How many pages make a poet? The notebooks of Michael Hamburger

Blog series English and drama

Author Lara Mayr, Manuscripts Cataloguer

Notebooks and diaries offer an invaluable insight into a person’s life, one that, without close friendship or thievery, would usually be hard to obtain. Even a half empty notebook shows signs of life, maybe having been carried around waiting for the right moment to put pen to paper. The same as a much-used notebook shows the stresses and worries of its author carved into its surface via pen. And who better to serve as an example of the many facets of the notebook and the person behind them, than a poet?

This philosophy is certainly true for the collection of notebooks that makes up part of the archive of the poet and translator Michael Hamburger (see Add MS/89814). Born in 1924, his family was forced to relocate from his birth city Berlin to Edinburgh in 1933, to escape growing anti-Jewish sentiments in Germany, later relocating to London.

While attending university at Oxford, Hamburger began his first translations of the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, which would later become his first and one of his most influential collections of translations. He is also known for his translations of the Romanian poet Paul Celan and several of W. G. Sebald’s works, as well as his critical work The Truth of Poetry (first published in 1969).

One of the oldest notebooks in this collection dates to the 1940s, containing several drafts of original poems, as well as some of Hamburger’s earliest attempts at translating Friedrich Hölderlin’s poems. A handwritten manuscript of part of his autobiography A String of Beginnings is also part of the collection (see Add MS 89814/2/Notebook 22). As Hamburger states himself in this autobiography, he struggled with being able to translate the world around him into poetry in his early years as a poet. He found that his poetry was heavily influenced by more established poets and their stylistic choices; several poems mentioning Arthur Rimbaud might attest to that. Hamburger’s notebooks containing his own poetry are also of interest as they show the trajectory of themes and styles that interest him as a poet.

In a later notebook from the 1980s (see Add MS 89814/2/Notebook 27), however, we can see Hamburger leaning more into the themes he will come to embrace throughout the rest of his career, ‘plants, animals and human beings – but their growth and decay, not their chemical components’ (Add MS 89814/2/Notebook 3, f. 23v). This notebook features a list of several types of trees, alongside poem drafts such as Oak and Fore Alpes. Having published a collection of poems titled Trees in 1988, it might be that this list served as a basis for the poetry collection.

The notebooks also contain several diaries, ranging from small entries about daily life and work, to notes on his travels. Having been born in Germany, Hamburger also regularly travels back to Germany after the war to visit acquaintances and attend conferences on German literature. In a notebook from 1962, he recounts a trip to Berlin for a literary conference. He describes having to cross over into East Berlin for a lecture, and details the process of having his passport checked, and how he and his friends were split up, due to their different immigration statuses. In this diary entry, Hamburger captures not only the bleak atmosphere of East Berlin, but records opinions from people living there as well:

‘Talked to a girl next to me – a chemist – who was interested to know more about political parties & attitude in England. Asked her how East Berliners feel about the wall; though she was embarrassed and anxious, gave me to understand that most people are against it. Arendt, an old poet, told me later that they feel torn in half; he was very gloomy about prospects, thought the wall would stay & he’d never get out of the country again’ (Add MS 89814/2/Notebook 24, f.5).

This somber attitude also shows itself in Hamburger’s more personal diaries. Primarily interested in writing poetry, he struggles to make a living off poetry alone and finds himself employed more often as a translator, or much worse in his opinion, a lecturer. This leads him to expressing a rather self-deprecating attitude in some of his diaries, stating that his diary ‘[...], apart from being a waste of time, is rather terrifying, because it shows me how little I am really doing’ (Add MS 89814/2/Notebook 3, f.2v).

As his productivity was directly tied to his income, it is perhaps not surprising that Hamburger wanted to have a very clear idea of his earnings at all times. Refusing to employ an agent for a long time, he was solely responsible for managing his financial affairs, which can be seen in a journal, where he logged his published poems alongside the rate he received for them. This notebook dates between 1950 and 1997, almost spanning the entirety of his career, and offers an insight into the financial pressure that can come with earning a living from art (see Add MS 89814/2/Notebook 9).

Over half a century of thoughts and drafts are hard to condense into a few sentences. This collection of notebooks not only allows an insight into the mind of an often very hard on himself, poet. It also firmly places him into historical context, providing a backdrop to the fears and aspirations of an expat artist. The rest of the archive, containing personal and professional correspondence, drafts and press material, will make even more aspects of Hamburger’s working and private life available once catalogued, complimenting these discoveries from the notebook series.

The Michael Hamburger archive is being catalogued with funding from the Hidden Collections initiative. Cataloguing should be completed by summer 2027 with the material being made available to researchers after this point. In the meantime, please contact lara.mayr@bl.uk for any enquiries.