The Michael Hamburger Archive: Mediating European Literature

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Michael Hamburger was one of the foremost mediators of modern European - mainly German and Austrian - literature to readers in English. Born into a German family of Jewish descent, he came to the UK as a refugee in 1933. He became a poet, a literary critic, and the translator of a very broad range of writers, including Hölderlin, Goethe, Rilke, Celan, Brecht, Ernst Jandl, Hans Magnus Enzens-berger and W. G. Sebald. Hamburger's archive at the British Library, which thus far is uncatalogued, comprises 94 boxes of drafts of translations, poems and essays; correspondence with writers, publishers and friends; and diaries and personal reflections among many other documents. The CDP offers a unique opportunity, through research, cataloguing, and public engagement, to illuminate processes that have been at the core of Anglo-German cultural relations in the past three-quarters of a century: the translation of literature, and specifically poetry; the writing of feuilleton-style and heavier literary criticism; and reflection at length on translation and cultural transfer. The project will enhance the current emphasis on the transnational in German studies, and it speaks to an enduring academic and public interest in the relationship between Germany and the United Kingdom. Equally, the existence of such a full archive makes this an outstanding opportunity for Translation Studies research.Alongside the PhD research, and integrally connected with it, the studentship will involve a significant contribution to the organisation and cataloguing of the archive, and to the evolving approaches to and understanding of translators' archives in the Library. Applicants are invited to propose a PhD project that approaches the Michael Hamburger Archive from one or more of the following angles. These are areas in which close, sustained engagement with the archive will achieve research insights which cannot be developed otherwise, and where academic research will interconnect closely with practical work for the Library.