A chance suggestion of Hughes’s to Daniel Weissbort at a party in the early 60s led to the creation of a magazine that is still enthusiastically promoting poetry from around the world 50 years on
Ted Hughes’s poetic legacy is beyond question. But for such an emphatically monolingual poet, his greatest contribution to the landscape of British poetry may be the internationalism he promoted through Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT), the magazine he co-founded in 1965 with Daniel Weissbort, through the founding of Poetry International in 1967, and through his own translations and the poetic dialogue he had with those he translated, particularly the Hungarian poets János Pilinszky and Ferenc Juhász in the 1960s and 1970s.
The timing was propitious: interest in poetry in translation was growing in the early 60s and a number of poets were already engaged in serious and systematic translation work. The “dull” and suspicious “isolations of the 50s” were over, as Hughes wrote, and the “passionate international affair commenced”. In retrospect, “it seemed easier to let the magazine take off than to keep it grounded. The sheer pressure of material forced the issue.”
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The timing was propitious: interest in poetry in translation was growing in the early 60s and a number of poets were already engaged in serious and systematic translation work. The “dull” and suspicious “isolations of the 50s” were over, as Hughes wrote, and the “passionate international affair commenced”. In retrospect, “it seemed easier to let the magazine take off than to keep it grounded. The sheer pressure of material forced the issue.”
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