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Modern Poetry in Translation

Our first premise is that poetry matters: because it tells the truth in notably mendacious times and because that truth, through the forms and rhythms of poetry, enlivens people's lives.

Our second premise is that translation matters: because it brings valuable things from abroad into our native language. English is a major world-language and, precisely for that reason, its native speakers need to be continually confronted with what is foreign to them, or they risk becoming complacent, insular and xenophobic.

We believe that Modern Poetry in Translation, keeping faith with those principles, can encourage humane dealings between very different nationalities, languages, ideologies and ways of life. Translation and poetry together make for variety, they demonstrate that your own view is not the only one.

We understand the ‘modern' in the magazine's title to mean any new and lively version of any poetry of any age. So translation crosses frontiers of both space and time. The past is a foreign country just as much as anywhere else beyond our frontiers now. We need the imports from both foreign time and space.

When Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort began MPT in 1965 their aim was twofold: to get poetry out from behind the Iron Curtain into currency in the West, in English. But also to enliven English-language poetry by those imports from abroad. When we took over the magazine in 2004 we continued in the second of those ambitions (to confront home with abroad) but changed the first to accord with the facts and politics of the world now. The hallmark of our time is exile and diaspora, the enforced movement of people, the search for asylum, the loss of native speech, the necessary acquiring of new speech abroad. We have published a great deal that addresses those realities. Our second issue, for example (MPT 3/2) was indeed called ‘Diaspora'. We have had (and in some cases continue to have) valuable collaborations with such organizations as Amnesty International, the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, Oxford Brookes Asylum Seekers Project and the Durham Palestine Educational Trust. We are necessarily concerned with the whole fraught question of Poetry and the State, and that was the topic of MPT 3/15.

We seek to extend and vary the idea and practice of translation. The titles of past issues will give some idea of that: ‘Metamorphoses', ‘After-Images', ‘Transgressions', ‘Getting it Across', ‘Between the Languages', ‘Freed Speech', ‘Transplants'. In ‘Getting it Across', for example, we had an essay on Sign Language and an account of the work done for poetry by the Local Authority and at the Royal School for the Deaf in Derby.

We seek a real diversity of voices (MPT 3/14 was called ‘Polyphony'): different centuries, countries, languages, cultures, ideas. Also - very important - we mix writers and translators who have been established for decades with others who are just beginning, writers in their eighties already published far and wide, writers in their twenties whose very first publications will be in MPT. A variety of forms too: poems, essays, anecdotes, reviews, illustrations, photographs.

We look after our contributors. We pay as well as we can and we pay promptly. We recommend them for further commissions. We organize readings. We want a lively community of poets, translators, subscribers, readers. Our website, www.mptmagazine.com, demonstrates that community in practice: seventy-six different languages (and ever increasing), scores of poets and translators, all the continents, many nations, from the mid-third millennium BC to October 2011. We think of MPT as an International Republic of Letters, a beneficent globalisation, the free exchange of goods across the frontiers of countries and centuries.

Now times are hard and the politics of the day are unfriendly towards humane letters, indeed towards any activity whose value can't be measured by the markets. MPT is a registered charity, in broad terms our purposes and responsibilities are defined as educational. Believing that poetry matters, we believe our society needs it. So part of our educational responsibility consists in constantly seeking to prove by what we publish and by public argument that the state should fund the arts and so help foster what no humane society can do without. We have been lucky - others haven't - and our funding is secure for the next three years. Secure - but not adequate, we have to raise more money to do what it is our responsibililty to do. We are grateful to the Arts Council (we should have no such active website were it not for their generous help) but we were saddened to see comrades of ours, people engaged in similar and equally important work, being left to struggle for their very survival. The ecology of the arts is a fragile thing. The whole living system is weakened by the loss of any one of its parts.

Our website generates more sales and is beginning to bring us more subscribers. Still not enough. Like everyone else, we shall have to do better at fundraising. Our readings - at St Martin-in-the-Fields, for example, when we launched ‘Polyphony' with jazz - always feel like the living proof of the value of the magazine and of the whole endeavour to get good poetry into English. Somebody once commented to us that translators of poetry are the Public Service wing of the poetry business. Nobody translates poetry to get rich. But worldwide we are in friendly dealings with people deeply engaged in giving wider circulation to poets they love. Every issue of MPT is an anthology of such generosity - and of the knowledge and talent that come with it. Our postbag is a constant wonder to us - and a vast encouragement in these bad times.

David and Helen Constantine
Editors, Modern Poetry in Translation
November 2011


David Constantine taught German at the Universities of Durham and Oxford. He holds honorary professorships in English at the Universities of Liverpool and Aberystwyth. He is a translator and editor of Hölderlin, Goethe, Kleist and Brecht. He has published several volumes of poetry, most recently Nine Fathom Deep (Bloodaxe, 2009); also a novel and three volumes of short stories. He was the winner of the BBC National Short Story Award 2010.

Helen Constantine read French and Latin at Oxford. She was Head of Languages at Bartholomew School, Eynsham, until 2000, when she gave up teaching and became a full-time translator. She has published volumes of translated stories, Paris Tales, Paris Metro Tales and French Tales and edits a series of City Tales for Oxford University Press. She has translated Mademoiselle de Maupin by Théophile Gautier and Dangerous Liaisons by Choderlos de Laclos for Penguin, and has recently finished The Wild Ass's Tale by Balzac, also for OUP. She is married to the poet, David Constantine, and with him edits the international magazine, Modern Poetry in Translation.