Michael Hofmann on Poetry and Translation

Michael Hofmann, poet, translator (German-English) and critic, was the Arts Queensland/Judith Wright Centre Poet-in-Residence for 2008. His work has garnered some of the most prestigious British and European awards in its fields, including for poetry the Cholmondeley Award for Nights in the Iron Hotel (1984), the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for Acrimony (1988) and the Arts Council Writers’ Award for Approximately Nowhere (1997); and, for translation, the Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 1988 and 1993, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for translation in 1998, and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize in 2004 and 2007, among numerous other honours.

Hofmann’s translations range from lesser known works by familiar writers such as Kafka and Brecht, through fiction from the years of the First World War (Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel) and from the 1920s and 1930s (by authors such as Joseph Roth), to significant literary works from every decade since, including major titles by authors previously little known or unknown to non-German-speaking readers, solely because they had not fallen into the hands of an eligible translator. Indeed, the translated works represent the gamut of twentieth-century fiction written in German, as well as non-fiction and poetry – Hofmann edited and in large part translated The Faber Bookof 20th Century German Poems (2005), and has been almost single-handedly responsible for introducing Anglophone readers to a veritable library of hitherto inaccessible literature of striking quality, variety and interest, thereby altering and shifting the perceived borders and cognitive terrain of twentieth-century literature in German as we know it.

The polytropic range extends to the anthology After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (1994, co-edited with James Lasdun), with contributions by Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes et al.; and to the collection of his reviews from the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, the New York Times and The Times published as Behind the Lines: Pieces on Writing and Pictures in 2001. Apart from four poetry collections and a Selected Poems published by Faber in 2008, there have been more than fifty volumes of prose translation, poetry translation and compilations of poetry and criticism published under the Hofmann imprimatur.

There are so many facets to the praxis that one is put in mind of a performance space – something akin to a Spiegeltent of the literary imagination – frequented by multifarious characters from the Weimar Republic and the former Austro-Hungarian empire, those lured by Berlin’s corrosive vitality of the 1920s and 30s, and even the waifs of Ceausescu’s Romania, who are brought to life in a literary othertongue by Hofmann’s acclaimed translations. Introducing these characters and their worlds to new audiences in the mobile ambience of the reader’s consciousness is the Spiegelmaestro, invisible but indispensable to the continuity of the enterprise, ensuring that the programme will contain revelations and surprises, and that the show will go on.

Accolades abound. The following comment by Gabriel Josipovici, an eminent author, scholar and literary critic (writing in the London Times)is succinct and definitive:

Michael Hofmann is one of our finest translators. He moves with ease between German, English and American cultures and idioms. Less extreme than his father [Gert Hofmann], more at ease in the world, but with his father’s compassion for the broken and defeated, he grows in stature with each succeeding book.

An author statement is also illuminating:

Why I write? With the example of my father before me as I was growing up, it was all I ever wanted, or felt fitted to do. In obedience to a genetic imperative – my father [the celebrated novelist Gert Hofmann] wrote 12 novels in 12 years and dropped dead, my (maternal) grandfather edited the Brockhaus Encyclopaedia. Out of allegiance to certain twentieth-century practitioners, in particular Lowell, Brodsky, Benn and Montale. To bring confusion to my languages, and clarity to myself. (Booktrust, the British Council)

In conversation with Hofmann during his residency in Brisbane, I invited him to share his reflections on creativity and his own creative practice. Since words and language have the capacity to become wormholes through time and space, the conversation continued, via the ether, between the northern and southern hemispheres after his return to Hamburg, which alternates with London as his base. Here is his contribution to that conversation, in response to questions and prompts about formative influences on his life and art; poetics and praxis; poetry and translation; being bilingual; creative writing as a tertiary pathway; and the impact of translating and teaching on other forms of creative practice, particularly poetry.

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On formative influences

I failed at prose. When I was seventeen, eighteen, like any sensible person, I tried to write ‘stories’, but I got nowhere with them, partly because they were too unhealthily interested in language. They were these introspective slabs of consciousness, and even then I couldn’t break the half-page barrier. They were completely hopeless. It then sounds rather cynical, ‘I know what, I’ll try poems!’ and of course it wasn’t as worked out as that. But somehow it came to my aid that I’d read quite a bit of poetry by myself, mostly at night, away from school and studying, early Pound and early Stevens especially (Lustra, Cathay, Harmonium), but also Yeats, and some German poetry as well, Rilke, Brecht, Enzensberger. Things where you can see the attack, the love of the occasional flaring technicolor word, the fearless uncomplicated approach. ‘The firecat slept’, ‘the delicate soul of Florialis’, ‘the leaves ran like rats’, ‘generation of the thoroughly smug and the thoroughly uncomfortable’. (These at random, and from memory.)

Then on my first holiday from Cambridge, Christmas of 1976, I was nineteen – to Austria, where my parents lived – a friend had lent me that edition of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies paired with For the Union Dead, and I thought: this is it! Presumably I had in mind some of the parent or grandparent poems in Part Four of Life Studies – I don’t know if For the Union Dead got a look-in for years, though of course I love it now. From somewhere I’d got hold of these French theorists’ terms, lisible and scriptible, and I certainly don’t understand them and I’m probably misusing them, but Life Studies always felt scriptible to me. I wanted to write it. The application of vocabulary to truth. That was what writing was for, and that was what poetry was for. And then it worked right away. I date my first poem or ‘proper poem’ – the first one I typed and kept at all carefully – to 4th January 1977. It’s a poem about the post-Christmas slump, or what I think is called ‘Coronation Chicken’, and the title of it is ‘Calm and Reasonable Complaint’. I can establish the date from what critics call internal evidence: ‘The fourth day of the year must have/ Marked the beginning of our new way of life./ For lunch there was curried dragon./ It will all take some getting used to.’ Something of that has probably remained with me: the drollery, the view from below, the use of inference from some concrete detail, some quality of aghastness or magnificent disappointment…

I was always comforted by beginning that late. I thought I was spared the abstract teenage slush period. Gradually these suburban Polaroids – you know, poems about cats crossing the street, or watching a blackbird or a glider – gradually they acquired people. I thickened my pantheon over the next couple of years – Tom Paulin (whose first book was published in 1977), Ian Hamilton, Joseph Brodsky. In 1979, I published my first poem. It was called ‘Tea for my Father’. It appeared in Alan Ross’s London Magazine, and I got seven pounds for it.

What I haven’t told you, I suppose, is what a completely literary upbringing I had had to that point. My father (Gert Hofmann, 1931–1993) wrote plays before I was born; all the time we were growing up, he wrote radio plays, which on certain rare occasions we were able to hear (most of them were in German, for German stations, and we didn’t live there until much later). My mother typed them up, with many many carbons, and we collated them into typescripts for quite a healthy tip. The message to us was I suppose that literature was our employer. And as the oldest and aptest of us (I had two, then three, younger sisters), I got it. If you didn’t emerge from that as a writer, or with a powerful interest in writing, it was absolutely wasted, it seems to me. Like having red eyes without being able to see at night. My father read to us from when we were quite small, and then not kids’ things, but Thomas Mann, Kafka, Kleist, Gogol, from maybe ten and older. At the same time we all knew somehow that he was frustrated or hindered. I’m sure he felt he hadn’t written what he was put here to write, and what he wanted to be remembered for. He gave me books to read, and we would talk endlessly about writing. Flaubert’s coachmen, Babel, Thomas Mann’s story ‘Weary Hour’ about Goethe and Schiller. It seemed there was less than a generation between us, or perhaps that’s just how full of myself I was. It felt more like journeyman and apprentice, something like that. In a way, perhaps, he needed and got my encouragement almost as much as I his. I know, that’s overstating it. But the real issue was that it never felt I was born into the middle of his backlist. I wasn’t crushed by any weight of previous achievements. In a way, we were actually more like contemporaries: as I said, 1979 was the year my first poem came out, but it was also the year of my father’s first fiction publication, which I joke about in a poem, ‘your firstborn, The Denunciation’. Certainly, he couldn’t do anything for me in England, and poetry I’d found my way into by myself, so that was a further se­paration or quarantining, if you like. I think I had all the advantages of being pushed or coached, and all the advantages of being left alone.

I don’t know that I ever really learned anything except from my father…I never knew many poets – least of all when I was setting out – and even fewer translators, who tend to be light-shy creatures. Joseph Brodsky made a great impression on me from when I first heard him read in the late 1970s. I adored him, really. He had the most breadth and unremittingness, and he was the only genius, of anyone I’ve ever known. He would squat in someone’s flat in London with a Cyrillic travelling typewriter, and translate Cavafy into Russian, with next to no one knowing he was there, or what he was doing. For someone with such a huge personality, he cherished anonymity. In his case, I learned something like the freedom, the vagrancy and the obsessedness of the enterprise. Otherwise, I tend to like people for opposite-to-Brodsky reasons, for their almost amateurish distance from the business, their refusal to make a career out of poetry, people so well-rounded or well-backed that you almost think they can take it or leave it: rarely met with nowadays, but Elizabeth Bishop would have been like that, and James Schuyler, people who didn’t do readings and didn’t teach and didn’t sit on literary juries, or at least not until very late in their lives; today Hans Magnus Enzensberger would be an example, and Frederick Seidel another. (Seidel writes film scripts, and Enzensberger’s done absolutely everything, in terms of writing and books!) When I was first introduced to Fred, I asked him where he taught, and he’s one American you can’t ask that! I love the contemporariness and fierceness of those two: the way they beat up now!

On poetics and praxis

I don’t know if I would lay claim to anything so grand as a poetic/s, but things have certainly changed for me over time. For some reason, poetry requires change. The greatest poets are required to change the most, much more than I think we require of other types of artists: think of Yeats. Think of Heaney. Think of Benn, Montale, Akhmatova, Stevens.

Which means that either poetry is more organically related to the whole person than one thinks, or else it’s to make up for the lack of such intense organic relation. (Perhaps it’s to incorporate the expected sag in middle age: the best fiction years are probably the worst for poetry.) It wants to be different at different times in your life – either in relation to you, or perfectly autonomously, I don’t know. (I used to think for a while – and had it as the title of a poem – ‘a line for every year of life’ – some sort of association like that, maybe?) My first poems I didn’t care how they looked. They were such minimal things – perhaps they were more like anti-poems. Blocks of type with bad line-endings, no repetition, and no beauty. The prose equivalent would be a novel written without paragraphs. They dared the reader to find anything in them. After a while, though, they started to change. First, they allowed stanzas, so the reader could see into them, and the poem could breathe: four lines was always stability, anguish or drama was three. Then, over time, line-endings, repetition, beauty. The early poems had this brittleness about them. The line stopped, the sentence ended, the poem was over. ‘These poems also tend to end in the most surprisingly sudden way,’ Alan Hollinghurst wrote about them, or words like that. And that was the end of his review as well! It was rather scary. My poems of the 90s surge through two pages in one period. Somewhere, thirty years ago, I read Pavese saying – of himself, when young, I guess – that he had a lot to say, and so he wrote in long lines. Well, so did I, only the lines got longer and longer – to the point where they’ve almost physically had to break, and now I’m drawn either to masking-tape edges like on some of James Schuyler’s very skinny poems, or a bouncy, musical form like some of Heaney’s writing in short stanzas in North or Wintering Out. But perhaps that’s not at all what you meant by poetic/s? In any case, the type of poem I write has probably hardly changed at all in my time doing it: short or very short, intense or very intense.

On early literary success

I wish!… I think my expectations were properly keyed by my father. He would publish a book, and we would sit around the house, each thinking: ‘Now! This time! Surely! Come on!’ Visions of TV crews, flowers, bunches of grapes, postcards from actresses. And then after a while we would all get back to work. It’s all so small. When I had my first book in my hand, it weighed so pathetically little, I thought it would fly away. The thing has to be its own reward. To be allowed to write what you want to write, and publish what you write. To have some people who read you. To be allowed to continue. When I started, I just wanted to be busy and have enough work to do.

In response to the proposition that the purpose and presence of theme or subject matter in poetry is to serve language…

The trouble is everything serves language, whether it’s Omo ads, or sports commentary, or politspeak. Even bad grammar and mis­spellings and greengrocers’ apostrophes can be said to ‘serve language’. In those terms, language is just a blast furnace, a Moloch. In other ways, though, the position you put has some appeal. I’d love to be, say, the last person to use the word ‘quietude’ or ‘senescence’ – even if it’s their first users that make the OED. I’m pleased by odd juxtapositions of mine like ‘hospital distance’ or ‘planetary weather’ (before there was such a thing!) and think in some ways they have ‘served language’. (But perhaps they’ve served reality too, or reality more!?) Overall, though, I’m far too wedded to those other things, theme and subject matter, to renounce them, or to put them entirely at the service of language. Pound quotes Heine in an epigraph: ‘aus den grossen Schmerzen/ mach’ ich die kleinen Lieder,’ from out of the great pains or sorrows I make the little songs, and somehow you can’t or mustn’t underbid that. I think there’s something magnificent about incident or memory or feeling, for the writer but also for the reader. You don’t actually want poems to be written by something like a mathematician with a dictionary, but rather an ear with a heart and timing and a sense of humour. It doesn’t change, either: it’s not outmoded, we’re not past that. I like the idea (from Bunting) of poetry as Dichtung, as concentration; it’s not just composition. In the end, I think I take a circular view of the matter. It’s not just to serve language, but the serving language has itself to become theme and subject matter and drama. How things go into words, and words themselves be made thingy are matters of endless fascination to me.

On translating and translators

Translating wrecked a natural landscape – a little valley bed, with streams and ponds and a bunch of farms and woods, all coexisting inside me. Effectively what I did was dam up German, and stick a hydro-electric power plant on top. There was a bilingual pastorale, and it’s gone! I can hardly read German any more without falling into a­utomatic translation mode. Everything in me is directed towards English. Or it’s like an innocent Paul Klee scene with cottages, and a great red arrow hung up in the sky. It didn’t use to be like that! Somewhere I’ve industrialised myself, bulked up in an upsetting way. A nervous verbal system that was built or at least maintained for the production of poems has put out, I don’t know, fifty, sixty, seventy books of prose translation. I’ve had my Industrial Revolution. It’s strange to think that the poems I write now are the poems of someone who’s had to turn out millions of words of – sometimes ridiculously good – prose.

I never wanted to be a translator. When I fell out of university and published my first book of poems – both in 1983 – I cast about for things that would keep body and soul together. I did little bits of translating and editing for the magazine Granta – for what it’s worth, the expression ‘dirty realism’ is my invention – and in 1985, a poet-acquaintance who was an editor at Chatto & Windus put a German novel my way. I thought, why not. That was my first translation, Castle Gripsholm by Kurt Tucholsky. Six hundred pounds, plus introduction. At that time, I thought I could cross-subsidise myself by translating a novel a year. It’s ended up being more like two or three, and the t­ranslating I’m afraid has the effect of channeling the water away from my poetry – es abgraben, you say in German, where it’s more forceful and widely used. It takes all your words away from you. Plus it takes away your idleness, your musing. Window-time. Life-time…If you spend all day knocking out two or three thousand words – or more, or less – then the last thing you want to do at night is fool around with two or three hundred of your own. On the other hand, I have to say that’s how I’ve always been. Writing has to take its own chances with whatever else is going on. I’ve only ever written when there’s been a poem around that I was trying to get; I’ve never forced myself to write; no set times, no set places. I’ve viewed that process – the poem’s approach, its shy knock – as something that will survive regardless. But then – so I go – why not challenge it? I’ve always loved Cezanne’s saying: ‘Il faut décourager les arts.’ I never wanted to make either a career or a habit of poetry. But what I underestimated, I suppose, was the perverse appeal to me of professionalism, routine, a wage. And so most empty moments tend to get filled with translating. And that’s what made poetry next to impossible, these last ten years or so. It’s a little more discouragement than I had in mind! Though, then again, if I get through the years of this, perhaps it will have strengthened me.

The author I’ve done the most books of is Joseph Roth (1894–1939) – nine. I think he’s a perfect author of imperfect books, which of course as a translator you don’t care about, it’s not your fault, and anyway, how many perfect books are there, and do you really trust yourself to translate a book like that? (Though he did write one such, in my view, which I am very proud to have translated, and which is also probably the greatest and most measured thing I’ve done, which is The Radetzky March.) It was translating Roth – you know, my second, my third, and so on – that made me a translator. Before that I would say I was a sort of casual literary operative. I think Roth was a very good writer, from a very good period, the twenties and thirties. Perhaps he’s too remote from me for him to be a ‘favourite child’ – eighty years ago, and generally facing backwards in time and eastwards in space as well, to the Galicia of his birth. Perhaps also he’d lived too much and somehow got too big and too sad and too full of experience. I don’t exactly feel I can put him in my pocket.

No, my favourite author to translate would have to be Wolfgang Koeppen (1906–96), whom I met at the end of his life, and who by the way, knew Roth in Berlin, around 1930. I’ve published three books of his, and have translated a couple more, that I hope someone will print. His postwar trilogy, Pigeons on the Grass, The Hothouse and Death in Rome, books set in Munich, Bonn and Rome, written between 1951 and 1954, is the most gorgeous modern prose I know. Quite often, I will open one of those anywhere, and just start reading.

In poetry, it would be Gottfried Benn, slightly older than Koeppen (1886–1956): after I’d been reading him for thirty years, I recently started translating him in the course of a German an­thology I was editing. My head was full of him, I’d been hearing him for all those years, and then I started to put it into English! I’m going to publish a book of Benn some time in the next couple of years. He’s quite often invoked in the English-speaking world, so he has some sort of ‘p­resence,’ but he hasn’t actually been translated since the 1950s, and the existing ones aren’t very good.

Translators are still more recessive than poets. They’re like little clapped-out stations on branch-lines, and as I say, I know very few. I was summoned to meet Ralph Manheim (translator of Celine and Brecht and Danilo Kis, working from French and German and Serbo-Croat!) in the early 80s in Paris, and was struck by the way he worked at it as a job. He came home from his office, and we had drinks at six o’clock. He might have been a commuter, working in the City! (I didn’t follow his example, by the way.) Then, I was with a group of translators once in a theatre in New York City, and it was announced that Gregory Rabassa was there, and we all sat there clapping like mad, and this shy little man stood up, a spotlight picked him out looking modest and confused, and I had the rare sense of some hero of our trade. His Hundred Years of Solitude affected me as much as anything I’ve ever read; I love the way there’s so much Spanish left in his English, whole constructions and word-orders that I can’t name.

But you asked about languages, and two systems. I’m sure there is something there, but it’s not a simple thing or an invariable thing. You can rule out both extremes, I think: firstly that my poems are ‘composed’ in a sort of German and then ‘translated’ into a sort of English, and second the opposite of that, that they are written at the greatest, most untranslatable distance from German – written, if you like, to avoid translation ‘back’. (Though both are true at moments.) And yet there is a sort of ‘back of the tapestry’ feeling. Examples are trivial, but I have one. In a poem called ‘Fidelity’, it begins ‘At the old Tramontana/ on Tottenham Court Road’ and it ends with an awed glimpse there of Joseph Brodsky, writing, ‘the recording angel/ miles away’. Needless to say, all true. When that was translated into German, the German expression ‘uber alle Berge’ came to me, ‘over all the hills’ in the sense of ‘over the hills and far away’, which of course loops back to the Tramontana. And I thought that was the ending the poem – the Platonic poem an sich! – was meant to have, only English alone didn’t make it possible. At some depth of myself, though, I must have thought it, or the language or languages were thinking it through me.

As to whether there are similarities between (MH’s) poetic practice and translating practice, and whether they feed into each other…

I’d have to say absolutely not! Or only in the Nietzschean way that whatever doesn’t destroy you makes you stronger! Translation induces a really dangerous dependency on the pre-existing words of others. You can always do it. Really it’s the opposite of writing – which is all the more shattering as you go working and working, and turning out all these books, but no one other than yourself will see it as your work! On the contrary, they see it as a form of dereliction…

On cities of affinity

I like, by the way – this is an answer to your ‘offstage’ question about cities – being in non-English-speaking places, and having so to speak the local monopoly on English. I’m sure most of my poems were written away from England. The (English) reader must have a sense: this never happened here…! You feel the distance and the addition. You’re importing a different reality into the language, whether it’s the slightly ‘off’ sound of my father ‘saying’, ‘are you there?’ or some description like ‘the erasures in the Bayrischer Wald’.

On creative writing in the tertiary curriculum (a topic prompted by the fact that Hofmann teaches for part of each year at the University of Florida at Gainesville)

There are too many of us, too many teachers, too many students, too many courses. The dismaying thing to me is how many of the students aren’t even literary – you know, it would never occur to them to live with their noses stuck in a book, or to have a fondness for words or languages, or to go really deeply into an author. They write their own poems at set times, usually with misspellings, and they stumble over them when they read them aloud. Perhaps that’s my narrowness, maybe there are other ways into poetry than being literary, even if I can’t see them…

That said, I don’t think any of it does much harm, at least not to the students. Since so called ‘primary texts’ are largely off the menu these days because of the way English is taught, it’s a way of getting them to read, and to attend to writing, their own, or that of their peers, or whoever the class happens to be reading. I think if a few more people are around with some memory of having read a poem at some stage in their lives, that’s never going to be a bad thing, no matter if they then go into education, or law or business, and never read another book. As for the ones with some talent and commitment, as long as they understand when they leave that their two or three years are just the beginning, some elementary remedial stuff, and for the rest of the time they’re going to be on their own, I can’t see it as bad for them either. The friendships and connections within the group are perhaps the single best thing, even if those are hardly in one’s gift.

If there is a downside, then it’s in the illusion that this shapeless and solitary and largely self-taught thing can be transmitted and picked up; that grooves of succession, approaches, approved routes are etched into the chaos, and that future poets have basically emerged from one socio-intellectual process, with negligible distinctions of personnel and reading matter. Elizabeth Bishop, who went into this teaching from bare necessity – in order to have health insurance, for Lord’s sake – had a keen sense of its limitations. In 1972, she wrote to Lowell in the book of their letters just published: ‘I’m afraid I have actually been growing bored with most of the students. A few good ones – a few ‘advanced’ ones, publishing poems and whole books – but somehow so correctly ‘advanced’ – you can just foresee the next book, with a blurb by Richard Howard, etc.…’ Visionary stuff, isn’t it?!

But the ones who are any good at it, I think they understand that they will have to make themselves…For the ‘teachers’ or ‘pro­fessors’, there’s the difficulty of coping with the fact that, at bottom, they’re being paid by a – cynical? uninterested? contemptuous? – society not to write.

Fleeting impressions of Australian poetry

This will be so crass as to be entirely useless, and I apologise, but I heard it said at a forum on the subject in Melbourne that European poets envied Australian poets for having Nature and Wilderness (still!) to write about. To the extent that poetry is about naming things, it’s easy to get the feeling in Europe that most things and conditions have already been given their names, which would tend to make the poetry there something allusive and rapid and perhaps a little bit insider-ish, tipping the side of the nose, adverting to a common stock of experience and of literature as well. Perhaps the last European poem is on its way: an immensely sophisticated orbic grunt.

Think of the paintings of the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich, where the last beauty spots in Europe have the backs of burghers parked in front of them. By contrast, Australia could be seen as somewhere where you can start from scratch, where the things have no names (or you don’t know them), and where no one has ever stood, or not so as you would know…Physically, culturally, mentally, Australia is in an interestingly different relation to Asia, and to America, than Europe is. While I was in Brisbane, I tried to imagine an Australo-centric view of the world. I think the world could use it. Something benign and afraid, as befits living under the sun. What price an Australian Whitman?

I had come to admire Michael Hofmann’s poems for what struck me as their unusual conjunction of a palpable vulnerability, a sense almost of abjection, and a degree of risk-taking verging at times on recklessness, suspended on the tenterhooks of a rigorous line in craftsmanship. I asked him to what extent he was aware of these perceived qualities in his work: an intensely vulnerable poetic persona, evocations of abjection; and whether this modality might be seen as one of his poetry’s hallmarks, perhaps even as a paradoxical strength. Or whether it was an ineluctable element in the work, rather than a conscious choice.  

When my father ran off with fiction and German tucked under his arms like a couple of squealing piglets, it seems to me I was left with English and truth. If fiction is where you make things up – one man’s nose, someone else’s job, a third person’s gait, and the outcome is called ‘a character’ – then poetry is where you get given it straight. Or so it struck me, at eighteen or nineteen. Sometimes when I do readings, I have flashbacks to being thirteen or so, and reading the lesson somewhere like St Giles’s Cathedral in Edinburgh. Shrill, green, un­expected, unasked-for. So what’s changed? I wanted to wear a kilt, but was prevailed upon by voices of reason that said they hardly thought there was going to be a Hofmann kilt, even in that famous shop off Princes Street.

But really, I don’t think there’s ever been much choosing with me. It is as it is, if not as it must be.

On whom MH would choose to spend an evening with, given the run of history and art

It’s a problematic thing to say, because you are taught to believe that quality of work stands in no relation to pleasantness or depth as a person, and there is Auden’s story of having known ‘three great poets, each one a prize son of a bitch’, or words to that effect, when of course something in one would wish a great author to be a good person as well. (Who wants to spend time with horrible people, or enlist in art, if art pre-selects or accelerates moral disfigurement?) I think, and have thought since I was a teenager, that Chekhov was the best author who ever lived: I would love to have been in his company an evening.