Daniel Weissbort writes:
Michael Hamburger was one of the first advisory-editors of Modern Poetry in Translation. Ted Hughes proposed him, among others, including Christopher Middleton, with whom Hamburger initially collaborated on a comprehensive anthology of German poetry of the last century [German Poetry 1910-1975, Carcanet). What Hughes admired in particular were Michael’s translations of Goethe, a selection of which are available, attractively published by Anvil (Goethe: Poems and Epigrams, 1983). Michael Hamburger is the major translator of German poetry, historical and modern, his work ranging from classical figures to contemporaries, mostly friends, like Heissenbütel and Enzensberger. His most important achievements were perhaps his translations of Friedrich Hölderlin and of his friend Paul Celan, ongoing projects to which he added as he found himself able to translate additional poems. As a critic, of course, his work is best exemplified in his major study, The Truth of Poetry (first published 1969; Anvil, 1996) as well as in numerous essays and introductions.

I knew Michael primarily as an exemplary translator and an independent authority and sage who took little part in the debates that preoccupied many translators, including myself. His remarks on translation tended to be commonsensical and were eloquently, which is to say lucidly, expressed although he was not given to disquisitions on the art, limiting himself to occasional paragraphs and interviews. It is worth recording that he took exception to the notion that every translator is inevitably influenced by Ezra Pound; if he himself was a post-Poundian, it was only in the chronological sense, EP’s example, if anything, being one to be wary of. Michael rarely translated from languages with which he was not personally familiar, telling me once that he needed direct contact with the source text. In fact, he translated mostly from German, his first language, introducing us to almost the entire corpus of contemporary German poetry, East and West, including not only senior figures like Sachs, Benn, and Huchel, but also contemporaries like Enzensberger, Heissenbütel, and the expatriate writer and founder of the translation centre at the University of East Anglia, the late Max Sebald, as well as to major classical figures of German literature.

I first became aware of Hölderlin when I was a judge for a poetry-translation award offered by the Arts Council, my fellow judge being the late Roy Fuller. I asked for Hamburger’s ultimately prize-winning Hölderlin to be submitted, by far the most important translation published in that period. Having recommended the collection, I read it! For the first time, I was impressed by a translation of poetry which added something quite new to English literature. In an essay on Hölderlin (Reason and Energy, Studies in German Literature, 1957), Hamburger had written, ‘The beauty of a work of art is inseparable from it peculiar logic.’ By means of scrupulous fidelity, he achieved the stylistic feat of rendering Hölderlin’s ‘logic’ in English.

Sometimes irascible, Hamburger was that rarest of creatures in the literary or any world, a selfless individual. He was also beyond the reach of what he once called ‘the crass and shameless money dictatorship’, for which he had nothing but contempt. He exemplified a number of virtues which have to do with self-denial, being an old-fashioned, humanistic socialist, again of a rare kind. He was deeply disturbed by the heartlessness of modern society. As it happens, we both went to the same prep-school, the Hall, Hampstead â€" a decade or so apart. I recall Michael’s unsentimental view of the India-hand Victorian gent who founded the school and was still headmaster in Michael’s and my days there, though, as a fellow Jew, I had little in common with Michael, who stemmed from the assimilated German-Jewish high-bourgeoisie whereas my own origins were more lowly.

Michael belonged to my older brother’s generation and I had heard about him and others, like Jon Silkin, Bernard Kops, Dannie Abse, many years before becoming personally acquainted with them. I recall visiting him in his home, near Swiss Cottage, in a street, blitzed during the war and after the war demolished; also in Half-Moon Street, South East London, where he inhabited a double-fronted Victorian or Edwardian villa, and in his Suffolk home where I was royally entertained by him and his wife, the poet Ann Beresford. In all these places, Michael gardened with religious fervour. A naturalist-conservationist, knowledgeable and discriminating, he always seemed to have a garden and the garden always seemed to have Michael, in that it overran him as well as itself. His attitude was lovingly indulgent. I cherish the memory of trudging around his large plot in Suffolk, making our way through dense thickets which Michael beat severely aside with a handy branch picked off the ground. He seemed on intimate terms with every section of this wilderness or Eden, familiar with every plant. He once visited me in Iowa, where I directed a translation programme at the University, and I took him for a walk in Kent State Park, a well-groomed stretch of rural terrain. A delighted Michael discovered there, in an area of dense undergrowth I had never entered, an unusual plant which he gently wrapped in a piece of tissue paper to transport back to England. What remains in my mind is both Michael’s delight and his tenderness, as he cupped the tiny plant in his hand.

The stereotype of urban Jewish intellectual does not fit him, though he was one of that distinguished company of Central European Jews who greatly enriched English artistic and intellectual life. He was gloomy about humankind’s prospects and was aware that he had a reputation for so being. His later booklets of poems were written by a ‘Mr Littlejoy’, but Michael was a man who joyed greatly in the natural world, refusing, superstitiously perhaps, to make too much of it. It was a privilege to know this lugubriously, stubbornly sane and kind man.