[New-Poetry] Michael Hamburger obit

[JforJames at aol.com]

_http://books.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,2099883,00.html_ 
(http://books.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,2099883,00.html) 
Michael  Hamburger
 
Poet, translator and academic, more acclaimed in Germany than in Britain 
 
Jonathan Fryer
Monday June 11, 2007
The Guardian 

The poet, translator, critic and amateur horticulturalist, Michael  
Hamburger, who has died aged 83, was a serious voice in an increasingly  superficial 
age. 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. 
None the less, his work received much critical acclaim. He was revered  at the 
various academic institutions at which he taught, though it rankled that  he 
was better known to the wider British public as a translator, rather than as  
a poet. Perhaps the greatest irony of his life was that towards the end, his  
poetic standing was higher in Germany than in England, his English-language  
originals translated into German by the much younger Austrian poet of British  
parentage, Peter Waterhouse.
 
Like Waterhouse, Hamburger was born in Berlin, the son of a distinguished  
German-Jewish professor of paediatrics, Richard Hamburger. The Hamburger  
household was both cultured and disciplined, qualities which Michael to a large  
extent inherited. He was startled to be rounded on in his early adulthood by the  
proletarian poet Jesse Tor, who denounced him as "irredeemably  bourgeois".



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