Michael Hofmann: ‘English is basically a trap. It’s almost a language for spies’

The savagery with which Michael Hofmann can wield a hatchet has earned him unlikely fans outside the literary circuit. A recent issue of Viz ran a cartoon of the critic, poet and translator urinating all over a phone booth, while two donnish FR Leavis types nodded appreciatively from a safe distance. Coming from a publication with a proud track record of showing disrespect to the great and good, it felt like an exaltation of sorts.

The review referenced was one of the 58-year-old’s trademark masterclasses in literary evisceration: a forensic demolition job on Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North in the London Review of Books, in which Hofmann had described the 2014 Man Booker winner as “ingratiating”, “gassy” and “lacking the basic dignity of prose”.

It wasn’t Hofmann’s first dismantling, and not even the most vicious. In another LRB review, he had written after reading Martin Amis’s latest, elsewhere feted as a glorious return to form: “I read The Zone of Interest straight through twice from beginning to end and it feels like I’ve read nothing at all.”

His most eminent literary compatriot, Nobel-winner Günter Grass, came under the guillotine in 2007 in this publication: Grass’s confessional memoir Peeling the Onion, he wrote, contained “two pages of failed writing that should be put in a textbook, and quarried for their multiple instances of bad faith”.

Like a Soho drunk stumbling into the National Portrait Gallery in search of a good scrap, Hofmann has battered posthumous reputations with the same glee as those of the living. “Stefan Zweig just tastes fake,” he wrote in another review, dismissing the widely revered Viennese man of letters as the “Pepsi of Austrian writing”.

The real Hofmann doesn’t quite fit with the cartoonish picture of a lit-crit Johnny Fartpants. As he sits in an incongruously rowdy Hamburg bar, all shy eyes and nervous hands, one is reminded that he is also a poet and translator: a humble servant of words, not just their sneering judge. In smooth RP tones that belie his German parentage, he explains that none of his hachet jobs were written out of personal animosity. “I feel very extraterritorial,” he says. “I don’t bump into these people I write about. Though I did meet Richard Flanagan once, whom I liked.”

Born in Freiburg in south-west Germany in 1957, Hofmann grew up in a household that he says “unfitted” him for anything but a career in writing. His father, Gert, later an industrious novelist and writer of radio plays, taught literature at a series of universities around Britain, France and America.

“One value that was absolutely adopted in the household was that books were the highest good. Nothing else really counted, nothing else really existed. We children accepted that – I certainly did. If you didn’t, and you wanted to become a merchant banker or an architect, you were a long way behind the starting line.”

After being “pushed out” to an English boarding school on a scholarship aged 14, he went on to study English literature, via the “assembly line Winchester-Oxbridge”. He first started writing reviews in his 20s, for the short-lived but acclaimed Quarto, co-edited by Richard Boston and John Ryle, and then for the Literary Review, which taught him that “reviews should be fun”.

“I have a sense of the enterprise being ecological,” he says. “There is so much excessive praise and excessive interest in the books world, and it’s all too focused on too few people. If you cut things down to scale, you do something good.”

In 1984, Andrew Motion, then an editor at Chatto & Windus, put him forward for his first translation, of Kurt Tucholsky’s novel Castle Gripsholm. Thirty years, and more than 80 books, later, he is arguably the world’s most influential translator of German into English, who can single-handedly revive an author’s reputation, as he did with Hans Fallada. He has just finished Kafka’s short stories and is sitting on a translation of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, two of the holy grails of the translators’ guild.

If reviewing for Hofmann is a less personal enterprise than it may seem, translation is more so. One of the pieces in his recent collection Where Have You Been? is a kind of manifesto for “mongrel” translations: using anachronisms, neologisms or British expressions when translating into American English, he argues, should never be considered out of bounds. The essay’s title is a response to novelist AS Byatt chiding him for using the term “smart cookie” in his translation of Joseph Roth’s 1938 novel The Emperor’s Tomb. If English had offered “smart biscuit”, Hofmann retorts, he would even have used that.

Shouldn’t translators make themselves as invisible as possible, selfless sherpas to the text’s transition from language A to language B? “My translations are more egotistical than the run of translations,” he says. “I sort of fear saying this, but these things are also about me. Or at least in a technical sense they are about me, because however ideally self-effacing the translator is, the words are always going to be supplied by them anyway, so why not it be me? Why not supply dirty words that interest me?”

