En savoir plus
Informationen zum Autor 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his death in 1924, his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, defied his testamentary instructions to burn all his unpublished writing.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. Klappentext "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"-- Leseprobe First Notebook The spectators stiffen when the train passes. ————— “Whenever he ahsks me” the ah broken free from the sentence flew away like a ball in the meadow. ————— 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 ————— 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. ————— In the dark woods in the sodden ground I found my way only by the white of his collar. ————— 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. ————— 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. ————— 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. ————— In the open air the dancer Eduard...
