Michael Hofmann
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Information about the author.
Works
- 3 works
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The Land of Green Plums: A Novel
Herta Müller, Michael Hofmann
Set in Romania at the height of Ceausescu’s reign of terror, The Land of Green Plums tells the story of a group of young people who leave the impoverished provinces for the city in search of better prospects and camaraderie. But their hopes are ravaged, because the city, no less than the countryside, bears everywhere the mark of the dictatorship’s corrosive touch. All the narrator’s friends—teachers and students of vaguely dissident allegiance—betray her, do away with themselves, or both. As they do so, we see the way the totalitarian state comes to inhabit every human realm and how everyone, even the strongest, must either bend to the oppressors or resist them and thereby perish.
Herta Muller, herself a survivor of Ceausescu’s police state, speaks from intimate experience.
Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems
Durs Grünbein, Michael Hofmann
The first English translation of Germany’s leading contemporary poet.
…what is the whole surreal jokeshop
of terrors compared to the infinitely chance little
tricks of a poem. —from “MonoLogical Poem #1”
Born in Dresden in 1962, Durs Grünbein is the most significant and successful poet to emerge from the former East Germany, a place where, he wrote, “the best refuge was a closed mouth.” In unsettling, often funny, sometimes savage lines whose vivid images reflect his deep love for and connection with the visual arts, Grunbein is reinventing German poetry and taking on the most pressing moral concerns of his generation.
Brilliantly edited and translated by the English poet Michael Hofmann, Ashes for Breakfast expertly introduces Germany’s most highly acclaimed contemporary poet to American readers.
Approximately Nowhere: Poems
Michael Hofmann
Many of the poems in Hofmann’s impressive new collection return to the subject of his father, the German novelist Gert Hofmann. In 1993 Gert Hofmann died, and the poems written since that time reflect the evolution of a complex relationship: frankness and factuality are tempered by grief, pity, pain, and bemusement.
But whatever the subject matter, whatever the real or imagined impetus or poetic impulse, the lyrics throughout Approximately Nowhere are expertly conveyed in a flowing style and a variety of tones.
