A transcendental story of a hopeless alcoholic drinking himself to death, written by a genius who was in the final stages of drinking himself to death. Joseph Roth, clear-eyed chronicler of the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the rise of Nazism, is one of the Twentieth Century’s greatest writers, and his work has almost all been translated by the brilliant poet Michael Hofmann. I don’t think that there’s a writer/translator pairing I love more.
First published in English, in a different translation, by Chatto & Windus, 1989. Hofmann’s translation published by Granta, 2000
A Personal Anthology 