This volume, with contributions in the form of narrations, or of work sheets, by leading British and American translators, shows what happens: how problems present themselves and how they are resolved. Ezra Pound regarded translation as a superior type of literary criticism, representing a fusion of creative and critical. In this collection, translators make explicit not only what is implicit in their translations, but also critical insights that inevitably and agonizingly, cannot be accommodated in them. The translator's complex role, or predicament, as mediator between cultures is exemplified here.

In the new second volume of "Brodsky Through They eyes of His Contemporaries," the collection of interviews features eye-witness accounts of Joseph Brodsky's friends and family members, publishers, editors, translators, students, and fellow poets including John Le Carre, Oleg Tselkov, Petr Vail, Bengt Jangfeldt, Susan Sontag, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and others. This collection of 40 interviews illuminates an intriguing contemporary phenomenon and affords a fascinating insight into the American literary scene. Continuing the discussion begun in the first volume, this series of interviews contains important discussions on the style, ideas, and personality of one of the most brilliant and paradoxical poets of our time. Subtle, incisive, and rigorous in its critical evaluation, each discussion significantly advances our understanding of Brodsky's complex poetic world. All discussions are linked by core questions that are carefully and sometimes provocatively formulated. The interviews are published together with many unique photographs from the private archives of the author and the interviewees.

Brodsky Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries combines biographical details about Joseph Brodsky with a collection of interviews that illuminate an intriguing contemporary phenomenon, along with a new and authoritative interpretation of the poetics, style, and ideas of one of the most influential poets to emerge in post-Stalinist Russia. Subtle, incisive, and rigorous in its critical evaluation, each discussion significantly advances our understanding of Brodsky's complex poetic world. All discussions are linked by core questions that are carefully and sometimes provocatively formulated. This book is a superb guide to further study of Brodsky's work both for specialist scholars and general readers who are intoxicated by poetry. Presented in two volumes, this is the second edition of a work first published in 1992; this edition is enlarged with new interviews and a series of previously unpublished unique photographs from the personal archives of the author and the interviewees. Volume I offers a fascinating record of conversations with poets of various nationalities about Brodsky: Czeslaw Milosz, Roy Fisher, Lev Loseff, Bella Akhmadulina, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, Tomas Venclova, Viktor Krivulin, Alexander Kushner, and Elena Shvarts. Volume II features eye-witness accounts of Joseph Brodsky's friends and family members, publishers, editors, translators, students, and fellow poets including John Le Carre, Oleg Tselkov, Petr Vail, Bengt Jangfeldt, Susan Sontag, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and others.

Yehuda Amichai was first brought to attention in this country by his inclusion in Modern Poetry in Translation (1965). The magazine's editors, Daniel Weissbort and Ted Hughes, here provide a selection of Amichai's poetry translated by various hands, placing his achievements alongside those other Eastern European poets with whom he was first introduced - Zbigniew Herbert, Miroslav Holub, Vasko Popa, Czeslaw Milosz and Andrei Voznesensky - while demonstrating what makes his own talent so unique. In Ted Hughes's words, Amichai was 'the poet whose books I still open most often, most often take on a journey, most often return to when the whole business of writing anything natural, real and satisfying, seems impossible. And that after thirty years of feeling the same way about him. The effect his poetry has on me is to give me my own life - to open it up somehow, to make it available to me afresh, to uncover all kinds of riches in every moment of it, and to free me from my mental prisons'.

Translation: Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader responds to the need for a collection of primary texts on translation, in the English tradition, from the earliest times to the present day. Based on an exhaustive survey of the wealth of available materials, the Reader demonstrates throughout the link between theory and practice, with excerpts not only of significant theoretical writings but of actual translations, as well as excerpts on translation from letters, interviews, autobiographies, and fiction.
The collection is intended as a teaching tool, but also as an encyclopaedia for the use of translators and writers on translation. It presents the full panoply of approaches to translation, without necessarily judging between them, but showing clearly what is to be gained or lost in each case. Translations of key texts, such as the Bible and the Homeric epic, are traced through the ages, with the same passages excerpted, making it possible for readers to construct their own map of the evolution of translation and to evaluate, in their historical contexts, the variety of approaches. The passages in question are also accompanied by ad verbum versions, to facilitate comparison.
The bibliographies are likewise comprehensive. The editors have drawn on the expertise of leading scholars in the field, including the late James S. Holmes, Louis Kelly, Jonathan Wilcox, Jane Stevenson, David Hopkins, and many others. In addition, significant non-English texts, such as Martin Luther's "Circular Letter on Translation," which may be said to have inaugurated the Reformation, are included, helping to set the English tradition in a wider context. Related items, such as the introductions totheir work by Tudor and Jacobean translators or the work of women translators from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries have been brought together in "collages," marking particularly important moments or developments in the history of translation.
This comprehensive reader provides an invaluable and illuminating resource for scholars and students of translation and English literature, as well as poets, cultural historians, and professional translators.