One of his guiding principles for translating, he says, is to avoid the obvious word, even if it is the literal equivalent of the original. When the opening page of a Roth novel contained the word Baracke, he insisted on going with “tenement” rather than “barracks”. In the second paragraph of Hofmann’s version of Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa doesn’t ask “What happened to me?” (Was ist mit mir geschehen?), but “What’s the matter with me?”. He liked the phrase, he says, because it sounds like someone having trouble getting up after a heavy night.

“Nobody will notice, but you have taken a step back from the original. You have given yourself a little bit of self-esteem, a little bit of originality, a little bit of boldness. Then the whole thing will appear automotive: look, it’s running on English rather than limping after the German.”

Without an active sense of mischief, he says, translators can easily become bitter people. “Nobody sees what you are doing, and the minute you do something, people cry ‘Mistake, mistake!’. If done in that way, it feels almost parasitic upon literature. You can begin to understand fussy authors such as Kundera, who minimise the space of translators. That’s partly why I have mostly ended up translating dead people. They are more appreciative.”

Hofmann’s poetry, like his reviews and translation, seems to require a certain degree of pollution and discord. Some of the poems in his collections Nights in the Iron Hotel, Acrimony and Approximately Nowhere could have been written as lyrics for 80s punk songs. There are vignettes about the “fat boy by Buddha out of Boadicea / With the pebbledash acne and half-timbered haircut” (“Ingurland”) and angry rants about politics – “The government is fucking a corpse / It doesn’t have an erection, but it’s fucking a corpse” (“Masque”).

“I read a line by Edgar Allan Poe when he was 16, in which he described poetry as ‘a frictionless expressive purity’, which I liked,” says Hofmann. But no sooner had I written that down than I realised that what I like is friction. What I like is little alarm bells, little uneases.”

Coming from someone who turned 20 in 1977, and who used to punch words into his typewriter while listening to Pere Ubu and the Only Ones, that may hardly sound surprising. But the discomfort often goes deeper.

“Making Tea for My Father”, Hofmann’s first published poem, which appeared in the London Magazine on the day of his Cambridge finals, is about more than oedipal anger. Describing a daily routine where young Hofmann makes a cup of tea (“very strong with cream”) for his father, which Hofmann senior then leaves to goes cold and for his son to pour down the sink, it articulates a pain that is even more acute because it doesn’t provoke a rebellion.

Hofmann describes his relationship with his father, who died in 1993, as “wonderful until I was 14, and I barely existed for him afterwards”. Putting his son into a boarding school, he says, allowed Gert to save time and write books. The poems in Acrimony, his second collection, often paint a brutal picture of his father’s egotism: “Once you offered me your clippings file – the human touch! / What next: a translator’s essays, a printed interview?”

Given the earlier resentment, isn’t it odd that he continued to serve his father even after his death, later translating some of the very books that Gert had neglected him for? “I didn’t feel he was in my way, to be honest,” he says. “We divided things up: he was prose in German and I was poetry in English. When I wrote about him, I didn’t think I was ever getting rid of him. It was my tips on how to survive with someone like him.” His first poem and his father’s first book were both published in 1979, he points out – in hindsight, they were less rivals than contemporaries.

From the age of eight, he says, his mother and sister would sit in the back of the car while he was allowed to be the co‑driver. “I was given the feeling that I was an adequate companion for my father. I’d say we are a patrilineal bunch.” He is himself father to two sons in their 20s. The final suite of poems in Approximately Nowhere, dealing with the breakup from their mother, is as discomforting as the dispatches about his father: “Are you staring hopelessly at your children and the television?” (“The Adulterer”).

Hofmann has described German as “an open wound, which is soothed and brought to healing by the application of English”, but recent years have brought him closer to the homeland of his parents. Previously married to the English poet Lavinia Greenlaw (after his relationship with the mother of his children), he now divides his time between Gainesville, where he teaches at the University of Florida, and Hamburg, where his new partner lives.

“I have come to be very fond of German again. There are reaches of simplicity that English cannot do without sounding ignorant and stupid. In English you always have to sound as if you are making an effort. English is basically a trap: class trap, dialect trap, feeling trap. It’s almost a language for spies, for people to find out what people are really thinking. Operating in German, which doesn’t have these heffalump traps, would be lovely,” he says. “I have just never been here enough. But in my temerity, I hope I can get by in English, while at the same time being as frank as no Englishman could reasonably be.”