Rolf Haufs was born in 1935 in Dusseldorf, the son of a bank employee. After a brief time as an exporter from 1956 to 1960, he moved to Berlin, where he worked as a writer and an editor, and he has lived there since 1960. He has published numerous books.Among these volumes are poems, stories, children's books, novels and plays. He won The Bremen Prize for literature in 1985, The Hans Erich Nossack Prize in 1993, the Peter Huchel Prize in 2003, and the prestigious Friedrich Hölderlin Prize in 1990, shortly after Self Portrait was published in 1988.

Self Portrait, by Rolf Haus, is a splendid journey down an avant-garde rabbit hole.  Reminiscent of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, it combines the lyricism of dreams with the terrifying obsession of schizophrenia. The dark frenzy of this book is hypnotic, so we gladly take the trip, trying to imagine the new world of our destination.

—Lawrence R. Smith

Tim Kahl's translation of Rolf Hauf's Self Portrait brings to American readers the work of a poet vastly different from any now writing in this country. Haufs is not different because he writes of the city, or because he uses the prose poem as his committed form, or because he pays attention to the particulars of bourgeois/capitalist life — but because his calm, cool (even cold) voice speaks from the end-time of meaning as solace. His mordancy is his poetry, his poetry his refusal, his refusal his shield. This is a voice we need to hear today, when so many of our poets wish to simply exchange bits of emotional autobiography. There is no apology in Haufs, and Tim Kahl has caught that voice perfectly.

—James DenBoer

Three Stars

Through the sand with the first, through the dust with the second, through the deep water with the third. Three stars and ourselves with hoarse throats in the boat La Paloma. Oh the wild wind! What power might have stopped us? We remember that each little uniform law has come to us because of adverse conditions. But no one is disturbed when the streetcar jumps the track, when a simple morality rules the day, when the spiritual assets are plundered. Morsels from the senate fly around, cocktails from the Privy Council are spit out, handprints leave the self-conscious blushing. Interrupted theater rehearsals (but sir, your singing, it's awful!), taxis damp with urine, mother, mother of everything! Nothing stops us. The three stars completely joined to the world, completley ruined, deadly, we are everywhere, good and quiet citizens in rehearsal.

Vertigo

If one already built such large city squares out of greed and disreagrd, why not build railings across the city squares? Run across many city squares, never just straight, always with a slight dizziness. In France philosophers stand with rigor and scorn. In Italy, water fountains represent the river. Nile, someone said, and photographed the Ganges. Or else build steps to a different destination, or else brambles, walls, on which advertisements for musical comedies are advertised. Bands marched about. Acrobats tumbled, ice cream salesmen ran all over the place with damp packing crates. He is drunk! the drunkards call out. In the night, owls fell from rooftops. The lights in the windows go out, one after another.