Modern Poetry in Translation

Modern Poetry in Translation Magazine
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When Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort founded MPT in 1965 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 contemporary world. For more than 50 years MPT has continued and widened that founding intent.

  1. 5d ago

    Renée Vivien & Tristan Corbière: Four poems, translated from French by Joshua Edward

    Read these poems on the Modern Poetry in Translation website: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/poem/four-poems-3/ Joshua Edward writes in the introduction: Every Translation Is a Shipwreck Born and raised on an island, I’ve always dreamed of life at sea, but lacking ‘boat money’ and unable to tell a bowline from a marlinspike, I’ve lamentably remained onshore. Still, I indulge in the idea that the poet’s vocation is similar (at least in outline) to that of the sailor. Aren’t both considered diminished remnants of romantic and impetuous eras? And don’t both occupations hazard fatal depths? These are the waters I’m currently interested in plying, and the poets translated here, Tristan Corbière and Renée Vivien, are well suited to this double dream of poetry and seafaring. Both these poets often take the ocean as their subject, and both are considered what Paul Verlaine called poètes maudits: damned or absolute poets, who’ve gone to the art’s greatest depths. Speaking of damned, it’s easy to also view translators as seafarers. Every translator is a voyager returned from a trip, who wants to repeat the experience with others. But this second journey uses only dead reckoning and is never completed, because every translation is a shipwreck. Which is not to say a disaster: at best the translator fools their companions into thinking they arrived at the intended destination. Also good is when the castaways happily forget about the original port of call, or they are inspired to take the journey themselves, to read the text in its original language. At worst the translator inspires a mutiny, and is lashed to the mast, banished, or flogged. I hope that these attempts get across some good measure of the enthusiasm I have for the original poems and for the act of translation itself.

    Renée Vivien & Tristan Corbière: Four poems, translated from French by Joshua Edward

  2. Jul 6

    István Vörös: Two poems, translated from Hungarian by Adam Piette and Ágnes Lehóczky

    Readings by Adam Piette and Ágnes Lehóczky. Read the translations of these poems on the Modern Poetry in Translation website: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/poem/two-poems-12/ Translators Adam Piette and Ágnes Lehóczky write in the introduction: These poems are excerpts from The University Island (forthcoming from And Other Stories), a major work in progress by Hungarian poet István Vörös. The text functions less as a memoir than an anti-memoir—a powerful satire in free verse that chronicles three decades in the trenches of academia. The protagonist, a failed academic and poet, is a tragicomic figure in constant dialogue with his phantom companion, Hermes, the decipherer of the shapeshifting incomprehensible. This inner journey through the history of philosophical hermeneutics echoes the non-conformist souls of twentieth-century literature, reminiscent of Georg Büchner’s Lenz, Paul Celan’s posthumous phantoms, and the morose narrators of Thomas Bernhard. Vörös depicts the slow physical and psychological collapse of a ‘failed lecturer’ challenging a politicised, devalued system. It is a sobering critique of an institutional ‘madhouse’ where the academic becomes the very agent of academia’s demise. The work is a fiercely nihilistic exploration of annihilation, documenting the destruction of the cultural agora and the natural world alike. Yet, Vörös’s genius lies in his ability to present a hyper-real comic world with a humour that is both grotesque and hyperbolic. The narrative occupies a thin line between fact and caricature, where surreal decapitations are viscerally, comically real. Translating this work was a collaborative effort born of shared experience in the British and Hungarian academic systems. We were compelled by its moral weight and its interrogation of the contemporary poem’s raison d’être. Ultimately, the book asks a vital question: do we surrender to a system that reduces us to puppets, or do we believe that literature remains powerful enough to push back against institutional hypocrisy?

    István Vörös: Two poems, translated from Hungarian by Adam Piette and Ágnes Lehóczky

  3. Jul 3

    Ni Made Purnama Sari: three poems, translated from Indonesian by Norman Erikson Pasaribu

    Read the these poems on the Modern Poetry in Translation website: modernpoetryintranslation.com/poem/three-poems-5/ Norman Erikson Pasaribu writes in the translator's note: The translation source of these poems was published in Ni Made Purnama Sari’s collection, Kawitan (2016). The title is a polysemant; it can mean (1) the ancestors, (2) the beginning, (3) the ceremony to celebrate the ancestors, (4) the chronology of how our ancestors became our ancestors. Ni Made Purnama Sari navigates the vast space that confines and connects these definitions. Transporting Purnama Sari’s poetic game can be a challenge. Often she freely breaks from the rules of meaning, by erasing subjects, or switching to older Indonesian literary forms or expressions. For example, the poem ‘A Farewell from Paslaan, Apeldoorn’—which is about the great Toba Batak poet Sitor Situmorang—instantly shifts into the pantoum form in its fourth stanza. Bali is one of the most culturally exploited areas in Indonesia. It’s a global tourist destination, historically designed by the colonial Dutch regime. This has led to extreme settler problems. The native Balinese have lost their well-being to the dramatic rise of prices, losing their land over the massive demand for villas built on their ancestral lands. Meanwhile, widely published narratives about Bali in the English-speaking world have mostly been produced from the perspective of the privileged Western eyes that romanticise Balinese culture as ‘the last paradise’ to eternalise the capitalistic tourism industry. Ni Made Purnama Sari’s Kawitan, on the other hand, rebels against these dictations. Her poems discuss Balinese lives by refusing to be ‘a Balinese’. She’s not a Balinese who’s being visited; she’s a Balinese who’s visiting. She traces a connection between Bali to the greater Nusantara and the rest of the world to produce a form of global poetic empathy.

