Michael Hamburger – A Translator made by the Trauma of Displacement

A reader familiar with Michael Hamburger’s work may stumble across a remarkable omission in the talk entitled ‘Modern German Literature in England’, which he gave in 1981 before a German audience, but was published for the first time in German in the journal Sinn und Form. Unlike in his English autobiography A Mug’s Game or his collection of essays Zwischen den Sprachen, originally written in German, the pivotal point in his literary existence, his threefold identity as a poet, translator and critic are not touched upon in this personal account.

Again and again, Hamburger depicts an essential experience in his autobiographical writings: the horror of a child fallen silent, a child who still has no words in the language of the country to which he has been exiled. The story begins in 1933 with a nine year-old refugee boy from Berlin-Charlottenburg who wanders the corridors of a British school. He has recently been expelled from Nazi Germany due to his Jewish background – a fact he was not aware of before the Nazis came to power. Hamburger, who later became the crucial ‘cultural mediator’ (Jeremy Adler) between German-language literature and the English-speaking world, has described this early encounter as a wordless abyss, a speechless gulf between the languages in various ways. When he wrote in his German mother-tongue about his early experiences, he made an extraordinary shift in the accentuation of the word ‘translation’ (‘Übersetzung’). Instead of the active form, he emphasized the passive form of being ‘translated’, expressing through this wordplay his experience of an imposed displacement to British exile.

Almost thirty years later, when asked ‘why I translate’, Hamburger responded that he sees two boys, himself and his brother, in an Edinburgh school building looking for the right entrance to a new world: ‘I had been translated into English. Now it was a case of mastering this foreign element [...] – or to perish’. In addition, in A Mug’s Game Hamburger wrote about this initiation to exile: ‘It was like learning to swim by being thrown into deep water’.  According to his own interpretation of this ‘linguistic transplantation’ it was precisely the experience of a lack of language that subsequently mobilized his own urgency to understand and to translate.

Other Jewish exiles of his generation verbalized similar ground-breaking experiences. The French-German Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, for example, described being exiled as a sudden confrontation with the ‘truth of language’ itself. Hamburger formulated the same insight as follows: ‘It could be that you begin to see language as something which you can’t take for granted in the way that most people do take language for granted’. It implies the impression of a disruption in which bilingualism is experienced less as an accomplishment but rather as an ‘affliction’. In order to grasp this, Goldschmidt coined the term ‘dual lingualism’ (‘Doppelsprachigkeit’) and distinguished it from bilingualism. He defines the former through history: ‘[Dual lingualism] is at every moment in life a doubled experience of existence; it never leaves us alone and demands an almost physical adjustment’. In the same vein Hamburger explained, when giving a speech at the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (German Academy for Language and Poetry) in 1973, that it was not his personal ‘history’ that had ‘displaced’ him to Britain. It was rather the wider historical experience of an ‘age of dispersion’, as he put it in his critical work After the Second Flood, that made him a ‘displaced poet’ and a translator in exile.

The experience of displacement becomes, as a consequence, a problem of expression. In this manner, the British scholar Jeremy Adler recently argued that the exiled writer is not only urged to understand the different literary environment of his host country, but is also forced to create something new if he wants to succeed in making his separation from his native country productive. In this sense, Hamburger was able to make use of a particular space between the languages, a linguistic interstice he named ‘Niemandsland’, a ‘no man’s land’. Accordingly, he called his critical activity a ‘carrying over’, a process that resulted in building his own ark of German literature in England, a practice which to some extent was also a heritage of his background as an assimilated Berlin Jew. The wide range of his work as a translator, from Friedrich Hölderlin to Paul Celan, attests to this. The fact that in 1943 the newly naturalized nineteen year-old Hamburger dedicated his first publication to Hölderlin, the poet as seeker for expression par excellence, fits in with his own linguistic struggle as a German-Jewish émigré. Presumably it was also his aim to counteract the in part misused nationalistic interpretation of the role of the poet by the Nazis. On the contrary, the Hölderlin he emphasized was – to use a phrase from his own translation – the poet ‘in desolate times’.

After 1945 Hamburger himself ultimately became – to draw on an expression of the Romantic writer Jean Paul – a ‘mediating spirit’ (‘Bindegeist’) between cultures in an era he characterized in his critical magnum opus The Truth of Poetry as ‘loose at all ends’. There is evidence that Hamburger saw himself in a similar position trying to re-connect the pre- with the post-war era. This implied a bridging of the eras without denying, as he put it, ‘the deathly distance’ marked by the Nazi period. Therefore, Hamburger’s aim was to develop a process of translation that was neither free ‘imitation’ nor ‘appropriation’ of a foreign language or culture. In his essential essay ‘Experiences of the Translator’ (published under the German title ‘Erfahrungen eines Übersetzers’), Hamburger, not without irony, remarked that he had learned this lesson from German literature, which had historically proved to be unusually hospitable to the literature of other countries, and practiced a fruitful ‘naturalization of the foreign’ (‘Einbürgerung von Fremdem’) to its own benefit.

Michael Hamburger’s original text of his 1981 talk in German translation, along with the full introduction/commentary are published as ‘Moderne deutsche Literatur in England’ in the journal Sinn und Form (2024.2), available at https://sinn-und-form.de/leseprobe--7965-18