Michael Hofmann is as famous for his translations of classic German novels, including his father's work, as for his own poetry, writes Eileen Battersby.
Readers look to other readers to guide them. And if the reader we select for that task is a gifted poet, so much the better. Literature is at best an imaginative adventure, it is also an intimate encounter with language - although sometimes that very intimacy is further complicated and obscured by additional layers of meaning. It becomes, in reality, a wall, a foreign tongue possessing nuances lost in a literal reading.
It is no secret that many of the most enduring stories and poetry we read were not originally written in English. So how to find the key to unlock the truths, the visions, the messages stories contain? Enter the unsung hero, enter the translator. Michael Hofmann, poet, critic, excitingly new style, old world traditional man of letters and IMPAC-winning translator whose participation in Poetry Now 2003 next weekend is cause for celebration, is a rare, sophisticated and intriguing writer.
His extraordinary literary legacy has shaped his own sensibility and contributed hugely to readers hungry for stories. The world he has opened up for English readers is that of the German language writers, including the enigmatic chronicler of the Austro-Hungarian world and also of 1920s Berlin and Vienna, Joseph Roth; the great German novelist Wolfgang Koeppen; the Swiss-German Beat Sterchi, author of the magnificent Blösch; Romanian IMPAC-winner Herta Müller; and, most touchingly, that of more personal works, of his late father, novelist Gert Hofmann, whose work includes The Parable of the Blind (1985, English translation 1986).
First published as a poet at the age of 25, Michael Hofmann has been committed to literature since childhood. His poerty is careful, deliberate. To date, he has published four volumes of verse: Nights in the Iron Hotel (1983), Acrimony (1986), Corona, Corona (1993) and Approximately Nowhere (1999). His collection of criticism, Behind the Lines: Pieces on Writing and Pictures, dominated by his interest in US and European writing and vintage cinema, is multi-dimensional and testifies to his being a lively, provocative critic.
Malcolm Lowry's classic Under The Volcano (1947) remains one of his favourite books, but on the subject of current British writing he is direct: "I don't get it. I don't understand it." Not that it worries him.
First transplanted to England at the age of four, and later educated there - culminating with a first in English from Cambridge - Hofmann, despite his English accent, remains a German. The theme of reinvention, forced and otherwise, runs through his work. He says, "I was abandoned," and writes in 'The Machine That Cried', "I gave a sudden lurch into infancy and Englishness", later recalling in the same poem, "My first-ever British accent wavered/ between Pakistani and Welsh".
Highly regarded by his fellow poets, Hofmann is a poet's poet and, as Dennis O'Driscoll has pointed out, is "easily among the best and most adventurous poets of his generation" - a generation that more or less includes O'Driscoll's own, Hofmann, born in 1957 in Freiburg, being some three years younger. It was the Irish poet who, also astutely identifying the influence of US master Robert Lowell, noted "Michael Hofmann's best work tends to be dense in style and tense in mood".
Memory recollected in urgency is a hallmark of Hofmann's art. Much of the most powerful feeling is concentrated in the poems dealing with his father and his relationship with him. Gert Hofmann died young, and suddenly, in 1993 at the age of 62. It might appear that his father's reputation had had an impact on Michael's, but this is not so. Hofmann senior was an academic, his career was spent as a kind of travelling lecturer on German literature, particularly the work of Thomas Mann.
The family lived in Britain, the US and across Europe. The young Michael Hofmann was initiated into the wonders of art house cinema by his father. It was not until he reached 50 that Gert Hofmann attacked the business of creating fiction - attack being the operative word. Within 12 years, up until his death, he wrote 12 books.
As his fiction began to appear at 50, his son, then 25, published his first poem. "We began together, at the same time," Hofmann recalls; father and son became writers together. Taught by his father to read, Michael Hofmann, eldest child and favoured only son of four children, found himself belatedly pushed away by a father intent on winning what proved too brief a creative race against time. Abruptly, Gert withdrew from the family: "Your family/ has been kept at arm's length" ('The Means of Production'). He used the radio as a kind of domestic buffer, leaving his son to ask in 'Fine Adjustments', " 'Why did God give me a voice,'/ I asked, 'if you always keep the radio on?' " (both from Acrimony).