    Ni Made Purnama Sari: three poems, translated from Indonesian by Norman Erikson Pasaribu

  4. Jun 19

    Anna T. Szabó: Three poems translated from Hungarian by Ági Bori

    Read these poems on the Modern Poetry in Translation website: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/poem/three-poems-4/ Ági Bori writes in the translator's note: The poems presented here are a powerful sample of Anna T. Szabó’s oeuvre. Translating her chiselled and daunting poetic voice has been a profoundly moving and humbling experience. Due to the increasingly strict dictatorship in Romania in the eighties, where Anna was part of the oppressed Hungarian minority, she moved to Hungary with her family at the age of fifteen. She started as one of the late intellectual successors of the legendary short-lived literary magazine, New Moon (1946–1948), and seems to agree with one of the authors in its circle, Géza Ottlik, who said: ‘Existence is my profession.’ Anna presents experiences as if they are empirical observations. Her poems are often anchored in pain and suffering, both physical and emotional, revealing her awareness and responsiveness to the emotions of others. Her writings seem to encompass extreme psychic states. ‘Disgust’ is a case study in what I will call ‘empirical observation of everyday horrors’. It charts the mental state of being lost in the world, hitting against the edges of existence. Disgust is distrust: it is losing the essential sense of security. ‘The Lake’ echoes a feeling that was named in the short story, ‘The Imp of the Perverse’, by Edgar Allan Poe: a compulsion to commit an act against one’s own interests. In ‘Crossing, out’ Anna tries to describe death. She was asked to write an elegy for someone she hadn’t seen in over thirty years. The poem deals with the feeling of worldly alienation in which someone is thrown into an abyss: a place without language or direction, where everything earthly is negated, including logic and duality.

    Anna T. Szabó: Three poems translated from Hungarian by Ági Bori

  5. Jun 19

    Yoo Heekyung: Three story-poems, translated from Korean by Stine An

    Read the translations of this poem on the Modern Poetry in Translation website: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/poem/three-poems-3/ Translator Stine An writes in the introduction: Yoo Heekyung’s fifth poetry collection, Winter Night Rabbit Worries (Hyundae Munhak, 2023), turns to the origins of stories and poetry. Both the tales that get passed on through time around a small fire on a winter night and the tales spun in the dark alone as a prelude to dreaming. When I first encountered Yoo’s story-poems, they felt like fine watercolour etchings from an old storybook—delicate, wistful, and glowing with a quiet warmth. Later, Yoo shared that his work was haunted by Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit: Fantasies in the Manner of Rembrandt and Callot (1842), the collection that introduced the modern prose poem to the Western literary tradition and inspired Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen. These character-driven prose poems are like intimate one-act plays that flame into existence as visions. Within South Korean poetry, his debut Today’s Morning Vocabulary (Moonji Books, 2011) marked a departure from the experimental avant-garde poetics popular at the time. Yoo’s work as a writer and cultural worker is undergirded by his faith in poetry’s plurality, accessibility, and necessity. Poetry is air: the atmosphere he’s shared through Wit N Cynical, the poetry bookshop and project space he founded in Seoul set to celebrate its 10-year anniversary in July 2026. Yoo approaches translation as literary collaboration, as a form of spooky action at a distance. He has described our work being connected by an invisible thread. I reflected on this thread as I brought my own lyricism and literary experiences to these poems. I imagined myself paying attention to the minute vibrations in the language to portray the tonal shadows and the rhythms of the many voices heard and the gestures felt through the dark. – Stine An

    Yoo Heekyung: Three story-poems, translated from Korean by Stine An

  6. 12/16/2025

    My best friend is in love with you, by Danae Sioziou, translated by Panagiota Stoltidou

    My best friend is in love with you, by Danae Sioziou, translated by Panagiota Stoltidou by Modern Poetry in Translation Magazine

    My best friend is in love with you, by Danae Sioziou, translated by Panagiota Stoltidou

  7. 12/16/2025

    I will not repeat Phryni…, by Iliassa Sequin, translated by Calliope Michail

    I will not repeat Phryni…, by Iliassa Sequin, translated by Calliope Michail by Modern Poetry in Translation Magazine

    I will not repeat Phryni…, by Iliassa Sequin, translated by Calliope Michail

  8. 12/01/2025

    'Minora Poetica X' by Dimitra Kotoula, tr. Dimitra Kotoula

    'Minora Poetica X' by Dimitra Kotoula, tr. Dimitra Kotoula by Modern Poetry in Translation Magazine

    'Minora Poetica X' by Dimitra Kotoula, tr. Dimitra Kotoula
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About

When Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort founded MPT in 1965 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 contemporary world. For more than 50 years MPT has continued and widened that founding intent.

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  • Creator
    Modern Poetry in Translation Magazine
  • Years Active
    2013 - 2026
  • Episodes
    142
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