Description

From a Diary of Non-Events captures a year in the life of Michael Hamburger, from December 2000 to November 2001, observing changes in the natural world alongside the preoccupations and ruminations of the poet in and around his home in a Suffolk village. Occasionally intruding upon these `non-events' are the larger concerns of the outside world. Hamburger's skill in synthesising the two strands results in a compelling narrative in which, as in all great sequences, the whole strikes us as more than the sum of its parts. 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 several of his translations, including editions of Goethe, Hölderlin, Rilke and Poems of Paul Celan, which received the EC's European Translation Prize in 1990. His Collected Poems 1941-1994 was published in 1995 by Anvil, who also publish his seminal critical work The Truth of Poetry.