"Poets at Bush House" seeks to draw attention to a comparatively little known aspect of English cultural life, the BBC World Service, at a time when it is about to leave its historic home on The Strand. The initial aim was to produce a book that would represent a substantial selection of the many languages in which the BBC broadcasts from Bush House (by the end of World War II the Corporation was already broadcasting in forty-five languages). As well as representing work by a few of the notable writers formerly associated with the service, the anthology also includes contributions by some currently at Bush House, including translations by David Constantine, Michael Scammel, Sasha Dougdale and Zinovy Zinik.

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.

The achievement of Ted Hughes as a poet is inseparable from his achievement as a translator of poetry and poetic drama. Throughout a long and intensely productive career, Hughes was continuously engaged in acts of translation, for the page and for the stage, starting with his role in the establishment of the annual Poetry International in London and the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation, which he co-founded with Daniel Weissbort in 1965, and which notably brought to attention poets such as the Israeli Yehuda Amichai, the Hungarian Janos Pilinszky and the Yugoslav Vasko Popa. The present volume, edited by Weissbort, surveys this aspect of Hughes's canon for the first time, offering a broad selection from his numerous translations, together with hitherto unpublished material (versions of Paul Eluard, or of Yves Bonnefoy), and excerpts from essays and letters. Strongly rooted in a native tradition, Hughes was nevertheless indebted to literary cultures other than his own, and his work far transcends national boundaries. The present volume selects from his versions from a wide variety of ancient texts - the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Aeschylus, Euripides, Ovid, Seneca, Racine - and equally from a range of twentieth century European poets and dramatists.

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'.

"European Voices" brings together a wide swath of major European poets from the 19th and 20th centuries, including Celan, Mallarme, Verlaine, Pushkin, Saba, and Cavafy.

Translators include David Constantine, Robin Fulton, Michael Hamburger, and Marilyn Hacker.

Also Available:
"Modern Poetry in Translation: Mother Tongues"
TP $16.95, 0-939010-65-8 o CUSA

"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.

"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."

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.