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Michael Hofmann

Michael Hofmann’s translation of Irmgard Keun’s novel Child of All Nations is out from Penguin this month. His Selected Poems are out from Faber.

From the London Review dated 11 September 2003

His Own Prophet

  • Collected Poems by Robert Lowell, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter  Buy this book

“The personal poet, the failed chameleon, the reviser, the marshaller of detail, the logomancer, that for me is Lowell, that’s where my own sense of him has settled after so much time. The religious poet, the formal poet, the monumental or confessional or public poet, all these for me are rather fortuitous, almost extraneous showings, that I feel little anxiety in excluding. Nor do I see him as the poet of water and the seaboard . . . rather he is the poet of organic life, growth and decay, and particularly of wood and lumber and mulch, of red and green and brown leaves." [ read more . . . ]

Selected bibliography

  • Selected Poems (2008)
  • Child of All Nations by Irmgard Keun, translated by Michael Hofmann (2008)  Buy this book
  • The Voyage That Never Ends: Malcolm Lowry in His Own Words edited by Michael Hofmann (2007)  Buy this book
  • Twentieth-Century German Poetry: An Anthology (editor) (2006)
  • Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems by Durs Grünbein, translated by Michael Hofmann (2006)
  • The Faber Book of 20th-Century German Poems (editor) (2005)
  • What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-33 by Joseph Roth, translated by Michael Hofmann (new translation, 2004)
  • The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth, translated by Michael Hofmann (new translation, 2003)
  • The Hothouse by Wolfgang Koeppen, translated by Michael Hofmann (2002)
  • Behind the Lines (2001)
  • Approximately Nowhere (1999)
  • The String of Pearls by Joseph Roth, translated by Michael Hofmann (1998)
  • Corona, Corona (1993)
  • Acrimony (1986)
  • Nights in the Iron Hotel (1983)

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In the LRB archive

subscriber-only content Reading with No Clothes on · 24 January 2008

subscriber-only content Two Poems · 13 December 2007

subscriber-only content Perfect and Serene Oddity · 16 November 2006

  • Speaking to the Rose: Writings, 1912-32 by Robert Walser, edited and translated by Christopher Middleton  Buy this book

subscriber-only content Carousel · 15 December 2005

  • Selected Poems by Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh, Renata Gorczynski and Benjamin Ivry  Buy this book
  • A Defence of Ardour: Essays by Adam Zagajewski

Five Poems: ‘Report from a Spa’, ‘Brothers Grimm’, ‘Perspective from the Spezial-Keller’, ‘Tips from the Posthumous Papers’ and ‘Confined to Bed’ · 23 June 2005

Two Poems: ‘In the Provinces 3 (Bohemia)’, ‘To a Penguin in New York Aquarium’ · 4 November 2004

His Own Prophet · 11 September 2003

  • Collected Poems by Robert Lowell, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter  Buy this book

subscriber-only content Imbalance · 22 May 2003

subscriber-only content Poem: ‘Broken Nights’ · 3 April 2003

subscriber-only content His spectacles reflected only my window, its curtains and my rubber plant · 28 November 2002

  • Doctor Glas by Hjalmar Söderberg, translated by Paul Britten Austin
  • The Serious Game by Hjalmar Söderberg, translated by Eva Claeson

Slowly/Swiftly · 7 February 2002

  • Last Poems by James Schuyler
  • Alfred and Guinevere by James Schuyler

The Excavation · 4 January 2001

Not currently in the LRB archive

 not available in archive Three Poems · 2 July 1998