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Christopher Middleton’s translation is excellent – by
no means a given in translations from the German, see
Michael Henry Heim’s ruination of Günter Grass’s
My Century – in that he replicates this sparse quality
in English without falling into a Beckett-ese, which it
might have been easy to do. Middleton is a poet – recommended
is his new and selected poems, The Word
Pavilion as well as the extraordinary prose pieces in
such volumes as Crypto-Topographia – and translator
of Canetti (his letters), Robert Walser and Nietzsche.
His is not a workman-like translation. Hofmann’s
forward-drive is here, the unaccountable tension, the
use of sentence on sentence like brick and timber.
BUY Gert Hofmann books online from and
The narrator (unusual for being six people and one
person simultaneously) often says “probably”, probably
we are here, probably there is a man with a stick, probably
we are being painted by the Painter. Surface is not
given to us for our delight, as in a Quiet novel (Edgar
Allen Poe’s term for the mainstream, ‘official literary
culture’ of his time, the work he hated and wanted to
tear down), but is constantly in doubt – what would
otherwise be a world is here only conjecture: “What’s
going on? we call. And it’s hard to find the way back.
We’re in a dream. Lying in a fresh furrow, in a boundless
field, half on the surface, half below ground, clouds
probably overhead.” �
275
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