Michael Hofmann

Ebenböckstraße

Idioma: inglés

Traducciones: alemán (Ebenböckstraße)

Ebenböckstraße

For my mother

A plaster – piece of sticking plaster – on the wall
Where the doorknob of the cold-water bathroom door
might hit.
Has shit. A bruise in the other kind of plaster, a dent.
Mend and make do. Guest bathroom, if you will.

It never gets any better; just an embarrassing display
of solicitude.
A naked concern with wear, like mylar or antimacassar.
The basin still to small for one hand to wash the other.
A crust of soap. No one´s died, at least not recently.

One playpen in the living room, penal, receiving.
Obsolescent photographs of grandchildren.
Small sticky fingerprints. An actual cobweb in my
cobwebby hair.
Knick-knacks no one understands trembling for their
lives.

Michael Hofmann

Foto © gezett.de

* 25.08.1957, Freiburg, Alemania
Vive en: London, Reino Unido

Michael Hofmann was born in 1957 in Freiburg, Germany, and moved at the age of four with his family - he is the son the German novelist, Gert Hofmann - to England in 1961 where he has lived most of his life since. He has worked as a freelance writer, translator, teacher and critic based in London since 1983.

Nights in the Iron Hotel, his first book of poems, appeared in 1984. This was followed by the poetry volumes, Acrimony (1986), Corona, Corona (1993) and Approximately nowhere (1999). Selected Poems appeared with Faber (2008) and Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2009). His most recent poetry collection One Lark, One Horse was released in 2018.

Foto © gezett.de

As a translator, Hofmann is one of the most acclaimed living German-to-English practitioners. He has translated over 80 books, including works by most of the great twentieth century German-language authors, including Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, Gottfried Benn, Joseph Roth, Herta Müller and Alfred Döblin. His translations have won many awards, including the Independent's Foreign Fiction Award, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the P.E.N./Book of the Month Club Translation Prize.

Hofmann has published reviews and essays in the London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, and Poetry. Hofmann is father of two grown-up sons, born 1991 and 1993.

He has taught poetry and translation at the University of Florida (1994-) and lives in London and Hamburg.

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