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“... At first it was only an imperceptible quivering of the skin – ‘As you wish’ – where the flesh is darkest. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ – Nothing. Milky dreams of embraces; next morning, though, the other looks different, strangely bony. Razor-sharp misunderstandings. ‘That time, in Rome –’ I never said that. A pause. And furious palpitations, a sort of hatred, strange ...”

“... some of which, like ‘Last Visit to 198 Cathedral Road’, gain a good deal from their context. Michael Hamburger, born 1924 in Berlin Of German-Polish Jewish origin, but brought up in ignorance of Jewish traditions, is an example of the blessings and problems of mixing cultures. His father was a well-known paediatrician, and was awarded the Iron Cross ...”

“... can endure this tension every day of his life is a fool and changes the world.’ It is, as Michael Hamburger remarked in his survey of postwar German writing, After the Second Flood, an earnest of Grass’s sophistication as a dialectician: by putting his shoulder to the wheel of gradual social change while insisting on art’s autonomy he was ...”

“... where he had been unable to do anything for the wounded. He is introduced and translated here by Michael Hamburger, who gives the German originals, including the last two war poems, ‘In the East’ and ‘Grodek’. Grodek was the place at the front where Trakl had his traumatic experience, but this last poem is somehow not adequate to its nature, any ...”

“... Poems and published by North Point in 1986, was made by Katharine Washburn and Margret Guillemin. Michael Hamburger has published translations from Celan in increasing volume since a 1972 Selected from Penguin; Poems of Paul Celan, containing work from every one of Celan’s nine volumes, is published by Anvil and Persea. All the English editions ...”

“... old men. Her exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery was full of them. She visits the elderly Michael Hamburger at his Suffolk farmhouse with her movie camera, zooming in on the wonky doorways, the rotting window frames, the overgrown garden, the teetering piles of books – an old poet’s props. She watches as he inspects his apple orchard, the ...”

“... whose simplicity bore little resemblance to the odes, elegies and hymns of his middle years. Michael Hamburger’s obsession with Hölderlin goes back more than sixty years. The first piece in his Collected Poems 1941-94 (1995), written when he was 17, is entitled ‘Hölderlin. Tübingen, December 1842’, and is typical of the poems dedicated by ...”

“... loves. He is a superb praiser, so it is a pity that he should ever be driven beyond his patience. Michael Hamburger’s poems have always been in the shadows of his translations and critical essays: mainly, I think, because he has acute misgivings about the autonomy of language. He believes in inspiration, that a poet’s words are what ‘some power ...”

“... studio in Virginia. The film moves (rather in the same way as Dean’s tremendous portrait of old Michael Hamburger fondling his apples) from a world of light and vitality, glimpsed through the studio blinds, towards a final montage of grey trees against a storm-warning sky. Halfway through the exhibition one turns off into Soane’s strange shrunken ...”

“... which he, a Jew, had experienced at first hand, in Austria, Germany and Holland. As his friend Michael Hamburger wrote, ‘no wonder Jakov Lind has become a specialist in the monstrous!’ The Continent was insupportable, he couldn’t live in Israel, indomitable Churchillian England was the place for him. And yet what brought him over was the most ...”

“... In Part III there is an admirably condensed and comprehensive survey of translations of Goethe by Michael Hamburger. There is also, for those not in the know, an essay by Richard Gordon on the recent research and polemics in France relating to Greek tragedy and the history of ancient societies. This, incidentally, is the one contribution in which any ...”

“... the fetching. More engaging is a visit to the village of Middleton, and to the poet and critic Michael Hamburger, whose dreams and memories might have been created expressly for this book. ‘Why it was that on my first visit to Michael’s house I instantly felt as if I lived or had once lived there, in every ...”

“... of machine guns’ or Céline’s bombs ‘like giant blossoms’. Celan’s poetry, at least in Michael Hamburger’s superb rendering, has an unluxuriating desolation which is quite extraordinary. To speak of agonised lyricism is for once to mean agonised rather than lyricism. There are poems in what English readers might recognise as the Hughes ...”

“... read Die Rote Fahne and kept a Luger hidden inside a cushion. Among her new acquaintances was Rudi Hamburger, a Jewish architecture student keen on modernism, a progressive but not a communist. She quit the bookshop for a publishing firm, where she trashed her prospects by writing an article for Die Rote Fahne denouncing the working conditions there. She ...”

“... the camp inmates call the milk ‘you’ throughout. In other translations (by John Felstiner and Michael Hamburger, for example) and in the German text, they start by calling the milk ‘it’ and then move to ‘you’. I like the (incorrect) intimacy from the start, and confess that I had to look at several editions to find out what is happening. I ...”