Michael Peter Leopold Hamburger OBE (22 March 1924 – 7 June 2007) was a noted German-British translator, poet, critic, memoirist and academic.
He was known in particular for his translations of Friedrich Hölderlin, Paul Celan, Gottfried Benn and W. G. Sebald from German, and his work in literary criticism.
He was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford and served in the British Army from 1943 to 1947 in Italy and Austria.
His work was recognised with numerous awards, including the Aristeion Prize in 1990, and he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1992.
[2] He often commented on the literary life: the first edition of his autobiography came out with the title A Mug's Game, a quotation from T. S. Eliot, whom Hamburger greatly admired, and to whose sixtieth-birthday biblio-symposium he contributed an eponymous poem of four stanzas[3] which tells its own story.