Modern Poetry in Translation

Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT) was founded in 1965 by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort.

The first issue, twelve pages in broadsheet form on Bible paper, cost 2s 6d and presented poems by Yehuda Amichai, Zbigniew Herbert, Miroslav Holub, Ivan Lalić, Czesław Miłosz, Vasco Popa and Andrei Voznesensky in translations by, among others, Edwin Morgan, Anne Pennington, Dom Moraes and Daniel Weissbort. The designer was Richard Hollis, who stayed with MPT until the first issue of the Third Series, 2004.

From the start we saw our editorship as something like an airport for incoming translations, an agency for discovering new foreign poets and new translators, who then might pass inland to more permanent residences in published books. Daniel Weissbort

Ted Hughes founded Poetry International in 1967 and was its first director. MPT published poets appearing at the third Festival in 1970. The editors commented: ‘We are glad to be associated with the Poetry International in this way, as we feel it has responded to the same need that we have tried to meet in the magazine. Our activities have clearly complemented each other.’ That natural and valuable association continues today.

MPT has had a number of publishers. They include Cape, Carcanet, Anvil and King’s College London. From the very beginning and still, MPT has been generously supported by the Arts Council. In 2004 Daniel Weissbort, Editor, and Norma Rinsler, Managing Editor, retired and passed the magazine to David and Helen Constantine. This marked the beginning of the Third Series of MPT and its move, for the editorial business, from London to Oxford.

Early issues of MPT

The first editors of MPT combined two achievements in one: they brought excellent poetry, particularly from Eastern Europe, into wider circulation in English in the West; and they confronted poets writing in English with work from abroad that would unsettle and inspire them. The present editors, in a different political landscape, have continued in the essential spirit and ambition of Hughes and Weissbort: to give good foreign work wider currency and to affect English poetry by confronting it with the foreign. 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.

Some back issues from the Second 'New' Series of MPT, edited by Daniel Weissbort and Norma Rinsler, are still in print and available to buy from Inpress Books UK and in our bookshop.