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.

Tomas Tranströmer is Scandinavia's best-known and most influential contemporary poet. Over the last 50 years he has risen to become one of the most important literary figures of our times, critically acclaimed and with a global reach that has seen his work translated into more than 50 languages.

Tranströmer’s poetry is founded in the universal and the deeply personal, giving us a ‘fresh access to reality’. He writes about the big questions – death, history, memory, nature. 'You can never feel small after reading the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer': Peter Englund, Permanent Secretary, Swedish Academy.

Featuring David Constantine, editor of Modern Poetry in Translation; readings in English by Sir Andrew Motion and in Swedish by acclaimed actor and star of Wallander, Krister Henriksson and with special live musical accompaniment, this is a unique event in honour of one of our greatest living poets.

The language marches in step with the executioners.
Therefore we must get a new language

'Night Duty', Tomas Tranströmer

See http://www.bl.uk/whatson/events/event130148.html

Poetry Parnassus Launch
7pm, Purcell Room, Queen Elizabeth Hall
Tickets £8
Kristiina Ehin will launch her MPT Poets pamphlet ‘The Final Going of Snow’, translated by Ilmar Lehtpere, during the opening event of the festival. Zeyar Lynn and Alvin Pang will also launch their new collections, and Simon Armitage will open the festival with an introduction to The World Record, a landmark international anthology with poems from over 200 countries.

Wednesday 27th June

Launch of MPT 3/17 ‘Parnassus’ 
Introduced by David and Helen Constantine
8pm, Saison Poetry Library
Every issue of MPT in the third series has been an anthology of languages, voices, and topics – world-wide and from different ages. Our latest issue ‘Parnassus’ continues that tradition, with the abundant contribution of poets and translators invited to Southbank Centre for the Cultural Olympiad. We are proud to present some of them this evening. This event is the idea and spirit of the magazine in practice.

Admission free but space is limited.
To book your place email specialedition@poetrylibrary.org.uk

Sunday 1st July

Ted Hughes Celebration Reading
12 noon, Purcell Room, Queen Elizabeth Hall
Tickets £8
Christopher Reid, Simon Armitage and David Constantine celebrate the life and work of Ted Hughes, co-founder of MPT, with readings of his translations, letters and biography, and of his own poems in Belarusian, French, Greek and Turkish. This event is in partnership with Modern Poetry in Translation.

Modern Poetry in Translation Third Series Retrospective
Presented by David and Helen Constantine
3pm, Clore Ballroom, Royal Festival Hall
Free (no need to sign up in advance)
In 17 issues since the launch of the third series of MPT in the summer of 2004 David and Helen Constantine have continued in the spirit of Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort, who founded MPT in 1965. With readings by a range of contributors to the third series they will show at least a little of the variety of the publications: the many countries, cultures, languages, different centuries. Also the many ways in which they have understood the word ‘translation’. And something also of their social and political concerns.

Tickets will be available in due course from Southbank Centre Ticket Office: 0844 847 9910
Book online www.southbankcentre.co.uk/poetryparnassus

Readings included a selection from Rocco Scotellaro, Poems, in both English translation read by Allen Prowle and the Italian originals read by Cristina Viti. Cristina also read from her own translations of Amelia Rosselli, poet and close friend of Scotellaro. Allen and Caroline Maldonado introduced a selection of poems from their new translation of more of Scotellaro's poems, to be published in February 2013 by Smokestack Books.

Photos of the evening were taken by Amarjit Chandan

Chinese poetry has a long and honourable history in English translation – it is nearly 100 years since Arthur Waley’s 170 Chinese Poems was first published. Both the Chinese classics and contemporary poetry, which has flourished in the last three decades, provide rich opportunities for Western publishers. In the last twelve months alone, several new volumes – both anthologies and single-poet volumes have been published in the UK and the USA. Nevertheless there are huge challenges: 

• Few poetry publishers will have in-depth knowledge of the contemporary Chinese poetry scene. Which poets will be represented? In the West, the label ‘dissident’ sells books, but what does it mean in the Chinese poetry context? 

• Who will do the translations? The panel will look at collaborative translating (translators + poets) as a practical and creative solution. 

• Promoting the unfamiliar and finding new audiences. How much contextualization is needed when introducing new poetry (whether classical or contemporary) to readers? How important are promotional events or readings, if at all? 

Panelists Nicky Harman, Bill Herbert, Brian Holton and Yang Lian, will discuss all this and more with chair David Constantine.

More details and tickets here.   For a list of all poems translated from Chinese in MPT Series 3 see here.

The MPT Poets pamphlets series features an extended selection of translated poems by poets and translators first discovered in MPT, whose work the editors feel deserves wider attention.  Rocco Scotellaro, first appeared in MPT 3/10 The Big Green Issue in Allen Prowle's English translations. 

Rocco Scotellaro was born in 1923 in Tricarico, in the impoverished southern region of Lucania. When he died at the age of thirty, he had published poems in regional and national magazines and was beginning to attract significant critical attention and acclaim. In the year after his death a first collection, È fatto giorno, selected by Carlo Levi from over four hundred poems in his possession, was awarded both the Pellegrino and Viareggio prizes. Further selections were edited by Franco Fortini in 1974 and Franco Vitelli in 1978 and 1982. Recognition of Scotellaro’s importance and achievement came in 2004 with Mondadori’s publication in its Oscar Series of the complete poems.

You are invited to enter the first MPT Poetry Translation Competition.  Entries by 1st February 2012. Translate any poem on the subject of FREEDOM into English verse. The poem may be in any language, from any age, and in translation should not exceed twenty lines. The original text should be submitted with your translation. 

First prize: £200. Second prize: £75. Three runners-up: one year’s free subscription to MPT. All winners and runners-up will have their poems published in the Spring 2012 issue of MPT ‘Parnassus’.

Entries (£4 per poem / £3 for subscribers) by 1 February 2012, may be submitted via our website, on payment of the entry fee. Alternatively hard copy of the original poem and translation, and cheque or money order, made payable to MPT, should be sent to MPT Poetry Translation Competition, Queen’s College Oxford, OX1 4AW,UK.

JUDGES
David Constantine
Helen Constantine
Sasha Dugdale

For full rules see our competition page

Readers will be MPT's Editors David and Helen Constantine, Philip Gross, Christopher Pilling, Saradha Soobrayen and Karen McCarthy Woolf.  

Philip Gross’s The Water Table received the T.S. Eliot Prize and his new collection Deep Field will be published by Bloodaxe in November. John Lucas said Christopher Pilling’s Les Amours Jaunes was, ‘a work which nobody who cares about poetry can afford to be without.’ Poetry Editor of Chroma, Saradha Soobrayen received the 2004 Eric Gregory Award and her work has featured in, among others, Wasafari and Poetry Review. Born to English and Jamaican parents, Karen McCarthy Woolf’s poetry has featured in distinguished journals, anthologies and on the London Underground.

Time: 20:00 to 22:00
Tickets: Standard price: £5.00 / Concession price: £3.00
Concessions are available for students, people on benefit and over 60s. Proof must be provided when collecting tickets.

For more see:  www.lauderdalehouse.co.uk

Come along for an evening of readings from MPT 3:15, Poetry & The State, with discussions on the relationship of poetry to state and poet to state.

The event will begin at 6:30p.m. with readings commencing at 7p.m. Please do be sure to get there in plenty of time.

The event is due to finish at 9p.m.

Readers will be:

Jennie Feldman
Tim Allen
Amarjit Chandan
Zuzanna Olszewska
Carlos Reyez Manzo, The Amnesty Poet in Residence

David and Helen Constantine will also read works and host the evening.

The address is:

Amnesty International UK
The Human Rights Action Centre
17-25 New Inn Yard
London EC2A 3EA
Phone +44 (0) 20 7033 1500

Directions are here:
http://www.amnesty.org.uk/content.asp?CategoryID=10151

Modern Poetry in Translation is launching the MPT Summer Reading Challenge which features the very latest titles in world poetry in translation.

Whether you are staying at home or abroad, choose up to two books from the Books Received list and then send us a postcard via the website. Simply share your journey through the book in 100 words or less. No experience of languages or reviewing necessary. 

To take part email Saradha saying which titles you'd like - along with your postal address - and we will send the books to you to keep.

MPT's Editors, David and Helen Constantine had this to say...

"We are as pleased as we are relieved to be assured of Arts Council funding. It removes a great anxiety and will enable us to get on with work that we feel sure we can do well and that we believe to be important. We are grateful to all the people – and they are many – who directly and indirectly helped us to this reassuring outcome. At the same time, as we look down the list of those of our colleagues who have not been successful, we feel in solidarity with them much sorrow and anger. Arc Publications, Enitharmon, the PBS, the Poetry Trust – these are organizations (among others), doing work which is vital to the wellbeing of our country if we understand that wellbeing in terms other than the merely financial. And they are true colleagues – we have friendly and productive dealings with all of them , we exist in collaboration with them and our condition, the condition of poetry in the United Kingdom, is weakened without them. Britain, despite its difficulties, is a rich country. The arts are not a luxury, they belong at the heart of any humane society. Government can’t afford not to help them thrive."

David and Helen Constantine
Editors, 30 March 2011

Reading from 'Polyphony' were Steve Komarnyckyj, Emily Jeremiah, Tim Allen, and MPT's editors David and Helen Constantine. There was also jazz from Tony Baker and Liz Hanaway, which interpreted a number of poems featured in the issue.

Some responses from the audience included:

“Heart warming poems, wonderful music. Thanks.”
“Much enjoyed!”
“Fantastic event - thank you.”

Leading children's poets of Russia and Britain Marina Boroditskaia and Michael Rosen met for a unique discussion of how poetry captures the hearts of children and adults in different cultures. Is poetry the best children's vitamin? A reading by both poets featured new translations of Marina's work. This discussion was chaired by poet David Constantine (co-editor of Modern Poetry in Translation).

The event was hosted by Modern Poetry in Translation, and supported by the British Council 

Marina Boroditskaia is a Russian poet and translator. She has published numerous books of children’s poetry in Russia, and translated many English-language children’s writers into Russian, including A. A. Milne, Eleanor Farjeon and Hilaire Belloc. Her most recent translation, the relatively grown-up poets of the Silver Age, appeared in 2010, and she has also translated John Donne, Chaucer and Burns, among others. She is the author of five books of poetry for adults (but dislikes the idea that children’s poetry and adult poetry are somehow different – noting that ‘they’re made of the same stuff’). Marina has received several Russian prizes for poetry and translation and the prestigious children’s literature Kornei Chukovskii Prize. She presents the Russian equivalent of Poetry Please! on Russian radio – called ‘The Literary First Aid Box’, it is inspired by Marina’s idea that literature is the best multivitamin on the market. 

Michael Rosen is the UK’s best loved children’s poet and the former Children’s Laureate. He has spent a lifetime promoting poetry and reading in schools and is passionate about the children’s right to read. His best-known children’s books such as We’re Going on a Bear Hunt are classics and learnt by heart by children all over the country. More recently his ardent defence of the Booktrust’s free books for children saved the scheme from government cuts. Michael has his own website at www.michaelrosen.co.uk

This event was part of the Market Focus Russia 2011 cultural programme at the London Book Fair organised by the British Council with Academia Rossica.  For more information about the full programme of events with Russian writers, please contact Fiona McMorrough at FMCM - FionaM@fmcm.co.uk

James Naughtie, chair of this year's judging panel commented: "The winning story, 'Tea at the Midland', is remarkable for the rich poetry at its heart and the economy with which David Constantine creates a story with fully formed characters and a memorable setting. It has imagination, depth and brevity. What more could you say about a short story?"

'Tea at the Midland' is part of David's collection, Under the Dam, available from Comma Press, here.