Poetry Translation

Bringing poetry across languages and literary traditions.

Translation sits at the heart of several of our researchers’ practice. Dr Nikolai Duffy is the editor of Rosmarie Waldrop’s selected poems, Gap Gardening (New Directions, 2016), and his own critical work, Relative Strangeness: Reading Rosmarie Waldrop (Shearsman, 2014), examines translation and cross-language poetics in depth.

As part of a UNESCO City of Literature with over 200 languages spoken across its communities, we see translation as a natural extension of Manchester Poetry Library’s wider mission — growing a collection that represents as many of the city’s language communities as possible, and running events, workshops and readings that bring international poetry into English and English-language poetry into dialogue with other traditions.

Mother Tongue Other Tongue, our schools poetry competition, is itself a translation project at heart: young people share poems from a language spoken at home, or write original work in a language they are learning.