Crafting Translations: Literary Critic, Poet & Translator Michael Hofmann

This is the 100th Episode on Harshaneeyam's Translator Series.

Michael Hofmann is a German-born poet, translator, and critic. The Guardian has described him as "arguably the world's most influential translator of German into English"

Hofmann was born in Freiburg into a family with a literary tradition. His father was the German novelist Gert Hofmann. Hofmann's family first moved to Bristol in 1961, and later to Edinburgh. He was educated at Winchester College, and then studied English Literatureat Magdalene College, Cambridge, graduating with a BA in 1979. For the next four years, he pursued postgraduate study at the University of Regensburg and Trinity College, Cambridge.

In 1983, Hofmann started working as a freelance writer, translator, and literary critic. He taught at the University of Michigan, Rutgers University, the New School, and Barnard College. He has been teaching poetry and translation workshops at the University of Florida since 1990.

Hofmann was awarded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 1995 for the translation of his father's novel The Film Explainer. Among the other notable awards he received are the Arts Council Writer's Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

Hofmann was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.

His translation of Jenny Erpenbeck's novel Kairos won them the International Booker Prize in 2024, the first occasion on which the prize was won by either a German writer or a male translator.

In this conversation he spoke about his family connection to Literature, being a literary critic and translator, Literary translation in the times of AI and the novel 'Kairos'.

Here he is talking about his Childhood surrounded by books.

Link for the Guardian Interview mentioned in the interview -

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/09/books-interview-michael-hofmann-anglo-german-poet-critic-translator

Link for the Guardian Interview mentioned in the interview -

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/09/books-interview-michael-hofmann-anglo-german-poet-critic-translator

Photo Credits: Alamy Agency

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