I’ve saved this passage by Kafka translator Ross Benjamin in my notes since early February. In re-reading it I realize anew how cogently it expresses my own experience of reading poetry, never mind translating it. It ends with a compelling recommendation to let certain writing speak for itself — “as far as possible”!

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My translation [of “The Diaries of Franz Kafka”], which I delivered to my publisher shortly after turning 40, Kafka’s age when he died, was the result of eight years spent groping and straining to make sense of Kafka’s groping and straining to make sense. Not 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. Like many diarists, he didn’t always achieve a clear-cut articulation of his inchoate consciousness, to say nothing of his unconscious, but often relied on a kind of mental shorthand or associative logic hinted at only barely in the words and syntax.

I typically translate by circling back to unresolved quandaries as many times as it takes for me to feel convinced of my choices. But chasing Kafka’s almost physically elusive sense, I found myself in the same predicament that afflicts many of his characters: the more tenaciously certainty is sought, the more insistently doubt and frustration are sown. It’s a self-perpetuating, potentially interminable cycle. I came to realize that only by putting aside my demands for clarity and coherence could I do justice to what was strange, disconcerting, and even baffling in Kafka’s writing, to what unsettled any narrow interpretation or reductive theory we might otherwise be tempted to impose on it. Kafka’s irresistible appeal is preserved— indeed, in my view, it’s only enhanced — by, as far as possible, letting his writing speak for itself.

(Ross Benjamin, “A Century On, the Search for the Real Franz Kafka Continues,” New York Times, 2-2-23)

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