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

    4d ago

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

    Read the translations of these poems not he 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.

    7 min
  2. Yoo Heekyung: Three story-poems, translated from Korean by Stine An

    4d ago

    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

    13 min
  3. My best friend is in love with you, by Danae Sioziou, translated by Panagiota Stoltidou

    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

    3 min
  4. I will not repeat Phryni…, by Iliassa Sequin, translated by Calliope Michail

    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

    6 min
  5. 'Minora Poetica X' by Dimitra Kotoula, tr. Dimitra Kotoula

    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

    3 min
  6. 'Polysyllabic Words' by Jazra Khaleed, tr. Jason Rigas

    12/01/2025

    'Polysyllabic Words' by Jazra Khaleed, tr. Jason Rigas

    'Polysyllabic Words' by Jazra Khaleed, tr. Jason Rigas by Modern Poetry in Translation Magazine

    3 min
  7. 'Names' by George Le Nonce, tr. Kostya Tsolakis

    12/01/2025

    'Names' by George Le Nonce, tr. Kostya Tsolakis

    'Names' by George Le Nonce, tr. Kostya Tsolakis by Modern Poetry in Translation Magazine

    5 min
  8. 'The Sea's Remorse' by Argyris Stavropoulos, tr. Gigi Papoulias

    12/01/2025

    'The Sea's Remorse' by Argyris Stavropoulos, tr. Gigi Papoulias

    'The Sea's Remorse' by Argyris Stavropoulos, tr. Gigi Papoulias by Modern Poetry in Translation Magazine

    3 min
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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.

Information

  • Creator
    Modern Poetry in Translation Magazine
  • Years Active
    2013 - 2026
  • Episodes
    139
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © copyright MPT Magazine
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    Modern Poetry in Translation