Ulrike Almut Sandig on Zbigniew Herbert MPT@50

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25th October 2016

When Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort founded Modern Poetry in Translation they wanted to give voice to poetry from the ‘centre of cataclysm’. They believed that exposing English-language poetry to this ‘insistent’ poetry would stimulate English-language poetry and revitalise it.

Fifty years later the centres of cataclysm are many and various but the poetry in this first issue is as vital and insistent as ever. MPT asked poets in the UK and in Eastern Europe to respond to the work in the first issue in poetry and prose. Read their poems and their discussions of the issue and what it means to them.

Ulrike Almut Sandig writing after 'Poem' by Zbigniew Herbert discussion and a new poem translated by Karen Leeder