Ross Benjamin and Merve Emre on The Diaries of Franz Kafka

Translator Ross Benjamin and critic Merve Emre visit Rizzoli Bookstore to celebrate the launch of his monumental new translation of The Diaries of Franz Kafka, published by Pantheon/Schocken.

“Essential . . . The new volume, in a sensitive and briskly idiomatic translation by Ross Benjamin, offers revelation upon revelation. It’s an invaluable addition to Kafka’s oeuvre.” —The New York Times

"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.” —The New Yorker

Ross Benjamin is a translator of German-language literature and a writer living in Nyack, New York. His translations include Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion (Archipelago Books, 2008), Kevin Vennemann’s Close to Jedenew (Melville House, 2008), Joseph Roth's Job (Archipelago, 2010), Clemens J. Setz's Indigo (Liveright/Norton, 2014), and Daniel Kehlmann's You Should Have Left (Pantheon, 2017) and Tyll (Pantheon, 2020). He is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow.

Merve Emre is associate professor of English at the University of Oxford and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. In 2019, she was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize. In 2021, she was awarded the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle.