Translation can be thought of as the transplanting of a living thing out of its native time and place into somewhere foreign. There it may thrive or die. How can the subjects and forms of poetry be transplanted across time and space? Must they be modified? Or can the host culture be induced to accept them as they are? In this issue of "MPT" we show many of the ways and means by which a literary transplant's chances of survival may be increased. New versions of ballads by Itzik Manger, of the French Grail legend, of the English Sir Orfeo (by Maureen Duffy), of early Brecht. Plus translations of "Rimbaud" by James Kirkup and of Alaskan Native American songs by John Smelcer. A very great variety of work.

Dublin is one of the world's great literary cities, immortalized in works by some of the most celebrated international authors. It is a city of warmth and character, which combines the richest of histories with a vibrant contemporary edge, and which welcomes millions of people to its streets each year. In addition to being Ireland's capital city, Dublin is a city with a proud European identity and with long-established, dynamic links with the rest of the world. Dublin Tales comprises an exciting selection of stories from across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries which are illustrative of this. The stories in Dublin Tales are variously vibrant, evocative, humorous, and diverse, and engage in different ways with Dublin's history, its culture, its cityscape, and its people. It includes stories by writers who are intimately associated with the city (James Joyce and Brendan Behan), as well as by some of the most acclaimed Irish authors of the twentieth century (Elizabeth Bowen, Liam O'Flaherty, William Trevor, John McGahern, and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne). Less familiar authors are also included, as are specially commissioned stories from some of the most talented younger writers writing today (Caitriona Lally, Kevin Power, and Melatu Uche Okorie). Dublin Tales also includes bilingual versions of two stories which were originally written in the Irish language by Dara Ó Conaola and Caitlín Nic Íomhair, which have been specially translated into English for this startlingly original new book.

This series publishes translations, original poems, reviews and short essays that address such characteristic signs of our times as exile, the movement of peoples, the search for asylum, and the speaking of languages outside their native home.

This issue will be largely given over to a collaboration with 'Poetry Parnassus' - the Southbank Centre's celebration of the 2012 London Olympics. Poets from all participating countries will be invited to London and MPT will publish a selection of translations of their poems. Poetry Parnassus marks the first time that so many poets from so many parts of the planet have convereged in one place; it is a monumental poetic happening worthy of the spirit and history of the Olympics. 'My hunch is this will be the biggest poetry event ever - a truly global coming together of poets' (Simon Armitage, the poet behind the idea and Artist in Residence at Southbank Centre) The issue will be enhanced with other translated poems, brief essays, anecdotes and images concerned, in whatever fashion, with the Games (ancient or modern) or with Parnassus, home of the Muses. Parnassus was a sacred site for the whole Greek world; Delphi, below that mountain, was 'the navel of the earth'; for the duration of the Olympics a truce was declared so that athletes could come and go safely. The modern Olympics are world - wide. MPT 3/17 will be just as extensive and various.

The subject of this issue is so-called 'minority' languages and cultures. It features translated poems, brief essays, anecdotes, photographs, that address that subject from as many points of view as possible: causes for lament, anger and revolt, but also for celebration - worldwide and perennial. And at the heart of the subject lies the struggle for what John Clare called 'self-identity', a chief factor in which is bound to be language, one's own peculiar tongue and the dialect of the tribe. So this issue is another polyphony: of strivings for identity, for self-realization, personal, social and cultural. And always the question: how shall such strivings live together?

'She was the golden beast, an unconscious force, the very scent of her could bring the world to ruin.' Nana, daughter of a drunk and a laundress, is the Helen of Troy of Paris. A sexually magnetic high-class prostitute and actress, she becomes a celebrity, rapidly conquering society, ruining all men who fall under her spell-especially Count Muffat, Chamberlain to the Empress. Nana herself meets a terrible fate, consumed by her own dissipation and extravagance, just as the disastrous war with Prussia is declared. Nana is the ninth instalment in the twenty volume Rougon-Macquart series. The novel opens in 1867, the year of the World Fair, when Paris, thronged by a cosmopolitan elite, was la Ville Lumiere, the glittering setting-and object-of Zola's scathing denunciation of society's hypocrisy and moral corruption. Nana comes to symbolize the Second Empire regime itself in all its excesses; but in the final chapters, the narrator seems to suggest that the coming disaster is not so much a result of the corruption of the Empire, as of rampant female sexuality.

2009 sees the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. One of those rights is freedom of speech. In this issue of "Modern Poetry in Translation", we celebrate speech that has been freed. Poetry and translation, working together, have often been the means and the best expression of that liberation. We feature examples from past and present, from all over the world, from all manner of circumstances, of people being enabled to speak and of their voices being heard. We also explore the repression and harming of those voices, but chiefly we show the triumph of the will to speak, the freeing, the recovery and the enjoyment of tongues.

Published in 1782, just years before the French Revolution, Les Liaisons Dangereuses is a disturbing and ultimately damning portrayal of a decadent society. At its centre are two aristocrats, former lovers, who embark on a sophisticated game of seduction and manipulation to bring amusement to their jaded existences. While the Marquise de Merteuil challenges the Vicomte de Valmont to seduce an innocent convent girl, the Vicomte is also occupied with the conquest of a virtuous married woman. But as their intrigues become more duplicitous and they find their human pawns responding in ways they could not have predicted, the consequences prove to be more serious, and deadly, than Merteuil and Valmont could have guessed.

'For certain men the stronger their desire, the less likely they are to act.' With his first glimpse of Madame Arnoux, Frederic Moreau is convinced he has found his romantic destiny, but when he pursues her to Paris the young student is unable to translate his passion into decisive action. He also finds himself distracted by the equally romantic appeal of political action in the turbulent years leading up to the revolution of 1848, and by the attractions of three other women, each of whom seeks to make him her own: a haughty society lady, a capricious courtesan, and an artless country girl. Flaubert offers a vivid and unsparing portrait of the young men of his generation, struggling to salvage something of their ideals in a city where corruption, consumerism, and a pervasive sense of disenchantment undermine all but the most compromised erotic, aesthetic, and social initiatives. Sentimental Education combines thoroughgoing irony with an impartial but unexpectedly intense sympathy in a novel whose realism competes with that of Balzac and whose innovations in narrative plot and perspective mark a turning-point in the development of literary modernism. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Centres of Cataclysm celebrates the fifty-year history of Modern Poetry in Translation, one of the world's most innovative and exciting poetry magazines. Founded in 1965 by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort, MPT has constantly introduced courageous and revolutionary poets of the 20th and 21st century to English-speaking readers. Ted Hughes thought of MPT as an 'airport for incoming translations' - from the whole world, across frontiers of space and time. These are poems we cannot do without. The anthology is not arranged chronologically but, from a variety of perspectives, it addresses half a century of war, oppression, revolution, hope and survival. In so doing, it truthfully says and vigorously defends the human. In among the poems are illuminating letters, essays and notes on the poets, on the world in which they lived and on the enterprise of translating them.

'Everything revolved around their love. They were constantly bathed in a passion that they carried with them, around them, as though it were the only air they could breathe.' Helene Grandjean, an attractive young widow, lives a secluded life in Paris with her only child, Jeanne. Jeanne is a delicate and nervous girl who jealously guards her mother's affections. When Jeanne falls ill, she is attended by Dr Deberle, whose growing admiration for Helene gradually turns into mutual passion. Deberle's wife Juliette, meanwhile, flirts with a shallow admirer, and Helene, intent on preventing her adultery, precipitates a crisis whose consequences are far-reaching. Jeanne realizes she has a rival for Helene's devotion in the doctor, and begins to exercise a tyrannous hold over her mother. The eighth novel in Zola's celebrated Rougon-Macquart series, A Love Story is an intense psychological and nuanced portrayal of love's different guises. Zola's study extends most notably to the city of Paris itself, whose shifting moods reflect Helene's emotional turmoil in passages of extraordinary lyrical description.

'Who possesses me will possess all things, But his life will belong to me...' Raphael de Valentin, a young aristocrat, has lost all his money in the gaming parlours of the Palais Royal in Paris, and contemplates ending his life by throwing himself into the Seine. He is distracted by the bizarre array of objects in a chaotic antique shop, among them a strange animal skin, a piece of shagreen with magical properties. It will grant its possessor his every wish, but each time a wish is bestowed the skin shrinks, hastening its owner's death. Around this fantastic premise Balzac weaves a compelling psychological portrait of his hero, a prisoner of his own Promethean imagination, and explores profound ideas about the human will, vice and virtue, love and death. Helen Constantine's new translation captures the energy and exuberance of Balzac's novel, one of the most engaging of his 'Etudes philosophiques' from the Comedie humaine. The accompanying introduction and notes offer fresh insights into this remarkable work. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

In ways no guide book can achieve, these twenty absorbing tales by Italian authors ranging from Boccaccio in the Middle Ages to Giacomo Casanova in the eighteenth century, to Pier-Paolo Pasolini in the twentieth and contemporary new writers such as Melania Mazzucco and Igiaba Scego, offer the delight of discovering and exploring one of the world's most unique cities thorough a wide variety of individual lives and epochs. The tales span seven hundred years but rather than being ordered chronologically, old and new appear alongside one another, reflecting the dual identity of Rome - thriving, modern metropolis and ancient city centre that is one of the wonders of the world. The tales are wonderfully varied in style, tone, and subject matter. Casanova sets about seducing the hotelier's daughter only minutes after his arrival, a notorious Spanish prostitute in Renaissance Rome endures a public hiding without flinching, a Danish tourist in her sixties finds an unusual lover, Pope John Paul II uncovers a vast conspiracy against him, a medieval revolutionary demagogue suffers almost the same fate as Mussolini. Each story is illustrated with a black-and-white photograph and there is a map of Rome to help readers locate the important sites which feature in the text. A deep sense of timelessness, of separate destinies entwined across a gulf of centuries, is the cumulative effect of this vivid mosaic of dramatic, comic, and tragic stories set in the Eternal City.

Berlin Tales is a collection of seventeen translated stories associated with Berlin. The book provides a unique insight into the mind of this fascinating city through the eyes of its story-tellers. Nearly twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the stories collected here reflect on the city's fascinating recent history, setting out with the early twentieth-century Berlin of Siegfried Kracauer and Alfred Doeblin and culminating in an excellent selection of stories from the best of the new voices in the current boom in German fiction. They are chosen for their conscious exploration of the city's image, meaning, and attraction to immigrants and tourists as well as Berliners from both sides of the Wall. These stories also depict Berlin's distinct districts, not just the differences between East and West but also iconic sites such as Alexanderplatz, individual neighbourhoods (Jewish Mitte, Turkish Kreuzberg) and individual streets. There is an introduction and notes to accompany the stories and a selection of Further Reading. Each story is illustrated with a striking photograph and there is a map of Berlin and its transport system (a frequent motif). There is an introduction and notes to accompany the stories and a selection of Further Reading. The book will appeal to people who love travelling or are armchair travellers, as much as to those who love Berlin.

Lisbon has been an extraordinary city for well over a thousand years, rendering it a place of great historical and contemporary interest. The combination of cultural influences in Lisbon-Arabian, African, and European-and the city's identity as a great seafaring stronghold, has granted it a unique and spirited legacy. Lisbon Tales reflects this legacy in its literary selections. From famous names to new voices, Lisbon Tales describes a city in continuous and vibrant change.

'Abbe Faujas has arrived '
The arrival of Abbe Faujas in the provincial town of Plassans has profound consequences for the community, and for the family of Francois Mouret in particular. Faujas and his mother come to lodge with Francois, his wife Marthe, and their three children, and Marthe quickly falls under the influence of the priest. Ambitious and unscrupulous, Faujas gradually infiltrates into all quarters of the town, intent on political as well as religious conquest. Intrigue, slander, and insinuation tear the townsfolk apart, creating suspicion and distrust, and driving the Mourets to ever more extreme actions.
The fourth novel in Zola's Rougon-Macquart sequence, The Conquest of Plassans returns to the fictional Provencal town from which the family sprang in The Fortune of the Rougons. In one of the most psychological of his novels, Zola links small-town politics to the greater political and national dramas of the Second Empire.
The first modern translation for more than fifty years and the first critical edition, features a fascinating introduction and helpful notes by Man Booker Prize nominated novelist and poet Patrick McGuinness.

ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more."

In this volume Paul Vincent presents a compelling collection of prose fiction, memoirs and anecdotes centring on Amsterdam from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. His selection offers a rare insight into the history and culture of the city. The subjects range from Rembrandt to the persecution of the Jews in World War 2, from barricades in a working-class district during the Depression to a writer's unhealthy obsession with a massage parlour. These eighteen newly-translated tales give the reader, and the traveller, a tantalizing glimpse of the Amsterdam that lies beyond the tourist guidebooks.

Chevalier d'Albert fantasizes about his ideal lover, yet every woman he meets falls short of his exacting standards of female perfection. Embarking on an affair with the lovely Rosette to ease his boredom, he is thrown into tumultuous confusion when she receives a dashing young visitor. Exquisitely handsome, Theodore inspires passions d'Albert never believed he could feel for a man - and Rosette also seems to be in thrall to the charms of her guest. Does this bafflingly alluring person have a secret to hide? Subversive and seductive, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) draws readers into the bedrooms and boudoirs of a French chateau in a compelling exploration of desire and sexual intrigue.

Exploring the many moods of the Danish capital. From the narrow twisting streets of the old town centre to the shady docklands, this rich anthology captures the essence of Copenhagen and its many faces. Through seventeen tales by some of the very best of Denmark's writers past and present, we travel the length and breadth of the Danish capital examining famous sights from unique perspectives. A guide book usefully informs a new visitor to Copenhagen but these stories allow the reader to experience the city and its history from the inside.

If you've never been to Paris, here is your chance to experience it; if you have been there, here is your chance to return. Paris Tales is a highly evocative collection of stories by French and Francophone writers who have been inspired by the mystery and charm of different locations in this most visited of capital cities. The twenty-two stories-- by well-known writers including Nerval, Maupassant, Colette, and Echenoz-- provide a captivating glimpse into Parisian life from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day.
The stories take us on an atmospheric tour of the arrondissements and quartiers of Paris, charting the changing nature of the city and its inhabitants. Viewed through the eyes of characters such as the provincial lawyer's wife seeking excitement, a runaway schoolboy sleeping rough, and a lottery-winning policeman, the collection presents a stage for the intimacies and insights of these distinctly Parisian people. From the artists' haunts of Montmartre to the glamorous cafes of Saint-Germain, from the shouts of demonstrators on Boul Mich' to the tranquillity of Parc Monceau, ParisTales offers a fascinating literary panorama of Paris.
Illustrated with maps and striking photographs, the book will appeal to all those who wish to uncover the true heart of this seductive city. Translated by well-known linguist Helen Constantine, Paris Tales is the first title in a series of literary tours of key capital cities. Rich in atmosphere, this literary tour will enchant both tourists and armchair travelers alike."

Following Helen Constantine's highly successful Paris Tales, Paris Metro Tales offers 22 remarkable short stories set throughout Paris--all connected by the underground tunnels of its famed Metro.
The journey begins at the Gare du Nord, stops at 20 underground stations along the way, and ends at Lamarck-Caulaincourt, each story corresponding to one of the 20 arrondissements of Paris. Readers are invited to find their way through the underground, changing trains when necessary and imaginatively emerging to read a story it its original setting. The stories range from the 15th-century account of the miraculous Saint Genevieve, patron saint of Paris, through tales by favorite writers such as Zola, Simenon, Balzac, and Maupassant. Though connected by the metro, the subjects of these short stories vary widely: from Martine Delerm's gripping narrative of the last hours of Modigliani's mistress to Gerard de Nerval's rich evocation of the bustling market in Les Halles in the 1850s, Colette's unlikely involvement in a traffic accident near the Opera, and Boulanger's fine description of a blackly funny experience in Pere Lachaise. In addition to writers well known to the English-speaking world, this collection also includes French authors whose work deserves wider attention, including Frederic Fajardie, Martine Delerm, Marie Desplechin, Paul Fournel, and Claude Dufresne. Each story is illustrated with a black-and-white photograph and the book includes a map and suggested itinerary through the metro system.
Perfect for fans of Paris Tales, connoisseurs of French fiction, and all short story enthusiasts, Paris Metro Tales offers rare glimpses of the darker side of the "City of Light."