[1957–]
Michael Hofmann was born in Freiburg, Germany. When he was seven years old, he left Germany for Britain. He was educated in Edinburgh, Bristol and Winchester before attending Magdalene College, Cambridge. Hofmann received a BA in English in 1979 and in 1980 he continued his studies at the University of Regensburg and at Trinity College in Cambridge. Upon obtaining his graduate degree in 1983, Hofmann became a freelance writer.
Hofmann’s debut volume of poetry, Nights in the Iron Hotel (1983), signalled the emergence of an unusual and significant talent. With prosaic rhythms and an offbeat sense of irony, his poems juxtapose familiarity with foreignness. The sense of ‘otherness’ is continued in his next collection, Acrimony (1986), which is divided into two parts. The first deals with a variety of emotional and political issues; the second is an intimate exploration of Hofmann’s complex relationship with his father, the novelist Gert Hofmann.
K.S. in Lakeland: New and Selected Poems was published in 1990. Hofmann has also translated several works from German, including Kurt Tucholsky’s Castle Gripsholm (1985), his father’s The Film Explainer (1995), and Joseph Roth’s The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1989). In 1984 he was the recipient of the Cholmondeley Award and in 1988 he won both the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize. Since 1990 Hofmann has been teaching creative writing at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
Hofmann’s poetry exhibits a private anxiety altogether different from Dabydeen’s largely historically conditioned work. ‘The Machine That Cried’ (1986) depicts the often desperate, and always moving, desire of a young man to understand his dual heritage and then make a choice as to where his future lies.
THE MACHINE THAT CRIED
‘Il n’y a pas de détail’ – Paul Valéry
When I learned that my parents were returning
to Germany, and that I was to be jettisoned,
I gave a sudden lurch into infancy and Englishness.
Carpets again loomed large in my world: I sought out
their fabric and warmth, where there was nowhere to fall …
I took up jigsaw puzzles, read mystical cricket thrillers
passing all understanding, even collected toy soldiers
and killed them with matchsticks fired from the World War One
field-guns I bought from Peter Oborn down the road
– he must have had something German, with that name –
who lived alone with his mother, like a man …
My classmates were equipped with sexual insults
for the foaming lace of the English women playing Wimbledon,
but I watched them blandly on our rented set
behind drawn curtains, without ever getting the point.
My building-projects were as ambitious as the Tower of Babel.
Something automotive of my construction limped across the floor
to no purpose, only lugging its heavy battery.
Was there perhaps some future for Christiaan Barnard,
or the electric car, a milk-float groaning like a sacred heart?
I imagined Moog as von Moog, a mad German scientist.
His synthesizer was supposed to be the last word in versatility,
but when I first heard it on Chicory Tip’s
Son of My Father, it was just a unisono metallic drone,
five notes, as inhibited and pleonastic as the title.
My father bought a gramophone, a black box,
and played late Beethoven on it, which my mother was always
to associate with her miscarriage of that year.
I was forever carrying it up to my room,
and quietly playing through my infant collection of singles,
Led Zeppelin, The Tremeloes, My Sweet Lord…
The drums cut like a scalpel across the other instruments.
Sometimes the turntable rotated slowly, then everything
went flat, and I thought how with a little more care
it could have been all right. There again, so many things
were undependable … My first-ever British accent wavered
between Pakistani and Welsh. I called Bruce’s record shop
just for someone to talk to. He said, ‘Certainly, Madam.’
Weeks later, it was ‘Yes sir, you can bring your children.’
It seemed I had engineered my own birth in the new country.