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MPT receives many unsolicited manuscripts, which are often inspired by an issue that we have just published. Not surprisingly, translations from French and German feature largely in our post. In the UK at least, these are still the most commonly studied languages and our most frequent passport to European culture, and MPT has included translations from French or German in many of the issues in the New Series. We have not, however, previously dedicated a whole issue to France or Germany, as we have to Latin America, or Russia, or the Netherlands, or Greece, or Palestine and Israel, or most recently Italy, though about half of MPT8 presented French poets and No. 16 of the original series of MPT was a notable French issue guest-edited by Anthony Rudolf. No. 16 of our New Series is devoted to both German and French poetry, or rather, poetry written in German or French, since we include an Austrian and two Francophone poets. Richard Dove’s review article on Enzensberger is by way of a tribute to the poet, whose 70th birthday was celebrated in 1999. Finally we offer four poets of the “cognate” literatures of The Netherlands and Scandinavia.

We rehearse from time to time the arguments for and against bilingual publication. In this issue we have occasionally included the original text where there seemed to be a special need to do so: in the case of Ringelnatz, for instance, to show David Cram’s solution to the problem of the local reference, as well as the importance of tone and its relation to form (so-called “light” verse does not impose lighter burdens on the translator!); in the case of Stefan George, because of his use of varying rhyme schemes and of alliteration and assonance, which moulds a traditional form to a new view of the possibilities of poetry.

One of our readers has suggested to us that the youngest generation of German poets is too little known in the English-speaking world, and no doubt the same is true of the youngest French poets. We have tried to present a range of poems from Goethe to the present day, and from the French sixteenth century onwards. This selection, for obvious reasons, makes no claim to be fully representative: we are in the hands of our contributors here. But it has been very interesting to observe which poets seem still to fire the enthusiasm of translators. We have in some instances offered versions by different hands of the same poet, and hope that the reader will find it as fascinating as we have to compare the responses of different translators. Nothing, perhaps, so cogently argues for the necessity and value of translation as this liveliness and diversity of response. Poetry lives and goes on living as long as readers can be inspired to translate it into their own voice – which in the case of foreign poets, often means translating it into their own language, if only in their heads. Here are readings of that kind that have been committed to paper. We shall welcome the post that will surely bring us, in the near future, more French and German poetry – with luck, some new and as yet untranslated poets. For as long as we can, we shall continue to present our choice of the astonishingly (and reassuringly) wide range of poems from many times and places that reach us every week.