This new edition of `The Garden of Theophrastus’ brings back into print one of Germany’s finest recent poets, in translations by his close friend Michael Hamburger. Peter Huchel (1903-1981) wrote amidst the political turmoil of twentieth-century Germany before the country’s re-unification. A highly influential figure in the former East Germany, he edited the magazine `Sinn und Form’ there until 1962 but was dismissed for indulging too `liberal’ a policy.

His poetry has its roots in Brandenburg, where the formative years of his childhood were spent. Through the hardship of the Second World War and its vexed aftermath, culminating in his exile to West Germany in 1971, he maintained a poetry of humane commitment, formal invention and precision.

Michael Hamburger was born in Berlin in 1924, and came to Britain as a child. He has taught widely in America and Britain and is the outstanding contemporary translator and critic of German literature. His awards include the German Federal Republic's Goethe Medal in 1986 for services to German literature. Anvil publishes several of his translations, including editions of Goethe, Hölderlin, Rilke and `Poems of Paul Celan', which received the EC's European Translation Prize in 1990. His `Collected Poems 1941-1994' was published in 1995 by Anvil, who also publish his seminal critical work `The Truth of Poetry'.