The Kafka Diaries: A Reading and Conversation with Translator Ross Benjamin

Join us Tuesday, January 17th, at 7pm at BISR Central, for a reading and conversation with Ross Benjamin, translator of Franz Kafka’s complete, newly unexpurgated and reconstructed diaries. Composed between 1909 and 1923, this eclectic collection of reflections, observations, literary sketches, accounts of dreams, draft correspondence, and chronicles of daily life reveal a writer thinking and experimenting in explicit, often surprisingly unpolished ways. BISR’s Christine Smallwood, Ajay Singh Chaudhary, Rebecca Ariel Porte, and Lauren K. Wolfe will sit down with Ross to explore the fraught history of Kafka’s reception, from the early censorious interventions by Max Brod to the present, with a view to what this new edition and its translation might contribute to “the rediscovery of a less sanctified Kafka”—writer of insurance reports, stimulus to many a later theoretical innovation, and himself an inventor of variously “translating” fictional figures.   

Held in partnership with Penguin Random House, the event is free to attend with a suggested $10 donation. Wine, beer, seltzer, and snacks will be served. A copy of The Diaries of Franz Kafka is available for purchase here. If you plan to attend in person, please RSVP below. (The event will also be streamed live to the BISR Facebook page.)

Event Schedule

Tuesday, 7:00pm EST
January 17, 2023

$0.00

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