A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
go to prose works; indeed, among the 14 prize winners of 2017 and 2018, one finds with—or without—surprise not one translator of a collection of poetry. An important award, exclusively for translators of poetry, is the Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize, which is worth £1,000 and was launched in 1983. It is awarded biennially by The Poetry Society for a volume of poetry translated from a European language into English.
Launched in 2010 by the London Book Fair, the Literary Translation Centre is an important institution that is made up of 10 partner organizations: Arts Council England Literature Department, the British Centre for Literary Translation, the British Council Literature Department, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the English PEN's Writers in Translation programme, Free Word, Literature Across Frontiers, the Translators Association (Society of Authors), the Wales Literature Exchange, and Words Without Borders. The ultimate aim of the Literary Translation Centre is to “enable publishers and translators to come together, network and attend a variety of seminars on literary translation to further this art throughout the UK and abroad.” One of the programs, PEN Translates, launched in 2012 with financial support from Arts Council England, encourages UK publishers to publish more books from other languages. Up to 75% of the translation costs are funded; if a publisher's annual turnover is less than £500,000, there is the possibility that up to 100% of the translation costs will be covered. This measure has been effective in so far as it has encouraged more publishers, big and small, to consider publications of translated poetry.
The most important publishers of poetry in translation are three of the “Big Five”—Bloodaxe, Carcanet, and Faber. However, two publishers specializing in poetry translation are more prominent—Arc Publications and Seagull Books, based in Kolkata, India, but with a registered division in London. The symbolic capital of Arc Publications—accumulated prestige, recognition, and respect, as Pierre Bourdieu defines it in Language and Symbolic Power (1991)—is widely accepted. In particular, the program “Poetry in Translation,” which encompasses no fewer than five series—Visible Poets, Arc Translations, Arc Classic Translations, New Voices From Europe and Beyond, and Anthologies in Translation—has been eminently successful. The appointment of Jean Boase‐Beier as series editor of “Visible Poets” in 2000 was an especially fortunate move. Boase‐Beier conceived “Visible Poets” as a series of bilingual books with a preface by the translator and an introductory essay by an eminent scholar. As Professor of Literature and Translation at the University of East Anglia, where she established and ran the MA in Literary Translation until her retirement in 2015, she also edits the “Arc Translations” and “Arc Classic Translations” series. The shortlist of the 2015 Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize serves as a good example of Arc's prestige: among the six shortlisted books were three Arc titles, translations from French, German, and Polish, and the winner came from among them: Iain Galbraith for his translation of Jan Wagner's collection Self‐Portrait with a Swarm of Bees.
Little magazines often publish translations, either in a regular section, as is the case in Acumen, Poetry Salzburg Review, Shearsman, and The High Window, or as separate issues. The latter case is best represented by Agenda—under William Cookson's editorship there were several special issues published: on German poetry (1994), Spanish poetry (1997), and Greek poetry (1999). In 1997, there was also a special issue devoted to Michael Hamburger's translations and his own poetry. The current editor Patricia McCarthy has been responsible for the publication of issues on modern Turkish poetry (2001/2002), translation as metamorphosis, and Rainer Maria Rilke. In terms of translations, the most important magazine, however, has been Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT). Ted Hughes's brainchild, launched together with Daniel Weissbort in 1965, was intended as “a cumulative and accumulating index of contemporary writing” (Weissbort 2004). No magazine has been more concerned with the theory and practice of translation or more devoted to introducing to English readers poets from many cultures who would not be known without translation. MPT 21 and 22 (both 2003), the last two issues under Weissbort's editorship, highlighted once again the magazine's initial aim “to provide a platform for the poetry of the first post‐War generation of Eastern European poets.” Weissbort's penultimate issue is a potpourri of all the objectives the editors had pursued over the years, including features of two contributors of long standing—Michael Hamburger and James Kirkup—with, more surprisingly perhaps for the general reader, a long section devoted to Hughes's unpublished translations in order “to draw attention […] to his importance as a translator himself of poetry and of poetic drama.” Weissbort followed up his intentions with regard to Hughes by editing a book of the poet's Selected Translations (2006). As part of the same program, he also published a monograph, Ted Hughes and Translation (2011), and a number of essays in poetry magazines and academic journals. For Weissbort, the magazine's ultimate achievement under his and Hughes's editorship was that it “help[ed] to make English readers, and English poets, see poetry as the very opposite of parochial, even if it was so intimately bound up with language. This paradox, the paradox in fact of poetry translation, remains a productive one” (Weissbort 2004).
When David and Helen Constantine took over the editorship of MPT with No. 23 in 2004, the new editors “felt the same urgency of the project, the same spirit, in very different times.” The editorial policy of their 9 years was shaped by three premises. The first was that “poetry matters: because it tells the truth in mendacious times and because that truth, through the forms and rhythms of poetry, excites in people under whatever repressive and demanding structures the demand for greater freedom,” which they shared with the founding editors. Their second premise was that “translation matters: because it brings valuable things from abroad into our home country.” Premise number three related to their interpretation of the word modern in the magazine's title, which they understood to mean “any new and lively version of any poetry of any age. So translation crosses frontiers of both space and time” (David and Helen Constantine 2016, 20). When Sasha Dugdale was appointed as new editor in 2013, not only did the magazine's shape and design change but also its frequency and editorial policy. Dugdale started to publish three issues per year, with each issue offering a focus section. She started off with predominantly European foci (Dutch, Romanian, and Polish) and managed to get the respective national literature organizations on board to make a financial contribution. Later issues of her 4‐year period contained sections that represented the magazine's global approach toward poetry in translation, ranging from Brazilian and Uruguayan poetries to Iranian and Korean ones. Other sections focused on African, Indian, and Arabic languages and the poetry produced in them. With the current editor Clare Pollard, who took over in 2018, MPT seems to have moved into a more politically engaged and more intriguing period. She introduced the editorial to her first issue, entitled “Profound Pyromania,” with a quotation from “Manifesto for Ultratranslation,” published by Antena, a language justice and experimentation collaborative founded by Jen Hofer and John Pluecker: “Who we choose to translate is political. How we choose to translate is political” (Pollard 2018). Her first four issues have contained sections on Caribbean and Hungarian poetry as well as work by LGBTQ+ authors. In what she calls her Brexit issue, Pollard argues that “[i]f Brexit has posed the question of who we are, we must listen for answers in all of our languages,” which is why she has collected “translations from Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Cornish, Irish, Anglo‐Saxon, Arabic, Polish, Turkish and British Sign Language (BSL), and poems drawing on Jamaican Patois, Scots, Ulster Scots, Shetlandic, Spanish, Angloromani, Black Country Dialect, Portuguese and the fabulous Inklisch of Sophie Herxheimer's Grandmother” (Pollard 2019).
Right from its start, MPT has always been financially supported by the Arts Council England. For the 3‐year financial period 2012–2015, the magazine received £117,500, a grant that was increased to £120,000 for the years 2015–2018.
A rival in the field of poetry translation seems to have emerged with Asymptote, an online magazine that was launched by its editor Lee Yew Leong in January 2011 as “a reaction to the literary parochialism [he] experienced living in Singapore back then” and with the mission “to unlock the literary treasures of the world.” The decision to publish it online “stems from [the editors'] commitment to social justice. Providing free access to the world's literature – for everyone, regardless of geography, language or class – is emboldened by an online