Intellectual agility in the service of criticism

The first-edition catalogues issued by book dealers are the ready reckoners of literary reputation

The first-edition catalogues issued by book dealers are the ready reckoners of literary reputation. There, without needing critical tomes or reference tools, you will discover at a glance (and with the stark objectivity which only a price tag can convey) who is up and in and who is down and out. The consensus on price found among book dealers mirrors the similar consensus on stature one finds among most critics and anthologists.

But what amounts to sound business practice ("As Tradesmen say everything is worth what it will fetch," Keats observed) also amounts to dubious critical practice. The critical consensus which largely exists as to which modern writers are destined to become permanent fixtures and which of them may safely be ignored is a symptom not of superior wisdom but of complacency, conformity and sheer lack of curiosity.

What makes Michael Hofmann's Behind the Lines (which reprints "roughly half" of the critical articles on "American poetry, European poetry, painting, stage and screen, prose fiction" which he has published in the past 20 years) such a refreshing book to read, such a refuge from the critical cartels that flourish elsewhere, is the independence of its judgments and the breadth of its subjects ("not the usual troop inspection", as he himself remarks).

Undoubtedly, one of the most original and distinctive poets at work in English, Hofmann - a cool and cosmopolitan chronicler of places and calibrator of moods - was born in Germany in 1957 and received a rugger-playing public school education in England, where he still lives.

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A native speaker of German and an IMPAC award-winning translator from that language (introductions to his translations of novels by Wolfgang Koeppen and Joseph Roth are included in Behind the Lines), he has a natural bias in favour of European literature and admits that "England is at the edge of my circle" in this book.

If Wallace Stevens (whose "addictively wonderful aphorisms" are prized by Hofmann) could contend that "French and English constitute a single language", German and English are used by Hofmann as though they were indivisible. He is liable at any moment to sprinkle a sentence with German words, like coffee laced with kirsch, as he spontaneously breaks into his father tongue ("die Weltmaschine, as my father once wrote").

Michael Hofmann's father was the German novelist Gert Hofmann, of whom he writes with critical affection and filial detachment. The literary father-figures adopted in Behind the Lines include John Berryman and Robert Lowell, who become so familiar through citation and allusion that they are virtually the volume's poets-in-residence. Having at one time engaged in postgraduate research on Lowell, it is as if Hofmann were now testing other writers by reference to the American poet's practices and precepts.

Hofmann's mind is well-stocked (the kind that can recognise a "Zukofsky-type pun" on a Goethe poem as quickly as his fellow-poets could say Bob Dylan), and he shares Edmund Wilson's emphasis on "books that set a standard". With the insight of a professional practitioner of translation and the passion of a devoted reader of foreign texts (who has likened his enjoyment of Bohumil Hrabal's novels in translation to "revisiting the primal, irresponsible pleasure of reading in childhood"), he convincingly argues that "translation upsets expectation, it extends the field of comparison, it forces even the sluggardly to re-evaluate and to re-contextualise."

Vital though translation undoubtedly is to the cross-pollination of literature, it has inevitable limitations, and there are times when the reader is reduced to the futility and frustration of a moth tapping against a brightly-lit library window. Dispiritingly for those of us who revel in the recent publication of four volumes of Paul Celan's verse in English, Hofmann contends that "there is even a case for saying there is no point in translating" his "extremely idiosyncratic, compressed, meta-linguistic poetry".

On translation, as on other topics, Hofmann tends to be forthright in his views; and, though he celebrates far more often than he castigates, his sabre-toothed utterances can be fearsome. For instance, his comments on a book by his fellow Faber author, the Hungarian dissident and novelist, George Konrad, aren't exactly a blurb-writer's dream: "A Feast in the Garden is an absolutely dire novel, misconceived, opportunistic, inflated, poorly written, cynical and floundering . . . Export-quality horseshit".

Viewing and reviewing the movie Voyager, Hofmann remarks of its director, Volker Schl÷ndorff, that he "can't seem to get words and pictures to work together, a fair old disadvantage if your business is making films".

Whether Hofmann is in finger-wagging prosecution mode or pleading vigorously for the defence, his intellectual agility is always impressive and - even when doubts about some of his verdicts are well-justified - the reader is swept along by his engaging ardour and eloquent exuberance. Offering spirited essays on topics as varied as Paul Muldoon's poetry, Arturo Di Stefano's paintings and a theatrical fable by Friedrich Dⁿrrenmatt, Behind the Lines is - to borrow from the lingo of the first-edition catalogues - a rare book.

Dennis O'Driscoll is a poet and critic. Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams, a selection of his prose writings, will be published by Gallery Press later this year