and a relief. Writers are writers, no matter the level of fame, no matter the time period.

The Diaries of Franz Kafka,” translated by Ross Benjamin and out this week from Penguin Random House, collects every entry of the writer’s personal diaries covering the period from 1908 until 1923, the year before his death from tuberculosis at the age of 41. Max Brod, Franz Kafka’s intimate friend and fellow writer, was, it is now understood, both his savior and his betrayer. Without his rescue of Kafka’s at-risk papers, there would be almost no Kafka at all; but in the presence of Brod’s mediating intrusions as editor, have we ever really known Kafka’s authentic voice? This new and scrupulously faithful translation of the Diaries brings us, unembellished by theory, the true inner life of the twentieth century’s most complex and enigmatic literary prophet, whose very name has come to us as symbol and vision of innocent vulnerability in the face of irrational force. Yet warns: beware interpretation!” 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.” replica la misma ausencia de entradas y anotaciones que 1919., las cuales repuntan en 1922. En 1923, ya muy enfermo e internado más tiempo en los sanatorios detiene a cero las anotaciones con tan sólo tres párrafos en los que se queja de su “incapacidad de nada” y de “sentirse cada vez más angustiado” cuando escribe.

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