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Michael Hofmann Seminar 2012
On Poetry and Translation
Abstract: The seminar focuses on issues of history, style and representation in translation, through a discussion of poems from Michael Hofmann's anthology The Faber Book of 20th Century Poems.
Bio: Michael Hofmann is the author of five books of poetry, including a Selected Poems, published in 2008 by Faber in the UK and Farrar Straus and Giroux in the US. He has been a regular contributor to the TLS and the London Review of Books over the past 30 years – a collection of his critical writing Behind the Lines: Pieces on Writing and Pictures was published in 2001, and a second collection Where Have You Been is due out next year. He is an award-winning translator from the German of such major writers as Franz Kafka, Ernst Jünger, Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Roth, Wolfgang Koeppen, Gert Hofmann, Elias Canetti, Thomas Bernhard, Hans Fallada, Durs Grünbein, Herta Müller and Günter Eich. His awards include the inaugural DEKA Bank/ City of Frankfurt Prize for the transmission of Germanculture, the PEN/ Book of the Month Club Translation Prize, the IndependentForeign Fiction Prize, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize, an IMPACDublin Prize, the Jewish Book Prize, the Schlegel-Tieck Prize (twice) and the Weidenfeld Oxford Translation Prize (also twice) among others. He is a full-time Professor at the University of Florida.
