“I am a survivor from a different culture” An Interview with Michael Hamburger Lidia Vianu (Bucharest, Romania) Lidia Vianu: In 1980 Romania was still under less confined to the Writers’ Union. Because I communism. Foreign books were out of our ceased long ago to be an urban poet and feel reach. We were cut off from anything claustrophobic in literary conferences, I could published in England. Somehow I managed not accept such an invitation. I did meet many to read your volume Real Estate, and have Romanian poets in England and elsewhere, but been teaching it ever since. You struck me failed to meet the poet Doinas, who translated as a deeply physical and also metaphysical one of my long poems, ‘Travelling’. poet at once. Both body and soul, and both Why did you choose Sorescu to translate? moving in some way towards dissolution. Are I was attracted to Marin Sorescu’s subversive you a tragic poet, do you think? wit. If he was a tragic poet also, fundamentally, Michael Hamburger: It is impossible for a he had a black humour that objectivized and poet to characterize his own work. From other allegorized his personal malaise. His kind of people I gather that I am a gloomy poet, if not a invention could also be appreciated by English tragic one. The reasons for that readers with no direct experience are in my biography, which I of the pressures to which they cannot trace here; but I wrote a were a response – thanks, in part, book of memoirs, A Mug’s to an English tradition of nonsense Game (1975, second version verse. String of Beginnings [1991]), You are a well-known translator about my early years only. and your major source is You have translated Marin German literature. You have Sorescu, the Romanian poet translated Büchner, Celan, who used his own deathbed as Enzensberger, Goethe, Grass, a table for poetry in The Hölderlin, Huchel, Rilke, and Bridge. Have you ever been to Trakl. Is translation of poetry Romania? creation as well? I met Marin Sorescu repeatedly Translation came naturally to me at international poetry festivals, because as a child I was translated and it was he who asked me to from Germany to Britain. So I translate his poems, which I knew only from began to translate when I was still at school, German translations. I do not know Romanian, also choosing to specialize in what was called but the language is not totally unintelligible to Modern Languages and amounted to French me as Hungarian is, for instance – because of and German. One of my earliest translations the Latin components of the language. I was was of the prose poems of Baudelaire, and as fortunate enough to have Oskar Pastior’s a soldier in Italy I also taught myself Italian, so permission to draw on his excellent German as to be able to read Dante. Though I specialized versions, but could at least read Sorescu’s poems more and more in German, from time to time I in the original Romanian, so that their rhythms continued to translate from other languages. and sounds were accessible to me. Translation, to me, was an activity separate from I was invited to Romania at least once, but was the writing of my own poems – rather as, for warned that I should not be free to travel where musicians, composition is separate from I pleased in the country, but should be more or performance or the interpretation of other 35 The European English Messenger, 15.1 (2006) people’s music. I don’t ask myself whether my enough to music to become an alternative ever translations are creative. It’s enough for me if since my adolescence – though I was a late they serve a useful purpose. Some of them were developer as a poet, partly because I had to important enough to me to occupy me almost spend four years as a soldier, during which throughout my long life – like Hölderlin, with formative years writing, most of the time, was successive editions from 1943 to 2005. Towards physic-ally and practically impossible for me. the end of my life, though, I had to give up My MA students (in the English Department translating, so as to be able to concentrate at Bucharest University we have just started entirely on my own poems. an MA that translates contemporary literary Your poetry is very earnest in tone. You texts from and into English) are in the process ignore the ironic fervour of your of translating your poems into Romanian. contemporaries. You hate mocking at the What would you advise them, both as the words or at the reader’s expectations. You author and as a translator? mean what you say. Every line is heavy with I can offer no advice to translators of my poems. profound sadness at the way of all flesh. I have had too many different kinds of What do you think of the jesting air and the translators, from the pedantically literal to the undeniable shallowness of some so-called ‘imitators’ whose real wish was to contemporary poets? produce poems of their own. All I can say is Yes, I suppose that I am a very serious poet – that as a translator I have tried to get as close except for satirical verse, which I have also been as possible not only to the semantics of the work compelled to write, though much of it may be translated, but to its way of breathing – which, inferior to my more serious poems – perhaps to me, is the most essential characteristic of because I am not playful enough by nature, and any poetic text. even my satirical or polemical verse is not When one asks for an interview, one secretly entertaining. Now I find myself very much out hopes to find a very intimate area of the of sympathy with most of the poetry of my interviewee which nobody has ever put their younger contemporaries, but am aware that I finger on. You have been amply interviewed, am a survivor from a different culture. and I cannot hope for much. But I must tell Do you read much poetry these days? Whom you that reading your poems has made me do you prefer of your contemporaries and find a secret area of my being I never knew of the younger poets that you know? existed. You made me perceive mortality with a new strength. Has that ever been your For that reason I read mainly classics and dead poetic aim? authors now – with very few exceptions. Since I have given up literary criticism also, which I I have never been able to reveal the mainsprings practised for decades, I can’t presume to judge of my poetry. If I knew what they are, it could my younger contemporaries. Both literally and well have been impossible or unnecessary to write metaphorically, in old age I have had to content my poems, because poems are adventures that myself with the cultivation of my own garden; take me into unpredictable regions – even if they and even as a gardener I am a grower of mainly begin with recognizable persons, things or scenes. obsolete or obsolescent fruit. I have learnt more about my constant concerns and themes from other people’s responses to my What in your life led you to poetry? Like all work than from a self-analysis I do not practise. writers, I am sure you have a secret story, a That, incidentally, is the justification of good story of your sensibility. How did you become criticism – as distinct from the hyperbole of praise a poet and also a translator? or malice that has almost replaced such good Among the arts, music was my first love; but criticism in my own country. But I recognize the the pressures of education did not allow me to truth of what you write about my obsession with attain proficiency in that art. Poetry was close time and mortality. 36 Interview with Michael Hamburger I remember teaching you under Ceausescu, of contemporary British literature (if that is in icy cold classrooms, to freezing students, what I was, considering I could not find any who never failed to understand the pain in contemporary books to read) at the English your lines, even though they were engrossed Department of Bucharest University, I in their own tragedy, which was totally discovered you, and the enthusiasm of that different. You have a very compelling gift of discovery – I had no idea who you were, communicating moods. Is there a feature of what your poetic status was – has been with your work that you would have liked critics me for more than two decades. It was mere to comment on, yet no one has noticed? chance that I happened to find your book. It is good to know that your students could But it gave me a standard for poetry. Is respond to my work under Ceausescu. I had poetry your calling? Or is it translation? no direct experience of that dictatorship, but So I, too, cannot know what my poetic status lived for a short time under the dictatorship of is. In earlier decades I was included among the Hitler and, in my military service, experienced outstanding poets in British and American the consequences of a world war when serving anthologies, in recent decades my work has in Italy, Austria, and on a brief visit to my been omitted from such anthologies and my surviving relatives in Berlin. Though I was not books of poems no longer appear in the USA.