Features writing that is, in one sense or another, a reflection or lingering effect of poets and artists who have gone before.

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.

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.

The first "Oxford Poets" anthology introduces the work of six writers whose poems extend the rich tradition of the Oxford list, now continuing to develop through Carcanet in association with the English Faculty, Oxford University. The "Oxford Poets" editorial panel makes the selection, acknowledging promise and achievement. There is no editorial programme or ideology beyond a desire to represent the best. Drawing on a wealth of submitted manuscript material the editors chose what they found most compelling in terms of formal and rhythmic invention. Verse metered or unmetered, rhymed or unrhyming, with sure or fragmented syntax, makes specific claims. The poem, not the poet, answers.

Friedrich Hoelderlin was one of Europe's greatest poets. The strange and beautiful language of his late poems is recreated by David Constantine in these remarkable verse translations. This is a new expanded edition of Constantine's widely-praised Hoelderlin Selected Poems (1990/1996), containing many new translations as well as the whole of Hoelderlin's Sophocles (2001), in which he sought to create an equivalent English for Hoelderlin's extraordinary German recreations of the classic Greek verse plays. Constantine won the European Poetry Translation Prize in 1997 for his translations of Hoelderlin. This new volume presents a substantial selection from the work of a poet who, writing around 1800, addresses us ever more urgently two centuries later. Hoelderlin translated all his writing life. Through translation he reached a poetic language of his own, so that much of his best poetry reads like a translation from elsewhere. He was intensely occupied with Sophocles in the winter of 1803-04. His versions of Oedipus Rex and Antigone (he worked at but never finished Oedipus at Colonus and Ajax) came out in the spring of 1804 and were taken, by the learned, as conclusive proof of his insanity. He was by then very near to mental collapse, but no one now would dismiss his work for that. He translated in a radical and idiosyncratic way, cleaving close to the Greek yet at the same time striving to interpret these ancient, foreign and - as he thought - sacred originals, and so bring them home into the modern day and age. Constantine has translated Hoelderlin's translations, carrying as much of their strangeness as possible into his English. The plays themselves need no introduction or apology. These double translations, links in literature from land to land and from age to age, demonstrate the vitality of ancient and modern poetic tradition. Carl Orff used Hoelderlin's texts for his operas Antigonae (1949) and Oedipus der Tyrann (1959), with the producers of recent DVDs of Orff's operas later choosing to use Constantine's texts for their English subtitles.

As well as being Germany's most important poet, Hans Magnus Enzensberger is a provocative cultural essayist and one of Europe's leading political thinkers. No British poet can match him in his range of interests and his moral passion. Enzensberger is a cultured, learned, widely knowledgeable man, but his poems wear their knowledge, learning and culture very lightly. Perfectly at ease in a variety of poetic forms, he presents us again and again with things that matter. This is intelligent and pointed poetry in the tradition of Brecht, humanely political and generously engaged. The poems have the ease and the lightness of real mastery. They are moral in their insistence that human life can be lived well or badly, that it is up to us to choose well and to act wisely. Enzensberger is now writing with an increasing awareness of mortality, yet addresses social and political dangers and evils with undiminished urgency. This is a dual language edition expanding Enzensberger's earlier Bloodaxe Selected Poems with work from his later collections Kiosk, Lighter Than Air and A History of Clouds. The translations are by Enzensberger himself and by Michael Hamburger, David Constantine and Esther Kinsky.

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?

'Polyphony' is concerned with voices: the local, the foreign, the native, the acquired - and the strange hybrids that come into being when the language of home is crossed with that of abroad. All poetic language is essentially foreign - 'otherwhereish', as Robert Graves said. This issue attends to the differences of voices - within individual poems, in the interplay of poet and translator and among various translations. It is an anthology in celebration of variety, without suppressing tones, dialects and utterances it might disturb us to hear.

Philippe Jaccottet's poetry is meditative, immediate and sensuous. It is rooted in the Drome region of south-east France, which gives it a rich sense of place. This book brings together his reflections on landscape in the prose pieces of Beauregard (1980) and in the poems of Under Clouded Skies (1983), two thematically linked collections which are remarkable for their lyrical restraint and quiet power. Jaccottet's poetry is largely grounded in landscape and the visual world, pursuing an anxious and persistent questioning of natural signs, meticulously conveyed in a syntax of great inventiveness. His work is animated by a fascination with the visible world from which he translates visual objects into verbal images and ultimately into figures of language. His poems are highly attentive, pushing the eye beyond what it sees, enacting a rich hesitation between meaning conferred and meaning withheld. Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. French-English bilingual edition.

Like the work of the European poets who have nourished him, David Constantine's poetry is informed by a profoundly humane vision of the world. Many of the poems in his latest collection spring from particular localities: Scilly, the North of England, Southern France, the Aegean, Wales; others from certain places (loci) in literature and mythology. Inspired by such 'local habitations' and the people who live there, the poems of Elder express gratitude and loyalty, but also grief at every harm and death. Published on his 70th birthday, David Constantine's tenth book of poetry sounds many personal elegiac notes as well as - in the story of Erysichthon, for example - anxiety at the abuse of Earth, but there is also much celebration of love, beauty and the hope and aspiration in human beings to live well in the time allowed.

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.

David Constantine is one the finest poets writing in English. His poetry stands outside the current literary climate, and like the work of the European poets who have nourished him, it is informed by a profoundly humane vision of the world. Its mood is often one of unease, elegiac or comically edged, barbed with pain or tinged with pleasure. His poems hold a worried and restless balance between celebration and anxiety, restraint and longing. His Collected Poems spans three decades, including work from seven previous Bloodaxe titles and two limited editions, as well as a whole collection of new poems. He has since published two later collections, Nine Fathom Deep (2009) and Elder (2014).

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.

Parallel French/English texts. Michaux is one of the notable travellers of modern French poetry; not only to the Amazon and the Far East, but into the strange hinterland of his own inner space. Fired by the same explorer's appetite, he has delved into the realm of mescaline and other drugs, and his wartime poetry, part of a private 'resistance' movement of extraordinary density and energy, has advertised his view of the poetic act as a form of exorcism.