Michael Hamburger (1924-2007) was a poet, translator, critic and memoirist and academic. Born in Berlin into a Jewish family which left Germany for Britain in 1933, he was known in particular for his translations of Friedrich Hölderlin, Paul Celan, Gottfried Benn and W.G. Sebald from German, and for his work in literary criticism. Sebald's encounter with him in The Rings of Saturn is a key episode in that book, reprised in Grant Gee's film Patience (After Sebald). Bloodaxe published several editions of his translations over the years, including Marin Sorescu’s Selected Poems in 1983, and his co-translations of Hans Magnus Enzensberger. He is one of the main translators of Enzensberger’s New Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2015).
