Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT) is a tri-annual poetry magazine edited by Sasha Dugdale 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.

Latest issue

MPT’s summer issue ‘A Blossom Shroud’ focuses on poets and translators associated with this year’s Shubbak festival of Arab Culture in London and it publishes a selection of new translations of poets appearing at the festival: Mona Kareem, Dunya Mikhail, and a new long sequence of poems by Golan Haji, translated by Stephen Watts. The focus also includes a conversation between Alice Guthrie, Shubbak’s literary producer, and poet, translator and activist Mona Kareem, who has led the campaign to get Palestinian poet Ashraf Fayadh freed from a charge of apostasy in Saudi Arabia. Also featured are new translations of Hisham Bustani, Najwan Darwish and Syrian actor and activist Fadwa Souleiman. This stunning work from the Arab world appears alongside documentary poems by Chinese poet Shen Haobo on the AIDS villages of China, new translations of Rilke’s French poetry by Paul Batchelor, poet Katrina Naomi’s translations of Mexican poet Yohanna Jaramillo and Golan Haji’s selection of the Kurdish poets we should all be reading. All in this new issue of the groundbreaking magazine dedicated to poetry in translation: for the best in world poetry read MPT.