Michael Hofmann is a poet and translator from German of books by Thomas Bernhard, Jenny Erpenbeck, Günter Grass, Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth and Patrick Süskind, among many others. He teaches at the University of Florida. He has contributed dozens of poems to the LRB since 1980 and more than sixty pieces, on subjects including Stefan Zweig, Bohumil Hrabal, Halldór Laxness, Caspar David Friedrich and boarding schools.
The room smells of semen. The leather curtain that hangs in the doorway to keep the men from the boys is now flapping like a ventilator ... People crowd in to see the erotic drawings. Yonis in close-up like a row of fingerprints. – Hokusai’s hairfine precipice technique applied to pubic hair. Fingers do the walking, tiny feet wave in mid-air. His white ladies groan...
‘I had made a religion of his will, the Papal Bull of his Infallibility ... He chose for both of us, and I was happy.
Three bags full. He had an affair and told me. That he was impelled to it by loneliness and a long curiosity.
How can I forget it? They got drunk, had sex, and lay in bed watching TV. It’s as obvious as though I’d done it myself.
An alien nerve attached to...
Patricia Beer’s Selected Poems contain work composed over a period of two decades. They are a tribute to her consistency rather than to her development: I don’t find myself skipping pages because her inspiration underwent a brief eclipse, or took a direction I happen to dislike. Nor do I turn to the newest or the oldest poems more readily: they are too much of a piece. Selection can be a leveller, but in Patricia Beer’s case, the level is excellence. The writing is plain and elegant; the poems range from the quietly autobiographical to the dramatic monologue to the descriptive piece. But by far the majority of them contain elements from all three types, blended together.
I live in Berkeleyan hostility With my parents. The fridge bellows Like a young tractor. Very soon I shall Run away and join the Vatican Guard.
Back NumbersCarelessly we tore our love Like soft newspapers with feet. Then stooping down, we read With interest some vintage items.
Carnal PoemBirds came and pecked at a group of yellow bread crusts scattered on a low roof.
She lay on her...
Her mother was her father’s senior by something like twenty years; a difference she was proud of. Most recently she was tall, shapely, and engaged to her date at home, though still our age and not yet twenty. A shimmering girl with polished nails and a soft creamy face, who washed her white blonde hair with pink strawberry shampoo. When she was little, her hair caught fire and her older...
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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