Modern Poetry in Translation

Modern Poetry in Translation Magazine (MPT) celebrates sixty years between 2025 and 2026.

MPT was founded in 1965 by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort and it began with an issue packed with the poetry of Eastern Europe, bringing poets such as Zbigniew Herbert, Miroslav Holub, Andrei Voznesensky and Yehuda Amichai (Israel) to an English-language readership. In the first important editorial Hughes and Weissbort described the work of MPT as publishing poetry from the ‘Centre of Cataclysm’. The issue was designed by revolutionary graphic designer Richard Hollis (designer of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing) and it reached thousands of readers, going quickly into a reprint. The work was urgent and it mattered. Both Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney spoke and wrote about the importance of such work for English-language poetry and writing.