Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Michael Hofmann, the son of the German novelist Gert Hofmann, was born in 1957 in Freiburg. At the age of four he moved to England, where he has lived off and on ever since. After studying English at Cambridge and comparative literature on his own, he moved to London in 1983. He has published poems and reviews widely in England and in the United States, where he now teaches at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

In addition to six books of poems (a Selected Poems appeared with Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2009), he has edited the anthology Twentieth-Century German Poetry, translated a selection of the leading contemporary German poet Durs Grünbein called Ashes for Breakfast, and prepared a volume of Gottfried Benn’s poems called Impromptus (all FSG and Faber & Faber); and brought out a selected poems of Günter Eich, called Angina Days (Princeton University Press). A selection of Hofmann’s critical pieces was published by Faber as Behind the Lines. Another, with the provisional title Critical Book, is on the way, as is a new book of poems entitled One Lark, One Horse.

Michael Hofmann has translated over fifty works of German prose (from authors including Thomas Bernhard, Bertolt Brecht, Elias Canetti, Hans Fallada, Gert Hofmann, Franz Kafka, Irmgard Keun, Ernst Jünger, Herta Müller, Wolfgang Koeppen, and Wim Wenders). The present volume is his tenth translation from Joseph Roth, whom he first translated in 1988; he won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize for The Tale of the 1002nd Night in 1998 and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for Rebellion in 2000. For other translations he was awarded the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize (twice). He is a Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung.