Search results for ""author yoel hoffmann""

Although the consciousness of death is, in most cultures, very much a part of life, this is perhaps nowhere more true than in Japan, where the approach of death has given rise to a centuries-old tradition of writing jisei, or the death poem. Such a poem is often written in the very last moments of the poet's life. Hundreds of Japanese death poems, many with a commentary describing the circumstances of the poet's death, have been translated into English here, the great majority of them for the first time. Yoel Hoffmann explores the attitudes and customs surrounding death in historical and present-day Japan, and gives examples of how these have been reflected in the nation's literature in general. The development of writing jisei is then examined from the poems of longing of the early nobility and the more masculine verses of the samurai to the satirical death poems of later centuries. Zen Buddhist ideas about death are also described as a preface to the collection of Chinese death poems by Zen monks that are also included. Finally, the last section contains three hundred twenty haiku, some of which have never been assembled before, in English translation and romanized in Japanese.

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The Christ of Fish is a gorgeous novel conjured out of a mosaic of 233 pieces of Aunt Magda's life in Tel Aviv. Originally from Vienna, Hoffmann's heroine is a widow who still speaks German after decades in Israel: we see many views of Aunt Magdaher childhood, her marriage, her nephew, her best friend Frau Stier, Wildegans' poetry, apple strudel, visions and dreams, two stolen handbags, a favorite cafe, and a gentleman admirer.

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Yoel Hoffmann’s Curriculum Vitae is the remarkable summation of the writer’s life: his escape from the Holocaust; his arrival in Palestine; time in an orphanage; youth; two marriages; fatherhood; his studies of Japanese Buddhism; his travels; his ever-busy inner life. Curriculum Vitae begins quietly but becomes more and more hypnotic and amazing. Funny, gorgeous and utterly unique, Curriculum Vitae is Yoel Hoffmann’s triumphant look backward and inward: How stupid we are to let the world toss us from one place to another, while we need to speak to dentists and poets like warehouse clerks who keep an account of old equipment (bags here and belts there) and pile it up on the floor. What do we remember? The lake at Biwa and the houses across it. The cherry blossoms and Auschwitz, Treblinka, Maidenak.... “Hoffmann,” as the Chicago Tribune put it, “is not just a good writer but a great one, with the ability to find, in the moment-to-moment dislocation of daily existence, epiphanies of revelatory force . . . What Hoffmann has achieved is a kind of magic.” Hoffmann has also been hailed as “miraculous” (A. B. Yehoshua), “spectacular” (The New Yorker), “radiant” (World Literature Today), and “stunning” (The New Leader).

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Set in today's Haifa and presented in 237 dream-like small chapters, it is a book in which shyness and stumbling tenderness emerge triumphant. Poet Peter Cole has made a beautiful translation, capturing Hoffmann's intense and unfathomably original style. A starred Kirkus Review acclaimed the novel "Beautiful, humane, priceless."

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In kaleidoscopic fragments, Hoffmann refracts Jewish popular lore and folk wisdom through a postmodernist prism, brightening his prose with snatches of verse, songs, diary excerpts, letters, ominous dreams, lush erotic passages and Yiddish sayings. "The Book of Joseph" tells the tragic story of a widowed Jewish tailor and his son in 1930s Berlin. "Katschen" gives an astounding child's-eye view of a boy orphaned in the new state of Israel. The novellas radiate the original poetry of Hoffmann's atomized hypnotic language, which Rosmarie Waldrop has called "utterly enchanting—it's like nothing else."

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