Splinters

Ready Steady Book has a rich and fascinating interview with the poet, critic and translator Michael Hofmann. I was surprised and perversely delighted to read that, despite having published four collections, he feels "reduced to a poem every other year". Might the torrent of doggerel that currently passes for poetry in this country (Ian Macmillan, John Hegley et al) be so restrained!

Hofmann's first and most-recent collections Acrimony and Approximately Nowhere feature his famous father Gert, whose novels his son has so brilliantly translated. If you haven't discovered him yet, you're missing out big time. Forget the big names you feel expected to read and instead order The Film Explainer, Luck or Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl.

For me, the best part of the interview is an aside Hofmann makes at the end of an answer about Thomas Bernhard's poetry: You might be interested to learn that I?ve recently handed in a translation of Frost, that first novel. Indeed, I was so interested that I had to have a little lie down. This is the only Bernhard novel yet to be translated.