Overview
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) is mainly known to the English-speaking world as the author of the poetic drama Faust. In Europe - as poet, dramatist, novelist, art critic, literary theoretician, travel writer, author of a treatise on light and colour, and prolific correspondent - he is regarded as the supreme Romantic literary figure. This selection is a classic introduction to one of the giants of European literature. It collects all the beautifully crafted versions Michael Hamburger has made over many years from all periods of Goethe's creative life, adding more than twenty new poems to Poems and Epigrams (1983), and including the complete text of Goethe's erotic masterpiece, the Roman Elegies. The critical introduction provides a valuable account of a writer who was, in the words of his translator, `so many-sided as to constitute a whole literature'. Michael Hamburger is a poet and critic and the outstanding contemporary translator of German poetry into English. His many awards include the Schlegel-Tieck Prize (1981), the German Federal Republic's Goethe Medal (1986) and the European Translation Prize (1990). Michael Hamburger's Collected Poems 1941-1994 is also published by Anvil, as are his selections from the poetry of Hölderlin, Rilke and Celan, and his seminal critical work on modern poetry, The Truth of Poetry.Author Biography
Born in Frankfurt in 1749, Goethe trained as a lawyer but achieved early fame with his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther. Plays, fiction, poetry, theoretical and critical writings followed. For ten years he was chief minister of state to the duchy of Weimar. His lifelong preoccupation was the drama Faust, completed shortly before his death in 1832.Michael Hamburger was born in Berlin in 1924 and came to Britain as a child in 1933. He is the foremost translator of German poetry into English - among the many authors he has translated from are Hölderlin, Celan, Rilke and Goethe - and one of Britain's leading poets of the period since World War 2.
