With Adam Ehrlich Sachs, Michael Hofmann Discusses His Father, Gert Hofmann's Influence

The German translator and poet Michael Hofmann has written eloquently about his father, German novelist Gert Hofmann, in his poems. Similarly, Gert Hofmann's novels "lurk behind" Adam Ehrlich Sach's new novel, The Organs of Sense. "Hofmann wrote exquisite, sometimes queasily exact poetry about his relationship with his father;" Sachs explains, "from the ’90s on, he became his father’s principal and best translator." The two discuss the father's influence at LARB: 

ADAM EHRLICH SACHS: You once noted that you and your father share a sensibility, a bleakness that “swings into a kind of exhilaration.” Could you say a word about his influence on a more prosaic level, sonically, syntactically? Are there phrasings or cadences in your writing that you identify as his? I wonder how it is that even across years and a language gap, I worry I’m writing in his shadow — or in his shadow in your English — while you, though you grew up under his roof, seem to have escaped that fate.

MICHAEL HOFMANN: It’s very gracious of you to invite me to spread myself like an odalisque. Where to begin? It’s probably not what you mean, but there are many moments when I’ve felt an absolute identity with my father. That’s both a myth and a principle with me. He would say something or read something aloud, and in the whole room two people are laughing, and it would be him and me. One wavelength, one humor. I’ve often had the weird and completely physical sense that I was looking out at the world from behind his brows. Not least since his death (in 1993). His frontal bone. My candle inside his pumpkin. I get him from the inside. It’s less resemblance than identity. And not influence, much less anxiety. Because it’s also a fact that in my formative years he wasn’t yet the writer. He thought about it endlessly, we both thought about it. But I couldn’t read him in my teens, he didn’t write in my teens, I didn’t write in my teens either, I began when I was 19. His first novel came out in 1979, when he was 48, and I was 22. We were both beginners at the same time. And I have only a patchy record of reading him after that. I felt I could easily have spent my life reading his books, because he then started putting them out very quickly, at the rate of almost one a year, and there’s something rebellious/ornery in me that would never agree to do that. It would be like picking up after someone. My life would be over.

Read more at LARB.