Michael Hofmann: An Extended Passport Application

For more than four decades, Michael Hofmann has made significant contributions to the literary cultures of Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, ranging from his original poetry to translations of Kafka, Brecht, Hans Fallada, and Joseph Roth, among others. In the first book-length study of this iconic figure, poet and translator André Naffis-Sahely surveys Hofmann’s life and work with an emphasis on his poetry, situating him within the ＂New Generation＂ of writers, including Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage, and Don Paterson, who rose to prominence in Britain between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s.

Reaffirming Hofmann’s central place in contemporary literature, Naffis-Sahely presents the author’s oeuvre as an ＂extended passport application,＂ as the poet’s unusually peripatetic nature emerges as a poetic means of questioning various modes of authority. Naffis-Sahely examines Hofmann’s chief literary influences, revealing that while he was heavily inspired by the example of Robert Lowell’s confessional model, his work was equally shaped by other poetic mentors, including Ian Hamilton and Hugo Williams. In turn, Hofmann’s five published volumes of poetry--from his debut Nights in the Iron Hotel to his latest collection, One Lark, One Horse, published after a silence of two decades--chronicle the poet’s sentimental and intellectual education from adolescence to middle age, as well as the traumatic emotional experiences that arose from his relationship with his father, the German novelist Gert Hofmann, whom the poet portrayed to shocking effect in his breakthrough second collection, Acrimony. Naffis-Sahely concludes his study with an analysis of the influence Hofmann has exerted on other poets, testifying to the value and importance of his work in the contemporary British tradition, followed by an extensive interview reflecting on his career.

André Naffis-Sahely is the author of The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life and High Desert, as well as the editor of The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature. He has translated more than twenty volumes of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, including works by Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Abdellatif Laâbi, Ribka Sibhatu, and Tahar Ben Jelloun. He is an assistant professor of English, French, and Italian at the University of California, Davis.