A MAN OF LETTERS
A transplanted European essayist labours to keep love of writing alive
Is there still a place in the world for long and highly literate essays about poetry, when blogs and tweets and fifteen minutes of fame seem the norm? The poet and translator Michael Hofmann proves definitively that there is.
Hofmann was born in Germany in 1957, was reared in Bristol and Edinburgh and has been teaching at the University of Florida since 1994. He has translated extensively from German in all genres, but especially fiction, and his poetry (in English) has won many awards. He is that increasingly unusual thing, a man of letters.
As a reviewer and essayist, Hofmann is unfailingly outspoken. His piece on Stefan Zweig, collected in his new book of essays, ends with a direct address to the German writer whose stock most recently rose when Wes Anderson used it as the basis for his film The Grand Budapest Hotel: “You are just putrid through and through.”
He suggests that Gunter Grass should have titled the book in which the German novelist belatedly admitted to having been a member of the murderous Waffen-SS during the Second World War, not Peeling the Onion but Applying the Whitewash.
He rejects a translation of the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert as “slack, chattersome, hysterical, full of exaggeration, complacency and reaching for effect.”
All the same, Hofmann’s normal effect as a reviewer, especially of poetry, is less quarrelsome. He deeply believes in poetry’s important place in the world, and he treats poets with respect and intelligence. His heroes are not everyone’s heroes. Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop (two Americans, although Bishop was actually born in Nova Scotia) as well as Ted Hughes (at one time the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom) compose a trinity for Hofmann. He is convinced that they were the greatest poets of the second half of the 20th century.
He also approves of Frederick Seidel, the American poet whose wealth and wealth-inflected concerns have invoked indignation, even loathing in some readers, as well as fame.
Hofmann is known for using an unusually broad vocabulary, with words like “kickshaw,” “petillance” and “apotropaically”
Hofmann writes admiringly about Basil Bunting, the English poet whose long poem “Briggflatts” is one of the masterpieces of 20th-century poetry; the little-read Scottish poet W.S. Graham (an acquired taste, surely); and, alone among Canadians, Karen Solie, about whom he writes an almost manic essay. He enthusiastically crowns her as “the one by whom the language lives.”
One may well disagree with Hofmann’s choices for great poets, but his writing is so rich and deeply informed, at times provocative but mostly just exceedingly well written, that his opinions become secondary to the pleasure it is to read him. He has an unusually broad vocabulary.
Who among even well-educated readers will not find themselves reaching for the dictionary when they come upon “kickshaw” or “petillance”? And if “contumaciously” and “peradventure” strike one as not so much unusual but simply antiquarian, where’s the harm? Hofmann misuses the word “apotropaically,” and neither the grand Oxford English Dictionary nor the muddy pastures of UrbanDictionary.com yielded up an entry for “deviltons.” Hofmann also occasionally betrays the fact that he did not grow up in North America, calling a football player a footballer, for example, in a confusion with soccer vocabulary.
He covers himself, in a way, in his excellent essay on translation by claiming that his use of both British English and American English, higgledy-piggledy, is deliberate and enriching. “We are all contaminated,” he claims.
It is surprising that, for a critic who clearly admires and cherishes the work of Ezra Pound, Hofmann not once mentions any of the poets who inherited Pound’s dedications, poets like Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan. Perhaps his ear, trained in European and British inflections, just cannot hear their work.
His love for the poems of Bishop and Lowell, who sound mid-Atlantic when they don’t sound purely English, appeal to him more. His writing is so good, however, that he will make converts and where he doesn’t, his writing will always give pleasure. Bruce Whiteman is a Toronto poet and reviewer.