Hamburger, Michael Peter Leopold (1924–2007), poet, translator, and literary critic
by William Baker

Hamburger, Michael Peter Leopold (1924–2007), poet, translator, and literary critic, was born in Berlin on 22 March 1924, the elder son and third of the four children of Richard Hamburger (1884–1940), an eminent paediatrician of Polish origin, and his wife, Lilli, née Hamburg (1887–1980), who came from a very wealthy banking family. Both parents were Jewish, very musical, and secular. Hamburger's younger brother Paul (1926–2001), who subsequently changed his name to , became a prominent publisher, businessman, and philanthropist.

Hamburger went to a private preparatory school in Berlin and briefly to a Gymnasium. With considerable foresight, his father decided to emigrate and in November 1933 the family moved to Edinburgh, where Richard Hamburger gained British medical qualifications before settling in St John's Wood, London, in a private practice. Michael Hamburger briefly attended George Watson's College, Edinburgh, and subsequently the Hall School, Hampstead. He became proficient very early on in English. Late in 1934 the family went to live in Hove with grandparents and an uncle who had also emigrated from Germany, and Hamburger briefly attended Brighton, Hove and Sussex grammar school. In 1937 he went to Westminster School, where he became friendly with Tony Benn and, as recounted in Hamburger's autobiographical A Mug's Game: Intermittent Memoirs, 1924–1954 (1973), his first published poem appeared in his house magazine, The College Street Clarion, in April 1939. A Petrarchian sonnet, ‘The Death of a Nation’, its subject was the German annexation of Czechoslovakia. Early in 1941 Hamburger won a Westminster exhibition to Christ Church, Oxford, to read modern languages. There he formed firm friendships and was heavily influenced by T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and W. B. Yeats. An Oxford contemporary, Philip Larkin, was later the subject of a moving memoir, Philip Larkin: a Retrospect (2002).

Hamburger spent four terms at Oxford in 1941–2. Through the good offices of Herbert Read, with whom Hamburger had become friendly, Nicholson and Watson published his translations as Poems of Hölderlin in their Editions Poetry London series in 1943. Hamburger initially encountered Hölderlin's verse while at school. He continued to produce translations of Hölderlin, a major influence, throughout his life. His identification with Hölderlin's final years, his ‘homelessness’, his change of identity, and attempt to find a home in English for the German poet may have had something to do with his own sense of displacement: ‘I should never have started translating in my adolescence if that hadn't been a bridge to a culture lost to me in every regard’ (The Independent, 11 June 2007). His ‘Hölderlin in 1842’ appeared in Oxford and Cambridge Writing in 1942, and ‘Charles Baudelaire’, ‘The Rebels’, and ‘La vita vecchia’ in Oxford Poetry, 1932–1942 (1943), alongside work by his Oxford friends John Heath-Stubbs, Sidney Keyes, Philip Larkin, Michael Meyer, David Wright, and others. A long poem, ‘Profuse Dying’, was published by M. J. Tambimuttu in his Poetry London X in 1944.

While waiting for call-up in wartime London, Hamburger mixed in bohemian poetic circles in Soho and Chelsea. In June 1943 he joined the Queen's Own Royal West Kent regiment. During his infantry training, following a review of Poems of Hölderlin in Punch, he was invited by the Poetry Society to read for them. The society contacted his company commander who ordered him to accept and represent the regiment. Subsequently he trained as a signalman and spent a period on garrison duty in the Shetlands, meanwhile working on his Baudelaire translations, an introduction to which he had begun when nineteen. His edition of Baudelaire's Twenty Prose Poems was published by Editions Poetry London in 1946, and reflected his scholarship, critical acumen, and lucid and informative prose style.

The war in Europe ended in May 1945 and Hamburger was posted to Italy, where he taught himself Italian so that he could read Dante in the original. He was then sent to Austria as an army interpreter and in the winter of 1945–6 he became the headmaster ‘of a co-educational boarding school for the children of British soldiers and military government officials in Austria’ (Hamburger, A Mug's Game, 139). About this time he managed to visit Berlin and track down elderly relatives, the experience leaving an indelible impression upon him. He was demobilized with the rank of lieutenant in July 1947. He then returned to Oxford in October 1947 and after four terms took his finals in the summer of 1948, obtaining second-class honours in German and French. He subsequently travelled to France, seeing the sights and writing poetry.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s Hamburger's poems appeared in such journals as the Poetry Review and Penguin New Writing, and in the United States in Tomorrow. He lived in his mother's Maida Vale house. He worked as a freelance writer, producing book reviews and longer critical pieces on a regular basis, and also did some broadcasting. The journals to which he contributed included the Times Literary Supplement, for which between 1949 and 1986 he wrote over 175 reviews, largely on German and French books, and on the post-war German cultural scene; the PEN Bulletin, for instance ‘Contemporary German poetry’ (July 1954); the New Statesman, Encounter, and The Spectator; and little magazines in Britain, America, and Germany. There were frequent visits to Italy and elsewhere, powerfully recounted in A Mug's Game. On one of these trips in Palermo he met Edwin Muir and his wife, Willa, whose work he subsequently championed. He also translated for Thames and Hudson, for instance the letters, journal, and conversations of Beethoven, published in 1952. On 28 July 1951 he married Anne Ellen File (b. 1928), a poet under the pseudonym Anne Beresford, and daughter of Legh Richmond File, film company's representative. They had two daughters, Mary Anne (b. 1953) and Claire (b. 1957), and a son, Richard (b. 1955). Hamburger and his wife divorced in 1970, but remarried on 22 March 1974.

