Günther Eich; Michael Hofmann, trans. Princeton University Press, 2010 ISBN: 9780691144979 This is the most comprehensive English translation of the work of Günter Eich, one of the most important German poets of the postwar period. The author of the POW poem “Inventory,” one of the most famous lyrics in the German language, Eich was rivaled only […]
Michael Hofmann Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009 ISBN: 9780374258825 With five critically acclaimed collections – Nights in the Iron Hotel (1983), Acrimony (1986), K.S. in Lakeland: New and Selected Poems (1990), Corona, Corona(1993), and Approximately Nowhere (1999) – Michael Hofmann has established himself as one of the truly original poetic voices of our time. His poetry, both public and personal, expansive and intimate, looks […]
Hans Fallada; Michael Hofmann, trans. Melville House, 2009 ISBN: 9781933633633 This never-before-translated masterpiece – by a heroic best-selling writer who saw his life crumble under the Nazis – is based on a true story. It presents a richly detailed portrait of life in Berlin under the Nazis and tells the sweeping saga of one working-class couple […]
Gert Hofmann; Michael Hofmann, trans. New Directions Publishing 2002 ISBN: 0811215024 A beautiful, bittersweet, and very funny novel about growing up, Luck is perhaps Gert Hofmann’s finest book, and is now brought into English by his son, the acclaimed translator Michael Hofmann. Luck is the story of a nuclear family: father, mother, daughter, and son. But all is not […]
Joseph Roth; Michael Hofmann, trans. Granta Books, 2001 ISBN: 1862074704 The great novelist Joseph Roth, in the last years of Weimer Germany, set out to explore the Jewish communities scattered across Europe and America. He wrote about them in his characteristically tightly-packed, understated style, and brought back reports of hope, poverty, fear and persecution. He traveled […]
Michael Hofmann Faber & Faber, 2002 ISBN: 0571195237 Since 1980, the poet and translator Michael Hofmann has also been a prolific reviewer, and his widely published critical writings encompass a broad range of novels, poems, paintings, plays and movies. Behind the Lines brings together these dispatches from the fields of literature and art, and also includes pieces […]
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Franz Kafka; Michael Hofmann, trans. Penguin Classics, 2008 ISBN-10: 0143105248 ISBN-13: 978-0143105244 For all his fame, Franz Kafka published only a small number of stories in his lifetime. This new translation of those stories, by Michael Hofmann, one of the most respected German-to-English translators at work today, makes Kafka’s best-known works available to a new generation […]
Ernst Jünger; Michael Hofmann, trans. Penguin Classics, 2004 ISBN: 0142437905 Ernst Jünger served in the German front line, fighting both the British and the French for most of World War I. Young, tough, patriotic but also disturbingly self-aware, he exulted in the war, which he saw not just as a great national struggle but – more […]
Joseph Roth; Michael Hofmann, trans. Granta, 2003 ISBN: 1862076057 The Radetzky March is the story of three generations of the Trotta family. The novel opens at the battle of Solferino, when the young Lieutenant Trotta saves the life of the Emperor and is ennobled. He owes the Empire everything, and his son also becomes a conscientious servant […]
Franz Kafka; Michael Hofmann, trans. New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2004 ISBN-10: 0811215695 ISBN-13: 9780811215695 Franz Kafka’s Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared at last has the translator it deserves. Michael Hofmann’s startlingly visceral and immediate translation revives Kafka’s great comedy, and captures a new Kafka, free from Prague and loose in the new world, a Kafka shot through with […]