Michael Hamburger: 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. Nonetheless, 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".
As befitted such a milieu, music played a significant role in the family. The boy Michael learned to play the piano well, with vague aspirations of a professional musical career, before accepting that he would never be quite proficient enough.
In 1933, as Adolf Hitler tightened his grip on Germany, the Hamburgers decamped to Britain, first to Edinburgh and then to London. Life was hard, until Dr Hamburger was able to retrain to acquire British qualifications. But Michael and his younger brother Paul, who would achieve fame and fortune as a publisher, philanthropist and Labour peer, under the adopted name Hamlyn, settled relatively easily into British school life and the English language.
Michael did well enough at Westminster to win a scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford, where he read modern languages (French and German). He was nearly sent down in his first term, when an inebriated Dylan Thomas started a fight in his rooms after a poetry reading.
Poetry had already become Michael's preferred artistic medium by this stage, and he was fortunate to be up at Oxford at the same time as other powerful young voices, such as Philip Larkin, John Heath-Stubbs and Michael Meyer.
In 1943, before completing his degree, he was called up into the army, an experience he later claimed cured him of "monomaniacal literariness". He trained as an infantryman in Kent before being sent to Austria and Italy. Demobbed in 1947, Michael completed his studies, which enabled him to enter academe.
He held a series of teaching posts, initially in Germanic studies in University College London, Reading University, Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts, and the University of California in San Diego. He built a fresh reputation as a literary critic, notably with his 1969 work, The Truth of Poetry.
Throughout his career of part-time teaching, his output as a poet was prolific, from Flowering Cactus(1950) onwards. His Collected Poemsappeared in 1984, but the flow did not stop, most of it published by top-end-of-the-market specialist presses such as Anvil, Carcanet and Enitharmon.
In his literary friendships, he gravitated towards other, serious minds, such as WG "Max" Sebald, whom he translated, and whose life was cut short in a car accident.
Michael shared with Sebald a passion for East Anglia, settling with his wife Anne File (the poet Anne Beresford, whom he married in 1951) into a bucolic existence surrounded by fruit trees, especially apple trees.
The British establishment recognised Hamburger's contribution to literature with a somewhat lowly OBE, whereas the Germans gave him numerous awards, including the Gaoth Medal, and the Austrians, the State Prize for Translation. He is survived by Anne, one son and two daughters.
Michael Peter Leopold Hamburger, poet and translator, born March 22nd, 1924; died June 7th, 2007.