2000

Translator Michael Hofmann has been selected by a five-member jury to receive the Fifth Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize 2000 for his outstanding translation of Joseph Roth's novel Rebellion, published in 1999 by St. Martin's Press. The prize, which is administered by the Goethe-Institut Chicago, was presented to Mr. Hofmann by the German Consul General of Chicago at an award ceremony on Monday, June 5, 2000, at the Newberry Library.

The jury commended the translator's "ability to recreate the yeasty, nervy postwar atmosphere of a novel dominated by the erosion of the soul and the attrition of spirit. Hofmann demonstrates a deep understanding and sympathy for Joseph Roth's work. His translation of Rebellion reproduces, with admirable energy and consistency, the often disturbing and cynical vision of its anti-heroic protagonist Andreas Pum. Roth has been praised for the poetic quality of his prose, evident even in this early novel. Hofmann's own feel for language enables him to recapture its bleak yet poetic tone in a version that is both fluent and faithful to the original."

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 in England and America. In 1993, he was appointed Distinguished Lecturer at the English Department of the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he teaches in the spring semester.

He has published four books of poems with Faber & Faber, most recently, Approximately Nowhere, which appeared in 1999. Among his more than 20 translations are his father's novel The Film Explainer (Northwestern University Press), Wolfgang Koeppen's Death in Rome, Kafka's The Man Who Disappeared (both Penguin), and Joseph Roth's Right and Left, The Legend of the Holy Drinker (Overlook), and The Tale of the 1002nd Night for which he received the PEN/Book-of-the-Month-Club-Prize. He has written about Roth for the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books and is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review.

(B/W Picture of Michael Hofmann © by Ulla Montan)