The poet, critic and translator Michael Hamburger was a key figure in English and European letters for more than 60 years.

An original, questioning temperament with a meticulous sense of the responsibilities of language, he earned the respect of writers of several contrasting generations. As a translator he had particular success in introducing the work of Hölderlin and Paul Celan to English readers, but the authors he served with unfailing sensitivity ran the stylistic and historical gamut from Büchner to Rilke and Trakl, and from Goethe to Enzensberger and Grass.

Michael Peter Leopold Hamburger was born in 1924 in Berlin. His father, Professor Richard Hamburger, was a Jewish paediatrician with literary interests whose own father had introduced ideas from the French avant-garde into Germany. His mother, born Lili Hamburg, a Polish Quaker, was a member of a prominent banking family.

Childhood friends in Berlin included the brothers Clement and Lucian Freud. Soon after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 the Hamburgers moved to Britain. Richard Hamburger had to retrain in Edinburgh before settling in St John’s Wood, North London. There he managed a limited general practice, after developing Hodgkin’s disease, from which he died in 1940.

Michael Hamburger was one of four children. His renegade younger brother Paul was to become the publisher and philanthropist Lord Hamlyn. Michael was an academic success at George Watson’s school, Edinburgh, and Westminster School (where he was a contemporary of Tony Benn), before winning an exhibition in Modern Languages at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1941, having taken the entrance exam a year early to save his mother his school fees.

His wartime degree was interrupted by military service but, nursing the literary ambitions which he had held since before his father’s death, Hamburger published his first book of poems, translations from Hölderlin, in 1943 at the age of 19. His characteristic reticence was displayed when it took a direct order from his commanding officer in the infantry for him to accept an invitation to read from the poems at the Poetry Society.

The original poems that appeared in his first two collections, Flowering Cactus (1950) and Poems 1950-51 drew on the rather inflated poetic diction that was current in the immediate postwar period, but already demonstrated Hamburger’s individual tone and preoccupations. This was particularly true of the longer poem, From the Notebook of a European Tramp, whose narrator wanders through a devastated Europe of bombed cities and displacement camps, noting: I still tried To live like other men and not to know That all we lived for had already died.

From 1948 Hamburger had attempted to live the life of a freelance writer and translator. He associated with some of the leading literary figures of the time, including Edwin Muir, Kathleen Raine and Robert Graves, with whom he stayed in Majorca. He even passed as sufficiently bohemian to be introduced to the notorious Aleister Crowley.

During this period he also met Ann Ellen File, the poet Anne Beresford, whom he married in 1951. The birth of their first child persuaded him of the need for regular employment, and he became an assistant lecturer in German at University College London, where his professor would introduce him as a journalist, on the grounds that his academic efforts were more concentrated on his articles for The Times Literary Supplement than on the thesis he was supposed to complete as a condition of his post. He moved to Reading in 1955, first as lecturer and then reader in German, and his writing on German literature completed during this period was collected in Reason and Energy(1957) and Prophecy to Exorcism (1966).

Hamburger left Reading in 1964, again having earned the antagonism of a professor – this time for the presumption of driving a secondhand Daimler. He took a series of temporary appointments in the US, which allowed him to devote at least six months of the year to full-time writing.

The peripatetic lifestyle may have strengthened his literary work as he became open to the more concrete expression of the objectivist strand in American poetry, but it had a disastrous effect on his personal life, leading to the temporary breakdown of his marriage and a psychological crisis.

It was at this crisis point that Hamburger found his distinctive tone as a poet, particularly in the sequence Travelling, which was extended twice after its first publication and finally completed in 1976. In this poem, his free-moving, ruminative lyricism is both philosophical and minutely sensitive to the natural world: And I moved on, to learn One of the million histories One weather, one dialect Of herbs, one habitat After migration, displacement With greedy lore to pounce On a place and possess it, With the mindýs weapons, words, While between land and water, Yellow vultures mewing, Looped empty air Once filled with the hundred names Of the nameless, or swooped To the rocks, for carrion. The desire “to pounce on a place and possess it” expressed itself in another area of Hamburger’s life – gardening. First in Reading, and in a much more ambitious way when he and Anne Beresford settled in Suffolk after their remarriage, he preserved rare varieties of apple trees by growing them from seed.

Two prose classics derive from this period of Hamburger’s career: The Truth of Poetry (1969), a compelling critical study of European poetry from Baudelaire on, and his vivid, quirky autobiography, A Mug’s Game (1973), revised as String of Beginnings (1991).

His retirement to Suffolk also saw some of his most significant achievements as a translator, particularly his masterly version of the notoriously complex poems of Celan, published in 1988 and 1995.

He received numerous awards, not least for the distinction and dedication with which he worked to make the riches of German literature accessible to English-speaking readers. His translations twice won the Schlegel-Tieck Prize, and he was awarded the Goethe Medal (1986) and the European translation prize (1990). He was appointed OBE in 1992.

Three years later he published his Collected Poems, followed by the sequence Late (1997) and a further collection, Intersections (2000). Despite this activity, Hamburger felt at odds with the contemporary poetry scene, particularly with what he saw as a decline in serious literary reviewing. In his book The Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald, another German author who had settled in East Anglia, recreated a visit to Hamburger in Suffolk, picturing jars of preserved fruit in a pantry behind Jiffy bags stacked for reuse as part of an epiphany of the writer’s lonely struggle, in which he saw himself and Hamburger as twin souls.

Hamburger was to outlive his younger admirer, whose long poem After Nature he translated for posthumous publication in 2002.

Hamburger’s 2002 volume, From a Diary of NonEvents, was a celebration of the strengths of the “antipoetry” of minimal rhetorical gesture, whose postwar development in several European languages had been treated in The Truth of Poetry.

The events of the year 2001, including the foot-and-mouth epidemic, his golden wedding, the death of his brother Paul and the attack on the World Trade Centre, were subsumed to the cycles of nature. His was a poetry of restitution, moving from global conflict and dualities of identity to the recurring rhythms of a threatened natural world to which he was minutely attentive.

And here once more on a sun-dappled patch Cleared of ground elder roots One twenty-five-year-old cyclamen corm, exotic, Kindles two hundred flowers Against an almost overshadowing yew, Blackness that has not killed but sheltered it.

He is survived by his wife and two daughters and a son.

Michael Hamburger, OBE, poet, critic and translator, was born on March 22, 1924. He died on June 7, 2007, aged 83