THE RIFKIND CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES AND ARTS

PRESENTS

ROSS BENJAMIN

ON THE DIARIES OF FRANZ KAFKA

in conversation with Prof. Václav Paris

MONDAY, MAY 8

5:00 –7:00PM

RIFKIND CENTER, NA 6/316

The Rifkind Center for the Humanities and Arts invites you to join Ross Benjamin for a conversation with Prof. Václav Paris on his new translation of the Diaries of Franz Kafka. The event will take place from 5:00 to 7:00pm at The City College of New York, Rifkind Center, NA 6/316.

This new and scrupulously faithful translation of the Diaries brings us...the true inner life of the twentieth century’s most complex and enigmatic literary prophet.

—Cynthia Ozick, author of Antiquities

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.

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 2010 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.

VÁCLAV PARIS (Associate Professor) specializes in Global Modernism and Comparative Literature. His translations include Zdeně k Kratochvíl’s The Philosophy of Living Nature and Vilém Flusser’s The Power of Images.

Dating from 1909 to 1923, the handwritten diaries contain 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.

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC