Modern Poetry in Translation

Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT) is a tri-annual poetry magazine that publishes poetry from all over the world in English translation. Founded in 1965 by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort it has consistently published the very best of world poetry in the very best translations, and has introduced a number of famous poets and iconic translations to the English-speaking world.

MPT prints work of unsurpassed range and quality. Over the last decade it has featured over 90 languages, 463 poets and 349 translators. Boyd Tonkin in The Independent wrote that MPT ‘has a rare and precious talent’. The Sunday Times called it a ‘necessity’. There is no other magazine that has the same reach and the same consistent quality of poetry.

The trial issue features six poems by Tsvetanka Elenkova translated by Jonathan Dunne, three poems from Aldeburgh by Taha Muhammad Ali and Gabriela Mistral’s poem The Foreigner translated by Arthur McHugh.

Other features include a review by Jo Balmer of classic French and German translations, Charlie Louth examines the work of Don Paterson, Martyn Crucefix and Rilke and Stephanie Norgate presents two haiku versions of Lucretius.

MPT No. 1 2025 ‘Presently Proximal Person’ focuses on experimental translations.  Highlights include Aditya Bahl’s translations after Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, where all that is ordinary, political, and marginal, in the translator’s everyday is absorbed by the translation. Also Erín Moure’s translation of Chus Pato, where she juggles different types of spectres between Galician and English and Mónica de la Torre imagining the Brazilian poet, Ana Cristina Cesar, as an apostrophe made absent by death, who nevertheless turns up in the interstices of her own voice. Vivek Narayanan, who writes after Tamil poems from the first few centuries of the Common Era, breaks open ancient syntax with his rhapsodic textual and non-textual commentary. Dabin Jeong who has translated poems from Moon Bo Young’s latest book introduces another kind of alternative person(a)s, strictly modern ones—video game characters who threaten to infringe on the reality of the players. Also in this issue: Leo Boix, Marcella Durand, Beth Hickling Moore, Dante, Sagawa Chika, Stéphanie Bouquet, Mark Leech and Sawako Nakayasu, and more – in an issue filled with speculations, surprises, leaps of syntax, and more. Discover this and more in the new issue of the groundbreaking magazine dedicated to poetry in translation.