Obituary michael hamburger cat

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.

None the less, 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 p