Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague, Bohemia, in December 1875, In 1897 he had an affair with Louise Andreas (neé von Salome), who was to remain a friend and influence on him throughout his life. In 1901, he married the sculptor Clara Westhoff and later that year their daughter Ruth was born, though the family lived in poverty. Rilke later went to Paris to meet the sculptor Rodin, a meeting which greatly influenced his own writings. He died in December 1926 at Valmont of leukaemia. 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.