Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

2024 – 22 March to be precise – marks the centenary of the birth of Michael Hamburger. He seems, sadly, to be more remembered these days rather more for his translations of and associations with great German writers than for his own poetry and criticism. That sense was reinforced by the first publication in English, in 2002, of W. G. Sebald’s Die Ringe des Saturn, chapter XII of which features a visit which Sebald’s narrator pays on Hamburger at his house in Middleton, Suffolk; Tacita Dean’s subsequent, extraordinarily beautiful film (2007; details available here) on Hamburger commissioned as a response to Sebald’s writing for the wonderful Waterlog exhibition; and the fact that Hamburger had translated two of Sebald’s poetry collections. (I wrote here, six years ago, about some of the connections between Hamburger and Sebald.)

To mark Hamburger’s centenary, this year I will periodically write about some of his writings, chiefly from the last third of his life when his poems, especially his nature poems, took on what I slightly hesitate to call a mystical quality. He’d never been a flashy poet, but, having taught at many universities in England and the USA, he was acquainted with poets of many different schools and styles, and his approach in his later years produced a more direct, informally formal poetry in which his thoughts were clearer and more powerful and affecting for being so. His late poems for me, are inspirational, as I hope I will show.

In 1981 (when Hamburger was the same age as I am now), Carcanet published his marvellous collection Variations which consisted of two sequences, ‘Travelling’ and ‘In Suffolk’, the second of which is particularly fine. Below, though, is a short, dizzying extract from part VIII (of IX) of ‘Travelling’, describing his weariness at the restlessness of moving by flight between positions and places elsewhere.


Estranged. By those global routes,
All curved now, all leading back
Not to the starting-point
But through it, beyond it, out again,
Back again, out. As the globe rotates
So does the traveller, giddy with turning, turning
And no return but for more departure,
No departure that’s not a return.
To what? To a home beyond home,
Beyond difference, indifference, sameness;
Beyond himself, who is here and there,
Who is nowhere, everywhere, in a season endlessly turning.