Hamburger, Michael 1924-2007 (Michael Peter Leopold Hamburger)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born March 22, 1924, in Berlin, Germany; died June 7, 2007. Poet, critic, translator, and educator. Hamburger has been praised for his creativity as a poet and his perception as a critic, but his greatest contribution to literature, some critics claim, may be his brilliant translations of difficult German poets whose work would otherwise be inaccessible or incomprehensible to many English speakers. Hamburger published his first translation of Friedrich Hölderlin at the age of nineteen. Critics were impressed that Hamburger succeeded in retaining the original poetry's odd meter. He also translated works by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Paul Celan, Günter Grass, Rainer Maria Rilke, and other German literati in at least fifty volumes published between 1943 and 2002. Working with these often difficult poems over sixty years enabled Hamburger to contemplate the body of literature from which they emerged, and he wrote more than a dozen books of literary criticism that examined and compared the works of German writers. Hamburger also managed to publish more than two dozen volumes of his own poetry, in which he explored the dilemma of the modern European Jew, survivor of the Holocaust and wanderer through the ruins of war. Critics particularly noted the quality of his work in Weather and Season (1963), which ventures away from classical forms toward free verse, and The Dual Site (1958), which, according to some critics, reveals more complexity and meaning with each successive reading. Hamburger did not write to support a teach- ing career; rather, he taught to support his family so that he could write. He lectured at the University of London and the University of Reading in the 1950s and early 1960s, then occasionally at several American universities, including Mount Holyoke College, the State University of New York, the University of California, and Boston University. Hamburger's work earned him several prestigious awards, including European Translation Prizes in 1985 and 1990, a Goethe Medal in 1986, and a Hölderlin Prize in 1992. He was decorated an officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1992 and received the Cholmondeley Award for Poetry in 2000. His volumes of literary criticism include From Prophecy to Exorcism: The Premises of Modern German Literature (1965) and The Truth of Poetry: Tensions in Modern Poetry from Baudelaire to the 1960s (1969). Hamburger reflected on his life and work in Michael Hamburger in Conversation with Peter Dale and A Mug's Game: Intermittent Memoirs, 1924-1954, published in 1973 and revised as String of Beginnings in 1991.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Hamburger, Michael, A Mug's Game: Intermittent Memoirs, 1924-1954, Carcanet (Manchester, England), 1973, revised edition published as String of Beginnings, Skoof Books (London, England), 1991.

Hamburger, Michael, Michael Hamburger in Conversation with Peter Dale, Between the Lines (London, England), 1998.

PERIODICALS

Times (London, England), June 11, 2007, p. 54.