Translation: Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader responds to the need for a collection of primary texts on translation, in the English tradition, from the earliest times to the present day. Based on an exhaustive survey of the wealth of available materials, the Reader demonstrates throughout the link between theory and practice, with excerpts not only of significant theoretical writings but of actual translations, as well as excerpts on translation from letters, interviews, autobiographies, and fiction.
The collection is intended as a teaching tool, but also as an encyclopaedia for the use of translators and writers on translation. It presents the full panoply of approaches to translation, without necessarily judging between them, but showing clearly what is to be gained or lost in each case. Translations of key texts, such as the Bible and the Homeric epic, are traced through the ages, with the same passages excerpted, making it possible for readers to construct their own map of the evolution of translation and to evaluate, in their historical contexts, the variety of approaches. The passages in question are also accompanied by ad verbum versions, to facilitate comparison.
The bibliographies are likewise comprehensive. The editors have drawn on the expertise of leading scholars in the field, including the late James S. Holmes, Louis Kelly, Jonathan Wilcox, Jane Stevenson, David Hopkins, and many others. In addition, significant non-English texts, such as Martin Luther's "Circular Letter on Translation," which may be said to have inaugurated the Reformation, are included, helping to set the English tradition in a wider context. Related items, such as the introductions totheir work by Tudor and Jacobean translators or the work of women translators from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries have been brought together in "collages," marking particularly important moments or developments in the history of translation.
This comprehensive reader provides an invaluable and illuminating resource for scholars and students of translation and English literature, as well as poets, cultural historians, and professional translators.

"EXPAND[S] OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THIS FASCINATING LITERARY CHARACTER." --STEVEN RATINER, "THE WASHINGTON POST ""BOOK WORLD" Known (with Philip Larkin) as the most distinctly English of the postwar British poets, Ted Hughes was a boundlessly curious reader and translator of poetry from other languages. This generous selection of his translations at once rounds out the publication of his major work and gives us a fresh view of his poetic achievement.

In 1965, Hughes, already famous in Britain, founded the journal Modern Poetry in Translation, and a number of the translations here are of poems by his contemporaries: the Israeli Yehuda Amichai, the Hungarian Janos Pilinszky, and the Serbian Vasko Popa. At the same time, Hughes was forever in search of older precursors, whether Homer, Lorenzo de' Medici, or the authors of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and his translations of them deepen our sense of his interest in pagan ritual and esoteric religion. These two strains of his work as translator were brought together late in his career, establishing him as one of the foremost interpreters of the classics in English.

Weissbort's intention was to end his tenure with the series "Modern Poetry in Translation "with an issue devoted, in part, to Eastern Europe, as the first book in the MPT series (1965) was largely devoted to this region or, more precisely, to the first post-War generation of poets, such as Zbigniew Herbert, Miroslav Holub, and Vasko Popa. In this most recent volume of "MPT," Weissbort explores the changed landscape of the past thirty years, including interviews with writers of succeeding generations and a few survivors from the Herbert generation.

Other features of "Looking Eastward "include a broad selection of MPT cofounder Ted Hughes' unpublished translations from various languages and time periods, and a selection of work from student translators.

Zephyr Press becomes U.S. publisher of Modern Poetry in Translation

The series "Modern Poetry in Translation" was founded by Daniel Weissbort and Ted Hughes in 1966, and since that time has achieved an international reputation for the wide range of poets and translators that it presents, as well as for its serious and lively discussion of the art of translating poetry. Each volume of the series offers a themed special section in addition to a wide-ranging selection of poems from other times and places, plus essays on translation, reviews, an ongoing exchange of readers' and contributors' comments, and occasional features on individual translators. Beginning with this volume, Zephyr Press will continue to work in conjunction with the UK editorial office of "MPT" in order to broaden the series' reach--both in terms of general readership and the material contained within each volume.

"Mother Tongues" brings together the work of poets who are or were resident in the UK, writing in languages other than English, Welsh or Gaelic. The field is large, ranging from the old BBC contingent, to recent immigrants and political refugees. As well as translations of poetry, the collection contains seven or eight short essays by living poets which, from a linguistic and cultural point of view, looks into the predicament of writing in a language which is not that of the writer's larger environment. The experience of exile, marginilization, and issues such as that of artistic integrity will also be addressed in these pieces.

Translators will include Ted Hughes, Daniel Weissbort, Michael Hamburger, and Musa Moris Farhi.

"The Jews and Germany" debunks a modern myth: that once upon a time there was a Judeo-German symbiosis, in which two cultures met and brought out the best in each other. Enzo Traverso argues that to the contrary, the attainments of Jews in the German-speaking world were due to the Jews aspiring to be German, with little help from and often against the open hostility of Germans. As the Holocaust proved in murder and theft, German Jews could never be German enough. Now the works of German Jews are being published and reprinted in Germany. It is a matter of enormous difference whether the German rediscovery of German Jews is another annexation of Jewish property or an act of rebuilding a link between traditions. Traverso shows how tenuous the link was in the first place. He resumes the queries of German Jews who asked throughout the twentieth century what it meant to be both Jewish and German. Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Kafka, and many more thinkers of genius found the problems unavoidable and full of paradoxes. In returning to them Traverso not only demolishes a sugary myth but also reasserts the responsibility of history to recover memory, even if bitter and full of pain. Enzo Traverso was born in Italy in 1957. He currently works at the Bibliotheque de documentation internationale contemporaine in Nanterre, where he is in charge of the German section of documentary research. He is also the author of "The Marxists and the Jewish Question: History of a Debate, 1843-1943."

The poems in this new collection are taken from a verse journal for the years 1985-1990, arranged chronologically to form three sections. The first considers loss and death, themes which have haunted literature since the Gilgamesh epic, and includes fragments of a conversation with the dead. The second is concerned with the world outside, which Weissbort describes as the world of dreams. The third reflects on politics, following the dissolution of the Soviet empire. The unity of the collection is in its style - a sophisticated and adaptable "vers libre" of great lucidity, answering the "journal" subject matter.