Modern Poetry in Translation

MPT announces new Editor

3rd May 2012

© Bloodaxe

PRESS RELEASE

Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT) is delighted to announce that the poet and translator Sasha Dugdale will succeed David and Helen Constantine as editor from 2013.

Sasha Dugdale will follow in the footsteps of Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort, founding editors of MPT (1965), and current Editors David and Helen Constantine, who said: 

“We are very fortunate to have Sasha Dugdale as the next editor of MPT. She has a wide and various knowledge of the literary world, in Russia and in the UK, and is besides, and most importantly, a first-rate poet and translator”

On her appointment MPT’s new Editor Sasha Dugdale said:
“Without poetry and without literary translation the culture of a single nation becomes little more than a shrunken head. MPT fights the shrinking with wonderful and important poetry from all around the world in excellent and sensitive translation.The magazine and its community have a brilliant beautiful and indomitable spirit, and it is a great privilege to play a part in the future of both.”

Chair of Trustees, Caroline Maldonado said:
“We’re delighted to have found in Sasha an editor who will carry forward the spirit of MPT and maintain its high quality and reputation. We’re looking forward to working with her as she builds on the achievement of past editors and continues to introduce new audiences to the inspiring world of poetry in translation.”

Further information: David and Helen Constantine editors@mptmagazine.com 07756943802

Notes to Editors
Sasha Dugdale. Described as ‘one of the most original poets of her generation’ (Paul Batchelor, Guardian), and a recipient of the Eric Gregory award (2003), Sasha Dugdale’s most recent collection of her own poems, Red House, was published by Oxford Poets / Carcanet in August 2011. A highly regarded translator, she has published two collections of translations of Russian poetry. The most recent, Birdsong on the Seabed, (Bloodaxe) by Elena Shvarts, was a PBS choice and shortlisted for the Popescu and Academica Rossica Translation Awards. She set up the Russian New Writing Project with the Royal Court Theatre and the British Council in the 1990’s, and has since translated new plays for the Court, the RSC and other theatre companies. She regularly reviews poetry in translation, most recently for P.N. Review and The Irish Times. She is guest editor of Salt’s’ Best British Poetry 2012’, to be published in June.

Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT) is the UK's most important poetry translation magazine and was founded in 1965 by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort. They had two principal ambitions: to get poetry out from behind the Iron Curtain into a wider circulation in English and to benefit writers and the reading public in Britain and America by confronting them with good work from abroad. They published poetry that dealt truthfully with the real world. For more than 45 years MPT has continued and widened that founding intent. Now in its Third Series (since 2004) MPT builds on the first editors’ extraordinary achievement. It affirms the vital importance of poetry in the modern world. It brings the best new translations, essays, and reviews that address such characteristic signs of our times as exile, the movement of peoples, the search for asylum, and the speaking of languages outside their native home. The present editors, David and Helen Constantine, in a different political landscape, have continued in the essential spirit and ambition of Hughes and Weissbort. Further, by understanding the 'modern' in the magazine's title to mean any lively new translation of any poetry from whatever age, they ensure that MPT crosses frontiers of time as well as of space.