The Wandering Jews

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 by himself, he moved to London in 1983. He has published poems and reviews widely in England and the United States. In 1993 he was appointed Distinguished Lecturer at the English Department of the University of Florida in Gainesville.

To date he has published four books of poems and a collection of criticism, Farthingale to Astrakhon, all with Faber & Faber. He edited (with James Lasdun) a book of contemporary versions of the Metamorphoses, called After Ovid, and is now editing Rilke in English for Penguin. He has translated Kafka, Koeppen, Wenders, and Gert Hofmann, among others, and is the translator of the last four Joseph Roth titles to appear in English: Right and Left, The Legend of the Holy Drinker, The Tale of the 1002nd Night (for which he won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize), and Rebellion, and hopes to bring out collections of Roth’s journalism and shorter fiction.