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Michael Hofmann is an award-winning poet and translator. His Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) appeared in 2009. His other books include the anthology Twentieth-Century German Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and the book of essays Behind the Lines (Faber & Faber). He has translated Durs Grnbein, Franz Kafka, Wolfgang Koeppen, and Joseph Roth, among many other writers. He teaches at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and lives in London and Hamburg.
Angina Days, a crisp new selection translated by Michael Hofmann and published in Princeton's 'Facing Pages' series, is an opportunity for Eich to secure at last the English-speaking readership he has long deserved. In the German-speaking world, Eich is widely accepted as a twentieth-century classic, the supreme poet of unease. His poem 'Inventur' ('Inventory') is one of the best known poems in the language. Born in 1907 in Lebus on the Oder, a small village near Berlin, Eich was a member, along with Heinrich Boll and Gunter Grass, of the Gruppe 47, a literary association 'called into being to cleanse and adjust and simplify' the German language after its abuse by the Third Reich, as Hofmann explains in his excellent introduction... Hofmann's translations in Angina Days have the confidence, clearness and clout to offer Eich salvation from obscurity... Hofmann's new translations are neither cumbersome nor dull. They work as poems independently from the German. They are animated, idiomatic, attractively spry, and above all they allow Eich's voice to reach us loud and clear--peevish, skeptical, true to itself, irresistible. -- Siriol Troup, Times Literary Supplement Scenes of isolated survival amid bewildering change appear throughout Angina Days, an excellent comprehensive bilingual selection of Eich's poems edited and translated by Michael Hofmann. -- John Palattella, Nation Since I mention poetry, I should say that Michael Hofmann's translations of the poems of the German poet Guenter Eich, Angina Days, is one of the best books to come out in 2010. Eich's acerbic, chafing, sensuous verses, dealing with life's most basic anxieties and activities, refute, through a combination of stubbornness and technique, Adorno's stricture about the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz. -- Amit Chaudhuri, Outlook India Fortunately, renowned poet and translator Michael Hofmann has brought a selection of Eich's late poetry into sharp, searing English in Angina Days, a book that will remain the definitive translated edition of Eich's late work... Eich's scaled-back language--in Hofmann s deft translation--facilitates a devastatingly unsentimental tone appropriate for this clear-eyed consideration of what it means to be a prisoner, and what a prisoner's simple possessions mean to him... Michael Hofmann's thrilling new translations of this neglected master will stick like barbs in the minds of English-language readers for years to come. -- Stephan Delbos, Prague Post