In London during the 1950s Hamburger first met Paul Celan, who had a profound influence upon him, and whose work he advocated. In ‘On translating Celan’ (1984) he wrote of ‘the urgency of [Celan's] vision’ (Hamburger, Testimonies: Selected Shorter Prose, 1950–1987, 1989, 277). Hamburger's ‘translations are attempts, however incomplete or provisional, to keep faith with [Celan's] texts’ (ibid., 285). His highly acclaimed translations of Celan were published in 1988 and 1995. The Hand and Flower Press, of Aldington, Kent, published in 1950 a pamphlet from Hamburger's early poetic collections, Flowering Cactus: Poems, 1942–1949, and in 1952 his Poems, 1950–1951. In 1952 he took up a post as assistant lecturer in German at University College, London, and in 1955 he became a lecturer in the German department at Reading University and moved with his family to Westwood House, Tilehurst, near Reading. He began cultivating the land, and stayed at Reading until 1964, rising to the rank of reader, meanwhile continuing with his translating, writing, criticism, and poetry. After resigning his position at Reading he lived a peripatetic existence in the USA, holding temporary appointments in German at Mount Holyoake College (1966–7), Buffalo (1969), Stony Brook (1970), Wesleyan University (1971), the University of Connecticut (1972), the University of California at San Diego (1973), the University of South Carolina (1973), and Boston University (1975 and 1977). He resettled permanently in England in 1978, the year he became a part-time professor at Essex University.

Hamburger's poetic style transformed over the course of five decades, changing ‘from a formal, symbolic and Yeatsian style to more colloquial work in free verse’ that explored ‘evolving rather than fixed patterns of meaning’ (P. Schmidt, 132) and was evident in Real Estate (1997) and Variations (1998). His poetry ‘explored the dilemma of the modern European Jew, survivor of the Holocaust and wanderer through the ruins of war’ (Contemporary Authors, 2008). Many of the late poems published in In Suffolk (1981), Trees (1988), Intersections (2000), Wild and Wounded (2004), and Circling the Square (2007) celebrated the Suffolk landscape, transplantation, and renewal.

Hamburger was prolific, the author of innumerable reviews, over twenty volumes of translations, and various poetry volumes; his most influential critical work was The Truth of Poetry (1969, new edn 1996). Michael Schmidt commented in a special issue of Agenda devoted to Hamburger's work that ‘no book gives a clearer or more comprehensive sense of European poetry from Baudelaire through the 1950s’ (M. Schmidt, ‘Michael Hamburger's The Truth of Poetry’, Agenda, 35/3, 1997, 116). Admirers of his poetry included Donald Davie, Jon Silkin, and M. L. Rosenthal. Davie, writing in Under Briggflatts, regarded Hamburger's poem ‘To Bridge a Lull’, published in memory of George Oppen, as ‘an admirably suave and monumental poem’ (Davie, 223). Many honours were bestowed, including Bollingen Foundation fellowships in 1959–61 and 1965–6, a fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature in 1972, honorary doctorates of the University of East Anglia (1968) and the Technische Universität Berlin (1995), the coveted Cholmondeley award for poetry in 2000, the Hölderlin prize in 1991, the Goethe medal in 1986, and the Austrian state prize for literary translation in 1988. In 1992 he was appointed OBE.

Hamburger's last years were spent with Anne in a rural retreat at Middleton, near Saxmundham, Suffolk, writing some of his finest poetry; translating, for instance, W. G. Sebald, a fellow East Anglian; gardening, and preserving rare varieties of apple trees, cultivating them from seeds. He died of a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm at his home, Marsh Acres, The Causeway, Middleton, surrounded by his beloved East Anglian orchards, on 7 June 2007, the 164th anniversary of Hölderlin's death. Nominally an Anglican, he was buried at Middleton parish church on 18 June 2007. To honour Hamburger's Jewish roots his wife Anne asked the poet and translator Anthony Rudolf to recite the kaddish at his funeral.

WILLIAM BAKER