Wolfgang Koeppen’s Trilogy Redux

In a promotional email, the publisher New Directions is hyping the idea that Wolfgang Koeppen’s great trilogy of novels written in the early 1950s “has finally returned in Michael Hofmann’s breathtaking translation.” What New Directions really means is that Pigeons on the Grass, The Hothouse, and Death in Rome are all finally being published as a uniform set by a single publisher for the first time. Originally written in German in 1951, 1953, and 1954, respectively, these captivating post-war novels, which each reflect back on the Nazi era in different ways, were actually translated by Hofmann in 2020, 2001, and 1992. The Hothouse and Death in Rome had previously been published by W.W. Norton & Co., while New Directions somehow got the rights for Pigeons on the Grass in 2020 when no other publisher seemed to have an English translation. The upside of the republication of these novels by New Directions is the attention and new readers they are drawing. Already there have been major…