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.

カフカの「日記」は、一人の天才が自己の深淵と格闘する生々しい魂の痕跡です。未検閲の本作では、従来の作家像を覆す性的衝動や荒削りな思考が露わになり、現実と虚構の境界で震える彼の孤独が克明に響きます。単なる記録を超え、断片的な言葉の一つひとつが独立した文学として読者の実存を激しく揺さぶるのです。 映像化作品が不条理な世界を視覚的な「悪夢」として固定するのに対し、原作の言葉は読み手の脳内に無限の迷宮を広げます。映像による外的補完と、テキストによる内的沈潜。この相乗効果こそがカフカという深淵に触れる唯一の道であり、私たちはそこに現代的な孤独の救済を見出すでしょう。