To those fragments of illumination we can now add “Conquest of the Useless,” a compilation of Herzog’s journals from June 1979 to November 1981, translated by Krishna Winston. (It was first published in Germany in 2004.) In the preface, Herzog warns us that the entries we’re about to read do not represent “reports on the actual filming” but rather “inner landscapes, born of the delirium of the jungle.” Cinephiles may groan, as I did, upon discovering that he means it. Anyone hoping for a definitive or even comprehensible account of the making and near unmaking of “Fitzcarraldo”is going to be sorely disappointed by the unadorned, barely annotated materials presented here.

Image Klaus Kinski, as Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, and the director Werner Herzog. Credit... Beat Presser/Photofest

As the curtain rises, we find Herzog at the home of Francis Ford Coppola, where he is staying while he races to finish the script. It feels appropriate, since Coppola’s own journey into jungle madness, “Apocalypse Now,” has just made its debut at Cannes. We anticipate a moment of baton passing, one world-class filmmaker handing some sort of cursed amulet of obsession to the next. It doesn’t come. “Apocalypse Now”is never mentioned. Nor do we find out what Coppola’s role, if any, in the future of “Fitzcarraldo” was intended to be. Nor do we learn what exactly has brought Herzog to his doorstep.

It never gets easier. Important figures arrive, then vanish, sometimes identified by first names only, their jobs, roles and relationships to Herzog mentioned only in passing a hundred pages later, or never. A book that cries out for interstitial explanations offers almost none, and the few that do appear only make matters worse. “Eight months expunged, as if I wished they had never happened,” Herzog interjects after an October 1979 entry. “A year of catastrophes, personal and related to my work.” Two paragraphs later, we pick up in July 1980, with no further light shed on those work-related catastrophes, although they presumably had some bearing on the story we’re vainly attempting to piece together.

We realize things are going wrong with Robards only when Herzog abruptly refers to the actor’s “appalling inner emptiness” (which he seems to have diagnosed after Robards told him he didn’t want anyone shooting at him). And we sense his admiration for Jagger, who works uncomplainingly, photographs Jerry Hall in rain-forest chic for Voguein his spare time and remains game even when a monkey bites him. But the diaries rarely record a specific conversation, dispute or personal encounter. Nature enthralls Herzog; people, less so. There is an awful lot about cows, dogs, lizards, moths and fist-size tarantulas, and anyone who has seen Herzog’s recent documentaries “Grizzly Man” and “Encounters at the End of the World” will recognize his singular ability to evoke the beauty and ruthless savagery of the natural world. But more workaday concerns only hum distantly in his head. “I went through the daily reports,” he writes, “and was devastated to see how little we have accomplished.” Absorbed as he is by thoughts of beetles and ostriches, that news, almost two years into his labors, actually surprises him.

But the befogged internal swirl of Herzog’s mind becomes an improbably apt vantage point from which to view the history of “Fitzcarraldo.” For all his maddening opacity (“Time is tugging at me like an elephant, and the dogs are tugging at my heart”), Herzog renders a vivid portrait of himself as an artist hypnotized by his own determined imagination. Occasionally he leaves the jungle, but he never really leaves it behind. He stops in New York in December 1980, anthropologically observing the dazed mourners in Central Park after John Lennon’s death while fretting about unsigned contracts. In England, he visits the set of “The Shining” and meets Stanley Kubrick, but the two men, each trapped in his own nightmarish production, don’t really connect. Back in Peru, he gets a telegram from Munich warning that his mother may die. Someone steals his under­wear. He records all this with the same benumbed neutrality. Nothing reaches him — not other people, not the punishing weather or tribal hostilities or delays, not even his notoriously loony star. (“No one will ever know what it cost me to prop him up, fill him with substance and give form to his hysteria,” Herzog writes of Kinski, concealing the full story even from his diary.)