Johann Friedrich Hölderlin was born in Germany in 1770. The vast majority of his groundbreaking poetry was written before 1807, though he died at the age of 73 in 1843.

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.