Translator's Introduction
November 2024
Dear FRANZ readers,
From 2014 to 2022, I worked on translating Kafka’s complete, uncensored diaries, published by Schocken Books in 2023. The project spanned eight years—partly mirroring, at a century’s distance, Kafka’s own diary-keeping from 1909 to 1923—and I completed it shortly after turning forty, his age when he died in 1924. I wrote about the experience and my approach to translating the diaries in this essay.
As I now embark on the translation of Kafka’s complete letters in their chronological sequence for FRANZ, I’ve been thinking about timing and pacing. There’s something compelling about translating each letter several days apart, much as Kafka himself wrote them. This rhythm—a near parallel between the original act of writing and my own—also highlights the interplay between past and present media technologies: the letter, a personal and physical form of communication, and the digital platform through which these translations will now be “posted.”
In some respects, my approach to the letters will resemble my approach to the diaries. I aim to preserve Kafka’s stylistic idiosyncrasies—including his unconventional punctuation and paragraphing, his spoken cadences, and the associative leaps in his syntax. But translating the letters introduces a significant shift: unlike the diaries, which were open-ended and provisional, the letters are consciously and—insofar as Kafka deemed them suitable to send—conclusively composed with a specific recipient in mind.
In the diaries, Kafka’s thoughts often feel inchoate, guided by a mental shorthand or intuitive logic hinted at only faintly in the language itself. To quote my essay, “[n]ot only could I not always—or even often—be certain that I knew what Kafka meant, but I also didn’t know whether at any given moment he himself knew what he meant.” Translating the diaries required embracing their uncertainty and indeterminacy, doing justice to what was strange, disconcerting, and resistant to reductive interpretation.
The letters, by contrast, aim for clarity and coherence—even if Kafka’s characteristic ambiguities persist. Each letter represents a definitive act of communication, shaped by the rhetorical strategies and the epistolary persona Kafka adopted for its intended reader. Still, these letters belong to his lifelong literary experimentation. In another essay on the diaries, I noted that for Kafka, “the act of putting pen to paper was always, at least potentially, an occasion to further elaborate his literary idiom.” The letters are no exception to this, offering another facet of his restless inventiveness.
Even Kafka’s diaries were not wholly private. He leafed through them to find entries to read aloud to friends, used them to draft letters and literary works, and reflected in them on his own avid reading of writers’ diaries, such as Goethe’s, revealing his keen awareness of the diary as a genre in dialogue with posterity.
The letters extend this dynamic between intimacy and public expression, offering a more polished counterpoint to the diaries’ raw immediacy. I’m looking forward to exploring Kafka’s epistolary selves—their multiplicity, strangeness, and emotional depth—and sharing with you the singular moments of brilliance, complexity, and discovery these letters contain.