Overview
This new edition of The Garden of Theophrastus brings back into print one of Germany's finest recent poets, in translations by his close friend Michael Hamburger. Peter Huchel (1903-1981) wrote amidst the political turmoil of twentieth-century Germany before the country's re-unification. A highly influential figure in the former East Germany, he edited the magazine Sinn und Form there until 1962 but was dismissed for indulging too "liberal" a policy. His poetry has its roots in Brandenburg, where the formative years of his childhood were spent. Through the hardship of the Second World War and its vexed aftermath, culminating in his exile to West Germany in 1971, he maintained a poetry of humane commitment, formal invention and precision. 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.Author Biography
Peter Huchel was born in a suburb of Berlin in 1903, but spent his formative years at his grandfather's farm in rural Brandenburg. He became a magazine editor until the oppressive East German regime eventually drove him into complete retirement in 1962. In 1971 he was allowed to resettle in West Germany, from which time he travelled widely. He died in 1981. 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.
