Arts: Lost in Translation Michael Hamburger's Huge Contribution to Our Knowledge of German Literature - Including a New Translation of the Verse of Gunter Grass - Has Obscured His Own Poetic Reputation

Beginning of article

This is the story of a literary life, translated from the German. In 1933, the year of Hitler's accession to power, a nine-year-old German boy called Michael Hamburger, one of four children from a prosperous, upper- middle-class Jewish family, left Berlin for Edinburgh with his parents and siblings, to escape from the possibility of persecution and death. Little by little, the boy became an Englishman. He went to prep school, Westminster public school, and Oxford. He served as a humble private among working-class squaddies in the British Army - his father had received the Iron Cross for distinguished service in the German Army.

After the war, Hamburger, a dreamy, …