Speaking by phone from the University of Florida, where he is Distinguished Lecturer in the English Department, Michael Hofmann is funny, Old-World polite, direct and true to the candour of his poetry. "Here I am in a place full of swamps and prisons," he says, and jokes about his habit of testing danger by walking in a place where he knows there are alligators to the right and to the left. "They are sluggish and cold blooded and seem very ancient."
He has no difficulty being described as a translator first and a poet second. If this is how some may know him, he does not object, and laughs on being told that, in one Dublin bookshop, the assistant said "The only Michael Hofmann book we have is his novel, The Radetzky March". Joseph Roth's classic novel, first published in 1932, was re-published last year in a superb translation by Hofmann.
His involvement with Roth's work began with The Legend of the Holy Drinker in 1988, and has continued since with Right and Left, Rebellion, The String of Pearls and The Collected Shorter Fiction as well as the powerful non-fiction, The Wandering Jews and, most recently, a first volume of journalism, What I Saw - Reports from Berlin.
Still, the irony that he as translator had overshadowed Roth was not lost on Hofmann, who says of the plight of translators in general: "The author likes to think he has a direct line to his readers, and just because it is in a different language he does not see why he should relinquish it. The reader equally wants to think he's reading Dostoyevsky, not David Magarshack or Rosemary Edmonds." Of translators, he recalls the late Ralph Manheim, veteran translator of Günter Grass, and says: "I knew him. He was exactly 50 years older than me."
To date, Hofmann has translated "more than 30 books", including Kafka and Brecht, and is most proud of his translations of Koeppen's novels, The Hothouse and Death in Rome - "a wonderful writer, elaborate and precise" - as well as his work with Roth. Most of Hofmann's translations are published with informative, essay-like introductions. "I translate word by word." His understanding of the German world, and its history, as well as its literature and language, provide valuable insights. It was Hofmann who penetrated the difficult and surreal world of Müller's IMPAC winner, The Land of Green Plums, releasing its brutal beauty into English.
At a lunch in Dublin in 1998 celebrating the prize-winning novelist and her translator, Hofmann remarked on Müller's courage and good humour. Although he had translated the novel for its US publication, he had never met her until that day. With his bright green eyes and black hair "now greying", Hofmann at that time looked younger than his years and was even then at ease with his three selves, that of a poet, a translator and the son of a German novelist ranked along side Grass as the voice of post war Germany.
Translating his father's work did not happen immediately, although he read everything. It appears to have been handed to him by his father: "You gave me a copy of your second/ with the dedication: 'Michael,/ something else for you to read.' " Although he had translated two of the stories in the collection Balzac's Horse and Other Stories, Michael Hofmann did not feel drawn to translate his father's work until he read the opening line of The Film Explainer (1995). "I knew from the first sentence that it was the story of my family, and that no one else could translate it." It was based on Gert Hofmann's grandfather, Karl, the film explainer of the title, who had worked for many years in the Apollo Cinema in Limbach/Saxony, where Gert was born in 1931. Karl's job was explaining the movies, which ended with the arrival of sound.
It is a very personal novel, as is Luck, which followed. A quasi-autobiographical story told through the eyes of the son of the central character, a writing-blocked writer whose marriage is collapsing. "Except that Father was never blocked." Hofmann's describes his father's earlier novels such Our Conquest - "not as funny as Father was" - The Spectacle at the Tower, The Parable of the Blind and Before the Rainy Season as "more international in feeling". Did his father know he was translating The Film Explainer? "He knew I was doing it, but he died before it was published."
Translating was something Hofmann turned to simply "because I had German". He certainly has the poet's feel for the right word and something of his novelist father's flair for characterisation. He also knows he had a head start in his literary life, whatever about the tensions that developed between his father and himself. "It was a house of books. My father read to us. I remember when he was becoming famous, I went with him to a radio station. He read from one of his books. He was a good reader. He had a wonderful voice."
Too much has been made of the difficulties in their relationship. "Everything I do," says Michael Hofmann, "is to do with influence." His is a highly literary sensibility and was always such. From his father, he also learnt a lesson vital to any artist. "When you write, you have to get back and read it over your own shoulder as if you are a stranger."
Michael Hofmann reads with Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill at 5.30 p.m. next Saturday at the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire