Behind the Lines by Michael Hofmann

by Michael Hofmann

Since 1980, the poet and translator Michael Hofmann has also been a prolific reviewer, and his widely published critical writings encompass a broad range of novels, poems, paintings, plays and movies. Behind the Lines brings together these dispatches from the fields of literature and art, and also includes pieces on writers such as Wallace Stevens, Thomas Bernhard, and Paul Bowles, and artists and filmmakers ranging from Otto Dix to Andrei Tarkovsky.Rarely has the critic's labor been carried out with more elan than in these pages. Hofmann's interests as a reader and art lover are diverse, and in candid, omnivorous prose he approaches the work of the writer, the painter, and the auteur with the enthusiasm and insight of the well-informed reader and observer as well as the self-searching curiosity of a poet.

Hardcover

First published October 15, 2002

About the author

Michael Hofmann is a German-born, British-educated poet and translator. He is the author of two books of essays and five books of poems, most recently One Lark, One Horse. Among his translations are plays by Bertolt Brecht and Patrick Süskind; the selected poems of Durs Grünbein and Gottfried Benn; and novels and stories by, among others, Franz Kafka; Peter Stamm; his father, Gert Hofmann; and fourteen books by Joseph Roth. He has translated several books for NYRB Classics, including Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Jakob Wassermann’s My Marriage, and Gert Ledig’s Stalin Front, Kurt Tucholsky’s Castle Gripsholm, and edited The Voyage That Never Ends, an anthology of writing by Malcolm Lowry. He teaches in the English Department at the University of Florida.

He is the son of German novelist Gert Hofmann (1931-1993).