Michael Hamburger: A Reader

by Michael Hamburger, Dennis O'Driscoll (Editor)

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.

Genres: Poetry

587 pages, Paperback

First published June 10, 2014

About the author

German-British academic, author, poet, translator and critic.

Reviews

[Cooper Renner · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn’t read all of this sizable anthology. I read all of the more or less autobiographical sections, perhaps half of the poems, most of the translations, and a scattering of the criticism. Hamburger’s bibliography is long and substantial and this volume could easily be the text for a college course.