Michael Hofmann has translated Kafka, Koeppen and others.
Siblings is like a book from a lost civilisation. It comes with four pages of endnotes, which these days is unheard of in fiction. This bespeaks the arcaneness of the so-called Dreibuchstabenstaat, ‘three-letter state’, the DDR (or GDR); the utter pertinacity, specialisation and goneness of its circumstances.
Why the past tense?Why the new, somewhat morose, expression in the photographs,the half-smile fallen from the half-wince,as though unplugged or unplupped?
Why of a sudden so much attention from the Far East – it’s because the world turns into the sunand so much less in English than in German – it’s the availability, even in common speech, of the composed...
Afemale undergraduate, newly arrived at Oxford, sees a man at a party. ‘Immediately there is an aura of difference about him.’ He’s ‘exotic-looking’ and stands out from the crowd in ‘an old-man suit’ and crumpled shirt. ‘He reaches for a fag that someone offers and lights it in the big cup of his hands.’ People like him, but are...
Things have not gone quiet around the Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal, even though he has been dead since February 1997, when he defenestrated himself from the fifth floor of a Prague hospital, à la mode tchèque. There were some no doubt well-meaning reports that he had fallen while trying to feed the pigeons, but these should be discounted. Not that he didn’t like pigeons,...
‘Do people ever know their true reason for embarking on a long journey?’ Tété-Michel Kpomassie asks, just as he is setting out for home (où ça?) at the end of a year and a half in the Greenland of his dreams. He was 16 when he first left Togo for Europe; 24 when he reached Greenland, by way of Ghana, Senegal, France, Germany and the colonial...
Michael Hofmann talks to Declan Ryan about his first new collection in almost two decades, One Lark, One Horse.
Documentary has customarily been regarded as a genre duty-bound to deal in facts. But the only duty Herzog has ever felt as a filmmaker is, as he puts it, to ‘follow a grand vision’.
Kafka wrote that, were it not for the final act, Michael Kohlhaas would be ‘a thing of perfection’, which is a diplomatic way of saying that Kleist absolutely butchers it. In fact, one of the many...
Many poets end up having a hard life but W.S. Graham went out of his way to have one. His dedication to poetry, about which he seems never to have had a second thought, was remorseless, and his instinct,...
Remarque apparently knew that The Promised Land would be his last novel, and meant it to be one of his finest, perhaps his masterwork.
Jakob Wassermann, who published nearly a book a year for the last thirty years of his life but died broke and exhausted, soon to be forgotten, on 1 January 1934 at the age of sixty, was well...
‘Literature should be naked,’ Peter Stamm writes. Words should never obscure the story, ‘its warmth, its form, its vitality’. It’s form that critics in Germany and...
On Tuesday, 17 October 1911, 18-year-old Rudolf Ditzen, the future Hans Fallada, got up before dawn to meet his schoolfriend Hanns Dietrich von Necker at a tourist spot outside Rudolstadt in...
As any adult can tell you – or any adult not given over entirely to mawkish and convenient notions of innocence – children are born spies. Every parent (previously an independent...
The two central facts about Malcolm Lowry are that he wrote and that he drank. He drank while writing – or possibly he wrote while drinking. When he died in June 1957 after downing a lethal...
Between 1951 and 1954, Wolfgang Koeppen published three scathing, disillusioned novels ridiculing the notion of a new start and a clean slate for West Germany. At the time, perhaps as many as 80...
Michael Hofmann’s poetry is a lament for a lost world. Some years ago, in an article on Frank O’Hara, he talked about New York no longer being the thrilling place it had been in the...
With Joseph Roth, you begin – and end – with the prose. The great delight of this Austrian novelist, who wrote in the Twenties and Thirties, lies in his strange, nimble, curling...
At the age of 48, after thirty years of lecturing on German literature and writing radio plays, Gert Hofmann began to produce disconcerting novels. Michael Hofmann, his son, the poet, confronted...
‘I was not myself. I was just anyone.’ The person who says ‘I’ in Michael Hofmann’s earlier poems is uncertain, diffident, angry; he seems both gnarled and youthful,...
This German novel has waited nearly forty years for its English translator. Michael Hofmann fell in love the moment the Good Fairy told him about it, and set out to liberate it from the thorn...
Wim Wender’s very pleasurable Paris, Texas (1984) is both an American movie and a European film. Its creative pedigree is mixed – all through the credits: the German Wenders as...
Attentive readers of the Guardian’s news pages will already know about Arabesques. A 1986 report from Jerusalem told readers of a first novel by a 36-year-old writer which was making a big...
In his autobiographical papers, Surely you’re joking, Mr Feynman?, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Richard Feynman, describes being piqued by an article in Science about how well...
The acrimony in Michael Hofmann’s book is that of a son towards his father. Like a family photograph album, the sequence ‘My Father’s House’ records the son’s growth...
There remains a most decided difference – indeed it grows wider every year – between what Philip Larkin calls ‘being a writer’, or ‘being a poet’, and managing...
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