A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
and 103 languages, all never‐before‐published poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, and interviews” (Leong 2019). According to its founding editor, the editorial team “operate[s] differently from other translation journals in that [they] don't just sit back and wait for translations to come to [them. They] actually identify the good work from writers [that have not yet been introduced to the English speaking world] and actively seek out translators to help to translate the work for [them]” (Habash 2011). In 2015, the magazine won London Book Fair's International Literary Translation Initiative Award and also became a founding member of The Guardian's Books Network with “Translation Tuesdays,” a weekly showcase of new literary translations that was published until 2017.
Another issue in this context is the question: how well known and widely published are British and Irish poets in translation? While this would be the subject for a separate encyclopedic study, I shall briefly comment on translations into German, as this is the field I am most familiar with. (See also Romer 2013 on British poetry translated into a variety of European languages.) One important series of German publications, Edition Lyrik Kabinett, is run by Hanser Verlag and comprises collections by John Burnside, Lavinia Greenlaw, Michael Longley, Geoffrey Hill, Robin Robertson, and Derek Walcott. Fischer Verlag, another prestigious German press, published a volume of Alice Oswald's poetry in 2018, translated by Melanie Walz and Iain Galbraith.
As for the series, Poets Laureate: how many of their collections are available in German translation? Just one each: Jan Wagner translated for Berlin Verlag Simon Armitage's Zoom! (2011). Carol Ann Duffy's sole publication Die Bauchrednerpuppe (1996) appeared in Margitt Lehbert's translation more than 20 years ago under the imprint of the Residenz Verlag. Under her own imprint, Edition Rugerup, Lehbert has published one volume each of Derek Mahon, John Montague, Gabriel Rosenstock, Iain Crichton Smith, and Robin Fulton.
With regard to Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney, the situation is scarcely better. Under Michael Krüger's directorship until 2013, Hanser Press published three collections of Heaney's poetry, one volume of Selected Poems, and a translation of The Government of the Tongue. For Fischer Verlag, Krüger edited a volume of Selected Poems from 1965 to 2006, entitled Die Amsel von Glanmore and published in 2011. The obvious question is why are only very few collections of Heaney's one dozen poetry books available in German translation?
A very different case is that of Michael Hamburger: together with Ted Hughes, he is probably the most widely translated British poet into German. Fifteen volumes of Hamburger's poetry were published by Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, Hanser, Droschl, and Folio. The last issued seven collections, six of them translated by Peter Waterhouse. This track record of Hamburger's poetry in German translations, largely due to the close relationship that Hamburger and Waterhouse enjoyed for many years, has led some critics to the conclusion that Hamburger is better known as poet in German‐speaking countries than in Britain (Hamburger 1998, 31–32). In a 1998 interview with Peter Dale, Hamburger acknowledges “the very generous reception given to my work in Germany, where there are two book‐length studies of it and a miscellany of essays by various critics, as well as many more serious and searching reviews of it in the general press – Swiss and Austrian also – than in Britain or in America” (Hamburger 1998, 34; Romer 2013, 553). A more recent case is Kate Tempest: from her five collections of poetry that she has published until 2018, three of them are already available in German translation, all published by Suhrkamp Verlag.
The latest, more wide‐ranging (bilingual) anthology of British and Irish poetry was published by Haymon Verlag in 2002 as So also ist das/So That's What It's Like, edited by Ludwig Laher and myself. It comprises work by 28 British and Irish poets, translated by Austrian poets and graduates of my own “Literary Translation” course, taught at the University of Salzburg. Iain Galbraith edited a volume of Scottish poetry since 1900, Beredter Norden. Schottische Lyrik seit 1900, that was published by Lehbert's Edition Rugerup in 2011.
It is a rather unsatisfactory résumé. British and Irish poetry is, with very few exceptions, more or less unknown in any breadth or depth in the German‐speaking countries. (One wonders whether the situation is substantially different in other European countries, or, indeed, elsewhere in the world.) The lamentable and arbitrary situation can only change if national organizations, such as Arts Council England, the British Council, the Publishers Association, the “Big Five” of British publishers, Literature Ireland (formerly known as Ireland Literature Exchange), Wales Literature Exchange, the Scottish Poetry Library, and Literature Across Frontiers increase their efforts and programs to support interested translators and publishers, and, thus, raise the profile of British and Irish poetry on the German book market (as well as on others). A model for such an initiative could be TOLEDO, a program of the Robert Bosch Stiftung and the Deutscher Übersetzerfonds. In 2019, it launched JUNIVERS, a program geared toward the needs and desires of poetry translators, with the ultimate aim of finding new translators and new languages for German poets. For six days in June, 18 translators, arriving at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin from countries such as Brazil, India, Poland, Italy, Argentina, and Greece, among many others, participated in a collective translation workshop and cooperated with guests such as Thilo Krause, winner of the Peter Huchel Prize, with a number of local poets, and also myself, conducting a workshop on translating the Austrian poet Erich Fried. Such an initiative will hopefully result in many more books of German poets in a wide variety of languages. British cultural administrators might take note.
The Poetry Presses
In 1992, Nigel Wheale defined small presses as “one, or rarely more than two individuals, who, usually in their spare time and at their own expense, write or edit poetry, print and bind it more or less competently, and circulate it, almost invariably at a loss, or at best only barely covering their costs” (Wheale 1992, 9). They usually publish collections by individual poets and are often run alongside a little magazine. According to Wheale, print‐runs range from 200 to 500 copies, rarely sell well or out, are not stocked by bookshops, and their “working life […] is normally quite short because the activity occurs at the margins of viability, and they routinely succumb to accumulated pressures of debt and/or despair in equal measures” (Wheale 1992, 9). Some of the characteristics in this definition are valid for quite a number of the small presses publishing during the British Poetry Revival between 1960 and 1975, but, I would argue, it was already outdated in the 1980s, let alone in the early 1990s. Peter Forbes, at the time editor of Poetry Review, and Jonathan Barker, Literature Officer at the British Council, argue in their joint essay “Poetry Publishing Today” that “some of the subsidized small presses […] now constitute the main outlet for poetry book publication, and match the majors in attractive production, prestige, and often in marketing flair.” The “big league,” comprising Bloodaxe, Carcanet, Peterloo, Anvil, Seren, Enitharmon, and Littlewoood Arc, “are more prolific than the majors” (Forbes/Barker 1992, 236). The essay by Forbes and Barker offers a substantial list of 52 poetry book publishers for Great Britain and Ireland (Forbes/Barker 1992, 237–238).
Half a decade later, Peter Finch described poetry as “a minority art made consumer friendly” that is “[b]right, visible, fashionable” (Finch 1996, 116), and Michael Horowitz put forward the thesis that “[h]appily, the arriviste atmosphere of ten to fifteen years ago when seven per cent or so of English poets and literary careerists controlled at least 84 per cent of the publishing, taste‐making, grant‐and‐prize and allied opportunities for poets, is on the wane across Britain” (quoted in Finch 1996, 116). Despite an astounding list of 320 poetry presses—an increase of more than 600% in 4 years—and “this undoubted success” (Finch 1996, 117), Finch warns of “cracks” that can already be seen. In particular, he detects a “quietly indecisive” attitude among the mainstream commercial publishers, reports of the small presses' concern that more unsold copies than expected had been returned by bookshops, and finally offers his feeling that “the boom if not quite bust is certainly on the point of turn” (Finch 1996, 117).
Despite a slight increase in the number of poetry presses to 326 in 1997, Finch continued his warnings that “[i]n the rush to mount the bandwagon publishers are now putting out far too many books and as a consequence reviewers are increasingly ignoring them” (Finch 1997,