Michael Hamburger

Michael Peter Leopold Hamburger, poet and translator: born Berlin 22 March 1924; Assistant Lecturer in German, University College London 1952-55; Lecturer, then Reader, in German, Reading University 1955-64; FRSL 1972-86; OBE 1992; married 1951 Anne File (one son, two daughters); died Middleton, Suffolk 7 June 2007.

With the death of Michael Hamburger, the English language takes leave of one of its most gifted and gently influential poets as well as the 20th-century's most distinguished and prolific translator of German poetry.

Hamburger was born in 1924 into an upper-middle-class German-Jewish family in the Berlin district of Charlottenburg. Nine years later, the Nazi takeover put an end to the Weimar Republic and precipitated the family's emigration to Edinburgh and London. The later English translator of Goethe's poems once remarked on the "alacrity" with which he had come into the world on the very day, 22 March, of Goethe's death and famous cry for "more light". Such auguries of promise may be taken with a pinch of salt, and yet no account of the unity of Michael Hamburger's life and work could choose to ignore the almost uncanny coincidence of the date of his death with that of the German poet to whom he devoted so much of his lifework as a translator: Friedrich Hölderlin.

Hamburger first encountered Hölderlin's verse while a pupil at Westminster School. By 16 he had already begun to translate this greatest of German poets, who was practically unknown to British readers at the time. His youthfully ambitious Poems of Hölderlin (1943) was the first of more than a hundred books Hamburger published. He continued to add to this for almost 70 years, with the most recent edition of Friedrich Hölderlin: poems and fragments appearing as recently as 2004 from Anvil Press, where he was lucky to find, in Peter Jay, a devoted editor and publisher of his poetry and translations.

Hamburger recalled his astonishment at the interest generated in 1943 by the English publication of this difficult German in the middle of a war with Germany. An infantryman in training at Maidstone Barracks when the book came out, he was "benignly but firmly advised" by his company commander to represent his regiment by accepting the Poetry Society's invitation to give a Hölderlin talk and reading. According to Hamburger, the possibility of such "absurdities" in Britain was what made that war "worth fighting".

Hölderlin in 1943 may have been a stranger in English, but it was only later, in what he called the "second phase" of his work as a translator, that Hamburger began to re-enact the essential tensions of a poetry as "far removed from any poetic convention obtaining either in German or English, in his lifetime or later". In so doing he "Hölderlinised" his English in much the same way as Hölderlin, in his own translations, had "Sophoclised" his German.

It is possible that Hamburger wrote his own first poetry, too, under the spell of Hölderlin. The still very readable poem which opens his Collected Poems (1995) carries the almost lapidary title "Hölderlin. / Tübingen, December 1842". The earliest in his first collection Flowering Cactus (1950), "Hölderlin" was also his first published poem beyond the Westminster School magazine, contributed to an anthology of writing from Oxford and Cambridge while he was a student at Christ Church, Oxford. The poem adopts the despairing persona of Hölderlin's final years, when a state of "homelessness" followed what Hamburger would come to refer to as Hölderlin's "change of identity" (rather than madness). Asked whether the German poet had influenced his later verse, he would point only to "Hölderlin's breathing", a prerequisite of the arching syntax of his own impressive longer poems "Travelling", "In Suffolk", "Late" and "From a Diary of Non-Events".

Hamburger's early identification with Hölderlin's plight, as well as his lifelong commitment to finding a "home" for the German poet in English, may have had roots in the vicissitudes of his own predicament - his "displacement" aged nine from one culture and language to another. Of his early impulse to translate from German (besides his decade-long preoccupations with Hölderlin and the German-Jewish poet Paul Celan, translations of work by Büchner, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Trakl, Brecht, Eich, Huchel, Grass, Enzensberger and W.G. Sebald flowed from his pen), Hamburger wrote: "It is possible that I should never have started translating in my adolescence if that hadn't been a bridge to a culture lost to me in every other regard."

Recollections of his early years are included in Hamburger's autobiographical work, A Mug's Game (1973, revised in 1991 as String of Beginnings). Until quite recently, however, he had thought that it was his father's political foresight that had hastened the family's sudden departure for Edinburgh, where, with the help of George Watson's College, Hamburger began his career as an "Englishman". But a group of German students researching the events of 1933 at the Charité, the university hospital in Berlin where his father held a prestigious chair in paediatric medicine, were able to inform him that his father had been dismissed in one of the first directives of the National Socialist authorities. The rest of the family followed - without his paternal grandmother, however, whose death at the hands of the Nazis he movingly commemorated in a poem about Adolf Eichmann ("In a Cold Season", 1961).

Hamburger described the first year of his exile in Britain and in the English language as the equivalent of a child being thrown into water so that it may learn to swim. In all his descriptions of his early years he stressed the "gloomy" and "claustrophobic" quality of his Berlin childhood, where the flat was like a "prison". Life in Edinburgh, where he soon became a member of a boys' street-gang, was a "liberation" from an "introversion that had become morbid."

The author of more than 20 volumes of poetry and many volumes of essays, whose seminal study of the tensions in European poetry, The Truth of Poetry (1969), the critic Michael Schmidt has ranked alongside William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis or Donald Davies's Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, Hamburger often joked - not without rancour - about British reviewers of his poetry who would "brand" him "better known as a translator", or a "passionate breeder of rare apples" (which he was), or "a renowned German poet".

The most powerful influences on his early poetry were not Hölderlin or Rilke, but Yeats and Eliot. Later on he came to agree with the critic G.S. Fraser, who, noting the cloying effect of the Irish poet's manner in Hamburger's verse, described it as "ghosting for the ghost of Yeats". As for Eliot, Hamburger eventually came to see that the great man's "doctrine of impersonality, taken too literally", had kept the aspirant poet in "a cage of decorous generalities" and that Eliot's notion of the "objective correlative", "improperly understood", had made him "distrust the data of his immediate experience".

It was not until after his marriage to Anne File - the actress and poet Anne Beresford - and their move in 1955 to a house and large garden in Tilehurst, near Reading, that Hamburger began to set the close observation of his surroundings and sensual impressions against the dictates of taste and poetic convention. It was here that he discovered his appetite for what he called "the roughage of lived experience". It was here, too, that he began to write poems in which loyalty to the primacy of experience could admit the intense exchange of dream, memory and observation. If this was a slow and late development, it was later intensified by the family's move in 1976 from London to Suffolk, where Hamburger wrote poetry - often emerging from the work to which he applied himself in his garden and orchard until the day of his death - which will be remembered as his best.

Reflecting on aging and dying in the month of his 80th birthday, he wrote of the peculiar freshness and urgency he sensed in the 17th-century George Herbert's poem "The Flower" ("And now in age I bud again./ After so many deaths I live and write"). It is to be hoped that poets centuries his junior will also derive sustenance and guidance from Hamburger's own poetry. His essay "The Survival of Poetry" defines an idea of contemporaneity that links him with Herbert and Hölderlin: "To a poet, language is all that it has ever been and is capable of becoming, all it has ever done or is capable of doing. In a sense, too, every poet who has ever written anywhere can be his or her contemporary in timelessness."

Iain Galbraith

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