Michael lives in London and Hamburg, and teaches in Florida. He is the author of four books of poems, a book of criticism, and the translator of many books from the German. Here he kindly answers my questions.

Mark Thwaite: Acrimony was a wonderful collection of poems, much of it about your relationship with your father.Was that book important to you? Do you still write poetry?

Michael Hofmann: I haven’t written so many poetry books – four – that they aren’t all important to me, if that doesn’t sound a little plaintive. But with its two-part organization, and the clutch of poems about my father and growing up and so on, I suppose Acrimony packs the most punch. It seems like a book I might have written on purpose, and not like the others, which contain more or less whatever I managed to write over a certain period. I still feel close to the poems in it – especially in the first, non-father, part – which is a little alarming, after almost twenty years. Somewhere in there is the clue too to why I haven’t written more, and why I’m hardly writing anything now. There doesn’t seem to me much wrong with what I have written, but at the same time I don’t want to write any more of it; I’m looking – or waiting – for some kind of new orientation. I’m not sure to what extent I’ve failed – dried up or gone away – and to what extent I’m doing what I always did and always wanted to do, which is a mix of things. That archaic designation, “man of letters”. Though of course I never imagined I’d be reduced to a poem every other year, or whatever it is! A friendly critic – I’m thinking of Dennis O’Driscoll – told me my poems must have taken a lot of living, and that a hiatus in production was not unexpected, and possibly a good thing. I’d like to find some way of writing that was less exorbitant, less antagonistic, less cannibalistic…

MT: I'm guessing from books like The Faber Berryman and Robert Lowell: Poems Selected by Michael Hofmann and your new The Faber Book of 20th Century German Poems that poetry is still important to you!?

MH: Yes, it is. Never in the exclusive way it’s supposed to be important to poets – I’ve always read other things, and held them in higher regard than most poetry – but it’s part of my furniture. Fierce furniture. Those books are projections if you like, or shadows, of the vast time I’ve spent on their authors: Berryman I first wrote about as an undergraduate; Lowell I was supposed to write a PhD on (though I didn’t come close), and I continually re-read; and I’m a sort of autodidact in German poetry. The German anthology is about one-third translated by me, for what that’s worth.

MT: Of late you seem to have been focussing on translation. Is translating the dayjob whilst you concentrate your artistic energy on your own writing or do you see translating itself as a creative endeavour?

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