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

I had intended writing a longer and more considered introduction to this collection of poetry written in England in languages other than English over the past thirty to forty years and I believe very strongly that these poetries deserve to be both very highly and radically considered. Moreover I think that the quality of English language poetry, and the contexts of poetry in England* in its widest sense, necessitates a reasoned, open and measured consideration of these poetries. However I’ve put all my energies into editing this ‘Mother Tongues’ issue of MPT and a longer essay must wait for another time.

Two or three things can however be quickly said: this issue collects a range of poetry written in England (rather, in this instance, than Britain*) over the past forty years, with some emphasis given to writing from the 1990s. We would want to stress this as the raison d’être that gathers these poems together, and clearly there are many cultural and political issues, of language and poetics, of balance and power, raised by this. It’s widely argued and agreed that England is a multicultural society, almost to the point where the word ‘multicultural’ has lost its cultural strength and acuity: but England is now also multilingual. More than 300 languages are spoken by children in London, for instance, in their daily lives: and poets living in London write in many of these. The purpose of bringing this collection together is to focus at least some belated and long deserved attention on the range and qualities of much of this poetry. After all, this is nothing new: poets have been bringing their work and translations into the English traditions since the time of Chaucer, or since Bede or Beowulf. Why not, then, be open to what is happening now.

We are not assuming a unity of voices, cultures or concerns, and indeed we are assuming or trying to indicate the great range of and differences within the voices of contemporary poetry in England. It seems important also to add that some of the poets in these pages have unique voices, even when their sense of their own poetry is communal, and that some of the poets are writing in unique voices beyond the range of contemporary English language poets. The vibrancy and richness of poetry in English now surely depends in part on poetry in the English language being open to the cultural experience and diversity and to the poetics of many of the poets in these pages. Translations also matter for other reasons: as Dominic Rai (Artistic Director of the British-Panjabi Theatre Company, ‘Man Mela’) has said: “Panjabi is the second most widely spoken language in England. There are many thousands of people who speak it every day but who don’t necessarily know how to read and write, for example, either the Gurmakhi used by Amarjit Chandan or the Persian script used by Mazhar Tirmazi. For that reason, it is important to translate their works into English in order to reach the widest possible audience and enable the Panjabi community to understand its cultural heritage. There is a massive audience out there.” Similar arguments also apply to other writers and communities of readers: Bengali is perhaps as widely spoken as Panjabi and there is a great need to translate works from Bengali into English. London has become a major centre of Arab journalism in the world, so why don’t we have more in English translation of Arab poets in London?

A number of the poets in these pages write from a position of exile or asylum and some of them would strongly want to be identified as such. Others, however, are not writing from such a position of exile at all or would not wish any such definition in or for their writings. We would not want to make any assumptions on behalf of poets who are, after all, speaking superbly for themselves, and we would want to stress that the criteria for inclusion here have been on the one hand language and the need for translation (thus, with very few exceptions, we have not in this translation journal included poems written originally in English)and secondly, where possible, the quality of the poetry in translation.

Finally there are of course regrets: in particular that we couldn’t in the end include certain poets and also that we’ve had to restrict some of the selections from poets we have been able to include. Avrom Stencl, the Yiddish poet who lived in Whitechapel from 1936 until his death in 1986 (a time span not unlike Erich Fried’s life in London) proved very difficult to obtain in translations that did him justice. And writing from the Yiddish Writers Group, which has met almost continuously in East London from 1938 and still flourishes, is also absent. Arab poets are not as widely included as they should be and I feel particularly apologetic to Fadhil Sultani, Salah Niazi and Sa’adi Youssef, in the knowledge and hope that translations of their work can be included in the forthcoming MPT issue featuring the poetry of Iraq. Nizar Qabbani, the great Syrian poet who lived the last years of his life in London, is available in two recent book-length translations and we have not found new English versions to include here. Among German language poets, Franz Baumann Steiner has not been included since an earlier issue of MPT was entirely devoted to his poetry, and we are sorry not to have poetry by that fine poet Stella Rotenberg, who has lived in Leeds for many years. The Kosovo Albanian poet, Rrahman Dedaj, has been living in London since the late 1990s, but we have not managed to gather new translations of his work. Tamil and Gujarati poets live in Britain and we haven’t managed to include them, neither has there been room for the Kurdish poet and translator Kamal Mirawdeli or the Azeri poet and scholar Reza Sabri-Tabrizi, or a number of Iranian poets based in London beyond those we have included. The only translations from African language poets that we have included are the two long poems from Somali: which is important, since a number of Somali writers and intellectuals have been in exile in Britain since the late 1980s and these are among the first translations of contemporary Somali poetry to appear in this country. We nevertheless regret not having been able to include work by other poets from the wide range of African languages.

Naming these omissions we would however prefer to celebrate poets such as Erich Fried, Esmail Khoi, Adam Czerniawski, Yang Lian, Amjad Nasser, and all the other fine writers we have been able to include. Our hope is that this collection will stimulate some deeper concern and interest in the non-English language poetries of this country and will help provoke far wider publication of good translations of what is often astonishing work. It is maybe worth bearing in mind that an anthology of poetry in translation by Greek writers in Australia ran to 556 pages, and that anthologies of Australian-Macedonian, Australian-Italian, Australian-Ukrainian, Australian-Russian and other poetries have been published there, in addition to many individual collections. A bibliography of translations published in England would be larger than might be thought : but there is still in this country a striking ignorance as to the range and quality of non-English language poetries being written here. May that soon change, and readings that include mainstream British poets with some of the major poets included here, or Poetry Internationals of poets living in London, for instance, become an obvious and natural part of reading circuits, however beautiful and sharp and radical a cultural shift that may require.

I should like to thank in particular all the poets and translators who have contributed work to this issue, as well as Norma Rinsler and Daniel Weissbort, editor of MPT, with whom it has been a pleasure to work, Wendy Pank at King’s College London for her patience, and also the Multicultural Arts Consortium(MAC) in Tower Hamlets where much of the editorial work on this issue was done.