What we're looking for

We are on the look-out for good translations of good poetry from anywhere in the world. More particularly, we want translations, original poems and short essays that will address such characteristic signs of our times as exile, the movement of peoples, the search for asylum, the speaking of languages outside their native home. We want also to widen and diversify the very idea of translation, and in that spirit we invite transformations and metamorphoses of all kinds: down the ages, across the frontiers and cultures, from one genre or medium to another.

We want a living connection with the past. The modern in the magazines title is in no sense restrictive. It is as necessary that we deal with the foreign country of the past as it is that we deal with what is beyond our frontiers now. All lively translations, that work in the language of today, are to be considered modern.

Before you send us your work, you might like to look at the content area of this website, to read examples of published work and to find out which translated authors have recently featured in MPT. The work you send in should not have been previously published elsewhere.

Deadlines

MPT is published twice a year. Submissions should arrive by 1st February for the spring issue, and by 1st August for the autumn issue.

Sending information

Please send your work by post, as a print-out. Work should be in a readable font, with your name, address and email clearly marked on each sheet of paper. Submissions are not accepted by email.

You will also need to enclose a S.A.E. marked Reply, so we can get back to you, or Manuscript, if you would like your work returned. Please note that no work will be returned unless adequate postage is provided.

Send your work to:

David and Helen Constantine, The Editors
Modern Poetry in Translation
The Queens College
Oxford
OX1 4AW
UK

Permissions

The responsibility for clearing rights and permissions for translated works, and the payment of any related fees, lies with the translator. Please note that copyright law varies from country to country and that it can take time to clear permissions.

The Next Issue of MPT

The next issue of Modern Poetry in Translation (Third Series, Number 13, spring 2010) will be called ‘Transplants’.

Translation can be thought of as the transplanting of a living thing out of its native time and place into somewhere foreign. There it may thrive or die. We invite submissions that will test and exemplify that idea. We should be especially glad to consider contributions that showed, and perhaps also discussed,  how particular forms of poetry may be transplanted across time and space. Must they be modified? Or can the host culture be induced to accept them as they are?  The Earl of Surrey translated Aeneid II and IV into iambic pentameters, judging that they would serve better than Virgil’s hexameters. With examples from all three genres – epic, dramatic and lyric – we should like to assemble a variety of the ways and means by which  a literary transplant’s chances of survival may be increased. 

 Submissions should be sent by 1 February 2010