Approximately Nowhere

by 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.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 1999

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).

Reviews

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Michael Hofmann’s collection Approximately Nowhere, the reader finds a poet moving into middle age, moving beyond the shadow of his recently deceased father, but not quite escaping it either. Hofman can be darkly funny, though the line between comedy and tragedy can become blurred. Hofmann’s cultural canvas is England, and a dismal England at that, made all the more dismal by the strained relations with his father, who reminds this reader of the John Gielgud character in “Brideshead Revisited.” Hofmann’s father was the German writer Gert Hofmann. Relations seemed chilly at best. In an early poem used as a preface for the collection, Hofmann sets the table for his collection:

“I think of his characteristic way
of saying ‘tea’, with his teeth
bared and clenched in anticipation”

The elder Hofmann, devoted to his work and seemingly not much else, prompts the son to react, in a gesture that seems both duty and rebellion:

“He puts it on the window-sill in front
of his table, and lets it go cold.
Later on, I come and throw it out.”

This poem, written in 1979, has its end game in this collection. In “Cheltenham” Hofmann shows his father near the end of his life, maintaining his dignity, even as infirmities create sadly comic situations:

“Ted Hughes is in the small audience,
and afterward asks my father
whether he ever, like an Inuit,
dreamed of his own defeat and death.

My father, who’s heard some question, but never anything
like this, doesn’t know Ted Hughes,
perhaps hears “idiot,” gives an indignant no
in that miraculously clear English of his.”

As in so many of Hofmann’s poems one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. However, in the poem “Directions” Hofmann does yearn to cry, even if it’s a crowded, dark and contemporary landscape that chokes the tears right out with the oppressiveness of details:

“The new South east cemetery
is approximately nowhere
ten steps by underground then bus
zigzagging through the suburbs
as bad as Dachau and you end up
still getting out a stop early”

And it is everyday details such as carp in ponds that become monstrous, and the meal afterwards is with “its long long tables and slabs of cake” as a cold comfort.

Hofmann is a skeptic who is often brutal with himself. His sex life takes a beating, perhaps because he views it as some sort of political effort, or as some sort of missed sixties experience, which plants it in the always questionable ground of nostalgia and sentiment. In the poem “The Station Road, The Primrose Path” he has a homosexual tryst on his way to school:

“Meeting you coming the other way, all of a sudden
I urgently wanted to proceed no further
than the back of the nearest bicycle shed
and there go to ground like two snails..”.

But this is part of the “German pig-tailed eighties,” and he wonders if he’s late, as in everything else, a “generation late.” Still, he abandons his “unwritten, never-to-be-written style paragraph,” and “the phoney language schools” in an attempt to rebel against the perceived uniformity of his father’s world. The reader gets the sense that in retrospect Hofmann doesn’t buy his youthful rebellions, and now pokes savage fun at his earlier posturing. In “Vecchi Versi,” the casual sex suggests a detachment that doesn’t seem all that believable:

“You drink wine at a table
and talk. Some things you talk around.
Then you are on the same side of the table.
He has some Durex, you let him fuck you.
– He was kind of lonesome, as the words go.”

And years later that detachment is tested (and found wanting) in the poem “Conversation.” Hofmann, drunk and feeling sorry for himself, meets up with perhaps the same lover (now married and with a child). Hofmann seems certain (or hopeful) that this former lover is “thinking about his legs.” The poet then spills his drink, rants about America “being a cesspool,” for which he “blames television.” His friend then informs Hoffmann that he has recently written a poem, a poem with “Forever England in it,” which seems to signal a complete sellout. When asked about his own writing, Hoffmann leans forward and pukes. As I said, he can be tough on himself.

But Hoffmann, skeptic that he is, is still a political poet. In fact, politics always seems right at the edge of all his writings, like some sort of Kafkaesque shadow. In “The Adulterer” Hoffmann poses some very current questions

“Are the expensive German
water-cannon cruising the streets
like fast white elephants,
and are the police out in force
with their long Mr Whippy truncheons?”

There are the obvious “wooden generals” and “troop movements,” and even the romantic disappearance of “poems fluttering on lamp posts,” but in the end the question has been reduced to the Living Room Question:

“...Are you staring hopelessly
at your children and the television?”

In part 3 of the collection, Hoffmann seems to be taking stock. Friends and lovers are dead (“Gone”; “Gomorrah”); he’s getting older, apparently a father himself now. All of this is summed up in the poem “XXXX.” But he goes about it -- initially at least -- pretty adolescently.

“I piss in bottles,
collect cigarette ash in my right hand”

But quite quickly the reader sees the establishment of cranky habits, a sea change occurring.

“With one stockinged foot — scrupulous pedantry —
I nudge back the loose stair-carpet on the eleventh step.”

∙ * * * * * *

I’ve identified the yellowish fox, beside the railway line”

∙ * * * * * *
“My smile / goes on shopkeepers and bus drivers and young mothers.
It dazzles me.”

All of which has Hoffmann sitting “amid palpitations,” watching “two children I was sure were mine.” The son, very different, yet similar, has become the father:

“I’m quarrelsome, charming, lustful, inconsolable, broken.
I have the radio on as much as my father did,
carrying it with me from room to room.
I like its level talk.”

[Pavol Hardos · Rating 2 out of 5]

Something is communicated, something cerebral is attempted. Left me completely cold. Made me think of Hegel, writing poetry. Made me want to make strong pronouncements, that enumeration and description surely cannot be poetry. Obviously, they can. But this was not for me and I don’t care much for people for whom this was.

Liked maybe six poems, count them out. Approximately nothing.

[Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many of the poems have that constant theme of death, which in a way it is a constant reflection of the poet. It could be argued that this whole collection acts more like a memoir for Hofman’s father, and his relationship to his father and his life. I like how it was separated in parts too, almost like parts of the whole story Hofman is creating. Some of the poetry that really made me sit and think about deeply were: “Last Walk”; “Epithanaton”; “Cheltenham”; “Conversation”; “Scylla and Minos”; “The Adulterer”; “XXXX” and “Fou Rire”.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had a few moments with this one, but nothing really kicked me in the gut.