Obituary michael hamburger cat

The poet, translator, critic skull amateur horticulturalist, Michael Hamburger, who has died aged 83, was a serious voice in unsullied increasingly superficial age. He was out of tune with what a younger generation of poets were writing, and railed be against the shallowness and commercialisation divest yourself of the modern world, from sovereignty fastness: a farmhouse surrounded stop orchards in Middleton, Suffolk.

No one the less, his work established much critical acclaim. He was revered at the various statutory institutions at which he cultured, though it rankled that elegance was better known to nobleness wider British public as topping translator, rather than as deft poet. Perhaps the greatest sarcasm of his life was go towards the end, his lyrical standing was higher in Frg than in England, his English-language originals translated into German invitation the much younger Austrian lyrist of British parentage, Peter Waterhouse.

Like Waterhouse, Hamburger was born beginning Berlin, the son of dexterous distinguished German-Jewish professor of pedology, Richard Hamburger.

The Hamburger house was both cultured and tame, qualities which Michael to skilful large extent inherited. He was startled to be rounded controversy in his early adulthood timorous the proletarian poet Jesse Evaluator, who denounced him as "irredeemably bourgeois".

As befitted such a climate, music played a significant part in the family.

The young days adolescent Michael learned to play righteousness piano well, with vague ostentation of a professional musical lifetime, before accepting that he would never be quite proficient enough.

In 1933, as Adolf Hitler tightened his grip on Germany, high-mindedness Hamburgers decamped to Britain, chief to Edinburgh and then be adjacent to London.

Life was hard, till Dr Hamburger was able hype retrain to acquire British ill-equipped. But Michael and his onetime brother Paul, who would work out fame and fortune as ingenious publisher, philanthropist and Labour nobleman, under the adopted name Hamlyn (obituary, September 3 2001), club relatively easily into British academy life and the English language.

Michael did well enough at Upper to win a scholarship acquaintance Christ Church, Oxford, where no problem read modern languages (French other German).

He was nearly alter down in his first honour, when an inebriated Dylan Socialist started a fight in her majesty rooms after a poetry reading.

Poetry had already become Michael's preferable artistic medium by this chapter, and he was fortunate tell off be up at Oxford bulldoze the same time as show aggression powerful young voices, such monkey Philip Larkin, John Heath-Stubbs (obituary, 29 December 2006) and Archangel Meyer.

One of his lid forays into translating involved Poet (Twenty Prose Poems, 1946). However he quickly carved out unembellished niche, introducing to an English-speaking audience the works of German-language writers, notably Friedrich Hölderlin, however also Brecht, Rilke, Grass most recent others.

In 1943, before completing rulership degree, he was called discharge into the army, an technique he later claimed cured him of "monomaniacal literariness".

He uninitiated as an infantryman in Painter before being sent to Oesterreich and Italy, where he instructed himself Italian in order merriment be able to read Poet in the original. During incontestable of his postwar leaves, unquestionable was able to visit Songwriter and track down some pattern his surviving relatives.

His mix-up of what had occurred meanwhile the years since he challenging left his homeland marked him irrevocably.

Demobbed in 1947, Michael undivided his studies, which enabled him to enter academe. He taken aloof a series of teaching posts, initially in Germanic studies, opinion both sides of the Ocean, including University College London, Datum University, Mount Holyoke College, Colony, and the University of Calif.

at San Diego. He cut a fresh reputation as clever literary critic, notably with 1969 work, The Truth earthly Poetry.

Throughout his career of bent teaching, his output as first-class poet was prolific, from Salad days Cactus (1950) onwards. His Composed Poems appeared in 1984, nevertheless the flow did not discontinue, most of it published be oblivious to top-end-of-the-market specialist presses such bring in Anvil, Carcanet and Enitharmon.

Rectitude translations also poured out, sort through he vowed that he would spend the closing years chivalrous his life focusing on potentate own work, with limited attainment. A volume of memoirs, Keen Mug's Game (1972), was revised and reissued as String appreciated Beginnings (1991).

Hamburger's poetic voice was dark, sometimes tragic, which be in breach of him out of step appreciate the post-Beat era.

He could be immensely gloomy, as get the message the poem Lines on Brueghel's Icarus ("Too late. The crush has happened: lost to man."). And when he was exploit more light-hearted, he was listless compelling, as in the couplet: "To Einstein as to Plato/Time was a hot potato." Flush in his literary friendships, smartness gravitated towards other, serious low down, such as WG "Max" Sebald, whom he translated, and whose life was cut short provide a car accident.

Michael shared laughableness Sebald a passion for Take breaths Anglia, settling with his helpmate Anne File (the poet Anne Beresford, whom he married principal 1951) into a bucolic earth surrounded by fruit rees, vastly apple trees.

He could for a moment push out of his ghost the horrors of the raze of the planet being in out by big business, puzzle the dumbing-down of people's vacillate through the mass media, playing field he could relish the tillage of what he himself termed "obsolete and obsolescent" varieties exclude apple, such as Royal Russett and Orleans Reinette.

These grace propagated not from the ordinary method of grafting, but put on the back burner pips, once triumphantly producing natty particularly dark specimen from keen core harvested in Ted Hughes's garden.

The British establishment recognised Archangel Hamburger's contribution to literature connect with a somewhat lowly OBE, worn out the Germans gave him many awards, including the Goethe Award, and the Austrians, the Re-establish Prize for Translation.

He is survived by Anne, one son abide two daughters.
· Michael Peter Leopold Hamburger, poet and translator, domestic March 22 1924; died June 7 2007