Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

As I think back, it seems to me we were imagining an issue such as the present one quite early on in the history of MPT. And actually the early issues did, in a sense, draw on what was at hand in this country, that is on what had been prepared or promoted by interested parties who quite often were source-language writers living and working here. We used such contacts as we had, for instance, in the BBC World Service, in Bush House, where a number of poets from around the world congregated and made their living. Veno Taufer, for example, a distinguished Slovene poet who worked at Bush House for some years co-edited, with Michael Scammell, a Slovene issue of MPT (no. 8). Indeed, it occurs to me that an issue devoted to poets who have worked at Bush House since the end of World War Two would be more than just a literary curiosity. It might, of course, induce some melancholic reflections on the fact that so many fine writers have existed in our midst and have attracted so little attention.

Whether this indifference is or was due to greater language chauvinism, to a kind of imperial hangover, is a matter for speculation. It seems to me that these are factors in what sometimes looks like a deliberate reluctance to celebrate. The situation may now be changing, the change being reflected in rather than brought about by government policy and probably having much to do with a generational shift.

After all, just speaking for myself, as a Jew, born in England but whose own parents came to this country shortly before the Second World War from Belgium (having arrived in Belgium, some decades before that, from Poland), I vividly recall, in boyhood, feeling hugely proud of “the empire on which the sun never sets”. From a linguistic point of view, I might have been drawn – although I was not – to Anglo-Saxon and Old and Middle English studies and might well have appointed myself, along with others, a guardian of English in its historically or traditionally attested form. As it is, I turned to translation, partly no doubt in an effort to distinguish between my English and the French I heard at home. This turned out to be more attractive territory for me than study within the language.

The upshot of all this was that the multiplicity of Englishes was not a notion I found it hard to entertain. I very soon came to feel that I was not obliged to “protect” or “defend” English, or that when translating into it, I needed above all to ensure that the translated text read “as if it had been written in English in the first place”. Of course, I accepted that one wanted it to be read, but the target readership was not to be taken for granted, since we did not live in a homogeneous world. Translation is a process of negotiation – i.e. like politics, it is also the art of the real – but the linguistic exchange that occurs within the translator’s mind will also reflect what is happening to the language itself, the language in transit. And after all a living language is always in transit.

In short, translation, as has frequently been observed, does provide an opportunity for extending the range or expressive possibilities of the host language. The existence in our collective midst of so many writers of other-than-English languages, many of them also – “also”, without negative connotations! – writing in English, their bilingualism (or multilingualism) vividly and excitingly reflecting the interchange between languages and cultures, is surely something to be grateful for. Our sense is that this writing is more central to what is happening, from a writerly perspective, in this country than the lack of media attention might lead one to believe. This apparent indifference is odd, since the media are so hungry, we are told, and since so much emphasis is routinely placed on the positive value of ethnic and cultural diversity in this country.

The present issue of MPT provides samplings of the work of a range of non-English language or/and bilingual poets in England. Even while limiting ourselves to England itself, we have nevertheless found that the field is so large that we cannot hope to be comprehensive. We are furthermore restricted, as ever, by the availability of translations, or by the “translatability”, at this time, of much of the work. Of course, the poets themselves, in many instances, have provided translations of their own work, self-translation being a problematical matter that is currently being and will increasingly be debated, as the diversity of our linguistic culture comes to be more generally acknowledged. In short, then, the present issue is a first attempt, on our part, to draw attention to a still largely unrecognized or invisible body of writing and to address some of the issues that arise in connection with this writing.

 It needs also to be pointed out that, having regard to MPT’s brief, we have focused, with a few exceptions, on work translated into English, rather than on work written directly in English. Certainly no value judgment is implied by this. Indeed, that writing takes place in more than one language is wholly natural and deserves recognition. Given the now somewhat greater visibility in this country of translation itself, it is even arguable that the English language writing of those of recent immigrant origin is more thoroughly invisible than writing in their other mother tongues. In this connection we would particularly like to draw readers’ attention to The Redbeck Anthology of British South Asian Poetry (2000), edited by Debjani Chatterjee, the first anthology of contemporary poetry in English by South Asians in Britain. There is a need for more anthologies of this kind, but there is perhaps an even greater need for anthologies of poetry in the UK to reflect all (or at least as much as possible) of the writing taking place in this country, and not only that which was written in English (meaning generally standard English). As was pointed out by the Scottish poet, Robert Crawford, at a recent translation symposium under the auspices of the British Academy, comprehensive anthologies, such as the recent Penguin one edited by Paul Keegan, might well benefit from more attention being paid to Anglo-French and Renaissance Latin poetry, as well as more recent English poetry, written in German, or Bengali, or Turkish.

