Clare Pollard

Translated poetry, once a niche within a niche, seems to be growing in popularity for a new generation of writers and readers. Translated poems within the major magazines have become commonplace – this year Poetry Review, under Emily Berry, has been publishing poets such as Stella N’Djoku translated by Julia Anastasia Pelosi-Thorpe and Hagiwara Sakutarō translated by Jae Kim, whilst André Naffis-Sahely’s inaugural issue as poetry editor of Poetry London contained translations from Amharic, Arabic, French, Persian and Portuguese. Naffis-Sahely is, of course, a wonderful translator himself, whose translations of the Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi came out with the Poetry Translation Centre this summer.

It is great to see poets from other languages taking their rightful place in anthologies too – Hazel Press’ deeply enjoyable O, a collection of poems on female pleasure edited by Anna Selby, features translations of Kim Hyesoon, Forugh Farrokzhad and Kutti Revathi, along with Zoe Brigley’s memorable version of Gwerful Mechain’s medieval ‘Ode to my Cunt’.

My own co-translation of Anna T. Szabo’s Trust came out with Arc this spring, the results of our friendship over 17 years – all that time ago, when I first visited Hungary with the British Council, I recall being surprised by how nearly every poet I met there also translated as part of their practise. Now poet-translators in the UK seem to abound – from Khairani Barokka to Shash Trevett to Juana Adcock, many of the most exciting poets are enriched by their multilingualism.

Another important shift has been in who gets to be translated. There was a time when white, male, so-called ‘major’ poets dominated (with the fact that certain European countries gave out generous grants making them far more likely to be published as well). Recently, organisations such as PEN and the PTC, with their Sarah Maguire Prize, have been trying to create a much-needed shift towards majority world poets. Presses have also shifted from heavy, exhaustive collections towards fresher, more fleet-footed translation pamphlets. Highlights this year have included Simone Atangana Bekono’s How the First Sparks Became Visible translated by David Colmer (The Emma Press), Anar’s Leaving, translated by Hari Rajaledchumy and Fran Lock (PTC), and the superb Translating Feminisms pamphlets on Indonesian and Filipino poets (Tilted Axis).

All of these, notably, recentre women’s voices. The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation has also done important work in shifting the gender imbalance, with Sasha Dugdale’s translation of Maria Stepanova, The War of the Beasts and the Animals (Bloodaxe), on the shortlist this year and surely likely to appear on many books of 2021 lists. I can only compare my experience of reading the title poem to that of reading ‘The Waste Land’ for the first time – it is so astonishing, and the effort that has gone into translating it immense.

Elsewhere, the trend for female or nonbinary translations of major texts has continued with Maria Dahvana Headley’s hugely successful Beowulf (that begins with the proclamation ‘Bro!’), and Hollie McNish and Kae Tempest taking on Sophocles’ Antigone and Philoctetes respectively. We all wait patiently for Emily Wilson’s Iliad, but in the meantime it feels like a golden period for translations that are making us rethink the canon.

Clare Pollard has published five collections of poetry and is the editor of Modern Poetry in Translation  

Neil Astley

We are delighted to have another pair of Bloodaxe collections on this year’s T.S. Eliot shortlist, Hannah Lowe’s third collection The Kids and Selima Hill’s twentieth, Men Who Feed Pigeons. Two poets from Bloodaxe’s multigenerational list: Selima Hill, whose first Bloodaxe collection, A Little Book of Meat, appeared in 1993, and Hannah Lowe, thirty years younger, who published her debut, Chick, with Bloodaxe in 2013.

As well as continuing to publish and support poets we’ve published for many years, we’ve played our part in the diversification of British poetry, which began for us back in the 1980s with the publication of E.A. Markham’s seminal anthology Hinterland – soon made an Open University set text – including poets Bloodaxe went on to publish: James Berry, Kamau Brathwaite, Fred D’Aguiar, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Grace Nichols, Olive Senior.

Thirty years ago, in 1991, Jackie Kay’s The Adoption Papers – rejected by the London poetry publishers – was our first debut collection by a poet of colour. In the course of the next decade, Imtiaz Dharker was first published in the UK by Bloodaxe; other poets joining her on the Bloodaxe list included John Agard, Moniza Alvi, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, Jack Mapanje and Benjamin Zephaniah.

Our international list was expanded to include Aimé Césaire from Martinique, Martin Carter from Guyana, Tishani Doshi and Arundhathi Subramaniam from India, and Elizabeth Alexander (Obama’s inaugural poet) and Patricia Smith from the US. Debut collections followed from Bernardine Evaristo (Lara, rewritten and expanded after its original publisher folded), Amali Gunasekera (formerly Rodrigo), Jacob Sam-La Rose, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Shazea Quraishi, and of course, Hannah Lowe.

There have also been several Bloodaxe anthologies of poets of colour, including three in the Ten series showcasing the work of 30 poets from the Complete Works mentoring scheme founded by Bernardine Evaristo and directed by Nathalie Teitler. Inspired by the Complete Works, Bloodaxe and NCLA (Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts) launched the James Berry Poetry Prize this spring, the first poetry award in the UK to offer both mentoring and book publication. The three equal winners of the inaugural prize, Kaycee Hill, Marjorie Lotfi and Yvette Siegert, will be mentored over the next year by Malika Booker, Mimi Khalvati and Mona Arshi, and will see their debut book-length collections published by Bloodaxe in 2023.

Michael Schmidt

Carcanet is proud to have the only first collection on this year’s T.S. Eliot prize shortlist. Victoria Kennefick featured in our New Poetries introductory series in January and her book came out three months later. It had a tremendous reception despite lockdown, with reviews and on-line events. She is a strong performer. She refuses to behave herself in the themes she chooses to explore, and she is formally as ambitious as she is experimental. She is also a committed reader of other people’s poetry, and her roots and rhythms reach back in time, not just decades but centuries.

Victoria is the kind of poet my associate publisher John McAuliffe and I are always thrilled to discover. She is not part of a mainstream, and though she has studied creative writing, she has got well beyond the karaoke phase that some would-be poets never get beyond, as they mix and match but never quite make something of their own. We are delighted the judges have singled her out – surprisingly, she is also the only Irish poet on this year’s list.

For Carcanet, this has been a remarkable year for first collections, with books by Jason Allen-Paisant, Parwana Fayyaz and Isobel Williams, as well as Victoria. What is exciting is how different each book is from the others, the integrity and ambition of each poet’s approach, and their thematic and geographical range. Next year looks like providing another harvest of fine first books, by Padraig Regan, Stav Poleg, Colm Toibin, Celia Sorhaindo, J.G. Ying and Joseph Minden. We are also bringing a number of poets from around the Anglophone world into circulation in the UK for the first time.

Over its now 51 years Carcanet has had many poets listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize and two of them – Sinead Morrissey and Les Murray – have won the laurels. At a time when review culture has rather run out of steam and space, and so many of the journals that used to feature poetry and poetry reviews have folded, awards are often spotlights – their shortlists which attract readers to debate with one another are a godsend to publishers. And the winning poet is news, over and above the important thing, which is the poetry itself. Perhaps the shortlist poets most want to be on is the TSE. Its spotlights shine brighter each year. Long may it thrive.