Centres of Cataclysm: celebrating 50 years of Modern Poetry in Translation

Centres of Cataclysm covers the fifty-year history of Modern Poetry in Translation, one of the UK’s most innovative and prestigious poetry magazines. Founded in 1965 by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort, MPT has published some of the first translations of the twentieth century’s most significant poets, among them Zbigniew Herbert, Yehuda Amichai, Marina Tsvetaeva and Miroslav Holub. MPT was intended, in Ted Hughes’s words, as an ‘airport for incoming translations’, so they might find more permanent residence in English-language poetry. This celebratory and inspiring anthology, Centres of Cataclysm, includes excellent and various poems from the MPT archive together with responses to those poems by English-language poets and writers. Included here also are letters concerning the magazine’s history as well as short essays on the art of translating poetry.