Michael Hamburger

Michael Hamburger (22 March 1924 – 7 June 2007) was a German-born British translator and poet. He came to Britain in 1933 as a refugee from Nazism.

Quotes

 * The ploughman ploughs, the fisherman dreams of fish; Aloft, the sailor, through a world of ropes Guides tangled meditations, feverish With memories of girls forsaken, hopes Of brief reunions, new discoveries, Past rum consumed, rum promised, rum potential.
 * Lines On Brueghel's "Icarus"


 * Being pre-eminently a moralist, he needed a medium that enabled him to illustrate a moral insight as briefly and vividly as possible. Being an artist and sensualist, he needed a medium that was epigrammatic or aphoristic, but allowed him scope for fantasy and for that element of suggestiveness which he considered essential to beauty.
 * Introduction to his translation, Twenty Prose Poems by Charles Baudelaire

Interview with Lidia Vianu

 * It is impossible for a poet to characterize his own work. From other people I gather that I am a gloomy poet, if not a tragic one.


 * I was invited to Romania at least once, but was warned that I should not be free to travel where I pleased in the country, but should be more or less confined to the Writers' Union. Because I ceased long ago to be an urban poet and feel claustrophobic in literary conferences, I could not accept such an invitation.


 * Translation came naturally to me because as a child I was translated from Germany to Britain.


 * I suppose that I am a very serious poet – except for satirical verse, which I have also been compelled to write, though much of it may be inferior to my more serious poems – perhaps because I am not playful enough by nature, and even my satirical or polemical verse is not entertaining.

About

 * He was out of tune with what a younger generation of poets were writing, and railed against the shallowness and commercialisation of the modern world, from his fastness: a farmhouse surrounded by orchards in Middleton, Suffolk.
 * * Obituary in The Guardian