Since 1941 Michael Hamburger has created a distinctive body of work. Collected Poems 1941-1994 reflects more than half a century's dedication to poetry and a consistent engagement with both the natural and the human world. Michael Hamburger was born in Berlin in 1924, and came to Britain as a child. He has taught widely in America and Britain and is the outstanding contemporary translator and critic of German literature. His awards include the German Federal Republic's Goethe Medal in 1986 for services to German literature. Anvil publishes his critical work The Truth of Poetry and several of his translations, including editions of Goethe , H�lderlin , Rilke and Poems of Paul Celan , which received the EC's European Translation Prize in 1990. His poem-sequence Late appeared in 1997.

Originally published in 1957, this volume brings together a collection of essays and hard to source translations on both well and lesser known German writers and poets, including Hölderlin, Benn, Mann and Nietzsche. The essays are linked by a consideration of the tension between the desire for what Thomas Mann called 'the miracle of ingeniousness regained' and the constrains of reason. The book shows how this tension contributes toward the prophetic nature of so much 18th and 19th Century German literature and its modernity, which qualities are also placed in the context of German political and social conditions. All prose quotations are given in English translation, and the majority of verse quotations in both German and English.

LITERATURE, CRITICISM, MEMOIRS, LETTERS / POETRY