Michael Hamburger A Reader

The Michael Hamburger Reader is the definitive collection of poems, translations, essays, interviews and personal reflections by one of the most influential Anglo-German writers of the last century.

Dennis O’Driscoll—a friend and fellow poet—has distilled Hamburger’s giant oeuvre into an essential volume that defines his legacy. The translations from German, Italian and French start with Goethe and Hölderlin and end with W. G. Sebald, via Celan, Bachmann, Brecht, and Nelly Sachs, among others. Hamburger’s own poems, with their subtle musical and philosophical inquiry, are generously sampled, as are his critical essays on major European writers, from Georg Trakl and Gottfried Benn to Samuel Beckett and T. S. Eliot.

Michael Hamburger (1924–2007) was a poet and critic of distinction as well as the outstanding translator of German poetry. His awards include the Schlegel-Tieck Prize (1981), the German Federal Republic’s Goethe Medal (1986) and the EC’s first European Translation Prize (1990) for Poems of Paul Celan. Dennis O’Driscoll (1954–2012) was born in Thurles, Co. Tipperary. Apart from nine collections of poetry, books published during his lifetime included a selection of essays and reviews, and two collections of literary quotations.