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.
Publisher
Modern Poetry in Translation Magazine
Category
arts · arts · society & culture · society & culture
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.
6 Jul 2026
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?
3 Jul 2026
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.
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