MPT generally presents poets with more than just one or two poems each. Aware that this practice further limited our ability adequately to sample such an abundance of writing as we have here, we relaxed the procedure. But we have not aimed at a rigorous consistency. We have presented what we could, to whatever extent we were able, and must make it clear that the amount of space given to authors in the present issue is largely due to circumstances and does not necessarily imply any judgment of relative merit. Frustratingly, there are many writers we became aware of as we were assembling this issue, who are not included here at all. This is not because we deemed them unworthy, but because we were unable to obtain translations in time or had run out of space.

As well as translations of poetry, this collection contains a number of short essays which from a linguistic and cultural point of view address the problems of writing not in English when surrounded by English. For reasons of space, we could not ask everyone. So, again we have been opportunistic. Some of the writers we extended invitations to took them up; others opted not to. We respect both forms of response.

The fact is that poets in particular continue to write in the language that comes to them at birth. In some cases more than a single language is involved and one of these is English. Anyway, the language of the country of adoption is English, and English is also a “world” language; indeed, whether one likes it or not, it is the world language. The incentive to write in it is therefore obvious. Furthermore, it may also, in a very special sense, be one of the writer’s own languages (if, for instance he or she is from the Subcontinent, or from many parts of Africa). English is no longer just the language of Shakespeare, or of the St James Bible, or of the BBC Home Service. It is, willy-nilly, a kind of international or interlingual language, as was Latin in its time. So, poets from diverse “mother-tongue” areas also write in English, that is in their English. Should “we”, the original English – I speak as a Jew of Polish/Belgian origin! – resent or resist this? “Should”, “Ought” – these hectoring terms are surely pretty meaningless. There is no precedent for what confronts us. English, by historical accident, is being called upon to stand in, as it were, for the multi-linguality of world culture. Those who, for whatever reason, find themselves now in this country – in this linguistic environment – are more than likely to enter the fray, to try their own hand at “English”, even if English is not one of their original mother tongues. The language is fluid and flexible enough, to entertain many versions of itself. The threat to linguistic diversity world-wide of such a dominant supra-national language, a lingua franca, is of course apparent as well, but at least English, for whatever reason, has managed to retain or regain an openness which is peculiarly appropriate at this time.

But is this beginning to sound jingoistic? To return to what I was saying earlier, the present issue of MPT represents a first attempt on our part to give some notion of what has been created in this country in many languages other than English, but which inevitably reflects Englishness and even, in a way, the English language itself, and which in its turn is also changing English and Englishness. The more recent arrivals here have to make a life for themselves too, and they have to believe that this country, this island – this England! – is also theirs. Nothing stops any of us from looking to Shakespeare or further back to The Canterbury Tales, or to Beowulf. (Ketaki Kushari Dyson, for instance, has translated Beowulf into Bengali, conveying it across languages, where Seamus Heaney has translated it up through the language into a modern English, having recourse, as he notes in his introduction, to some of the locutions of the Ulster English he grew up with.) The legacy, at the very least, is large enough to afford opportunities all round.

That very early on – when I was still co-editing this journal with Ted Hughes – we did have in mind an issue along the present lines, is of some significance. We were not, as has sometimes been suggested, interested only in what was happening in Eastern Europe. But we were not yet able to assimilate what was happening at home! Alvarez was out there, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, interviewing Holub and Popa and Herbert. But nobody, as far as I can remember, was interviewing Hatar, for instance, or Fried in this country. Poetry happens everywhere, but sometimes (often) it happens in languages which do not attract attention. We are the poorer for not experiencing it, at least to the extent that it can be experienced in translation. This is particularly true, surely, when it is actually happening next door!

I am enormously grateful to Stephen Watts, the co-editor of this issue of MPT, for putting me in touch with so much and so many. He has devoted much of his life precisely to trying to draw attention to the linguistic transactions proceeding in our midst, and to acting as a bridge between literary communities in this country, separated by language. The present issue could not have happened without him. As noted above, more material worthy of representation is arriving as we go to press. This is just a beginning.