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A Michael Hamburger Reader

Michael Hamburger

Edited by Dennis O'Driscoll

Michael Hamburger Reader Cover
Categories: 20th Century, 21st Century, German, Irish, Translation
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (587 pages)
(Pub. Sep 2017)
9781784105150
£25.00 £22.50
  • Description
  • Author
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • 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.

    Cover image: Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior with a Bust (oil on canvas), c. 1900.


    Michael Hamburger
    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 ... read more
    Dennis O'Driscoll
    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 ... read more
    Awards won by Dennis O'Driscoll Short-listed, 2001 Irish Times Literary Prize,Irish Poetry (Weather Permitting) Winner, 2013 Irish Times Literary Prize,Irish Poetry (Dear Life) Winner, 2013 Irish Times Literary Prize,Irish Poetry (Dear Life)
    'O'Driscoll manages to get the reader as close to Hamburger as possible in one book. It feels very much like spending a week at your grandfather's house - getting to listen to all his stories, roaming through cupboards, reading the works hidden inside.'
    Dominik Szczepaniak, DURA
    Praise for Dennis O'Driscoll 'Carcanet has done a great job in collating work from his various collections with some revised and new poems... O'Driscoll's work should be read and re-read, as a sort of 'life' of a poet and scholar who worked outside academe and literary theory, deep in the bowels of the everyday, where flesh-and-blood experiences strive to make their own poetry.'
    John Wakeman, Books Ireland
      ''To rinse the world in rose water before you write is to bear false witness''. This is the challenge that O'Driscoll took on board - to face the workaday world we might have thought we'd risen above. He, and his discerning overview, are much missed. His Collected Poems are welcomed.'
    Dundee University Review of the Arts
       'His voice is one of the most distinctive of his generation.'
    John McAuliffe, The Irish Times
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