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.

About the Author

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. Five collections of his poetry appeared since Collected Poems 1941-1994. He also published several collections of essays, the critical study The Truth of Poetry, and an autobiography String of Beginnings. His translations include selections from Celan, Eich, Goethe, Hofmannsthal, Holderlin, Peter Huchel, Rilke and others.

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, Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams (2001), two collections of literary quotations and Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (2008). Among his awards were a Lannan Literary Award in 1999, the 2005 E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the 2006 O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry from the Center for Irish Studies (Minnesota). A member of Aosdana, the Irish academy of artists, he worked for almost forty years in Ireland's Revenue and Customs service.

He died on Christmas Eve, 2012.