AustLit

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 1998 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.

No one who knew Manning Clark, even a little, was likely to forget him. No one, even, who saw him lecture, with that broad-domed forehead and that infinitely gentle vicar's voice, full of the tears in things, and maybe too of the one who might (mightn't he?) wipe all tears away. There are two ways of seeing Manning Clark that echo down the half-empty corridors of Australian memory. One was voiced, a bit improbably, by my own mother, who knew nothing of the great historian that Sunday twenty-five years ago as we sat watching him interviewed on television and who said, 'That man is close to God.' The other is there bitten off or thrown away in the voices of a hundred antagonists: some of them like Peter Ryan, who wrote of him most vividly and most bitterly after publishing him for many years, or Robert Manne, who demolished the charge that he had been in thrall to the Soviets, were antagonists who had had to double as defenders. But what they thought, at the end of the day, was unmistakable, 'Manning Clark was a charlatan.'