Huchel, Peter: Garden of Theophrastus

Peter Huchel was born in a suburb of Berlin in 1903, but spent his formative years at his grandfather's farm in rural Brandenburg. He became a magazine editor until the oppressive East German regime eventually drove him into complete retirement in 1962. In 1971 he was allowed to resettle in West Germany, from which time he travelled widely. He died in 1981. Michael Hamburger was born in Berlin in 1924 and came to Britain as a child in 1933. He is the foremost translator of German poetry into English - among the many authors he has translated from are Hölderlin, Celan, Rilke and Goethe - and one of Britain's leading poets of the period since World War 2.