Ted Hughes: Selected Translations - Softcover

The achievement of Ted Hughes as a poet is inseparable from his achievement as a translator of poetry and poetic drama. Throughout a long and intensely productive career, Hughes was continuously engaged in acts of translation, for the page and for the stage, starting with his role in the establishment of the annual Poetry International in London and the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation. The present volume selects from his versions of a wide variety of ancient texts – Aeschylus, Euripides, Ovid, Seneca, Racine – and equally from a range of twentieth-century European poets and dramatists. Here, for the first time, Hughes the translator can be placed in steady relation to Hughes the poet.

Daniel Weissbort and Ted Hughes founded the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation in 1965. Until 1999 Weissbort directed the Translation Program at the University of Iowa. His has published anthologies of Russian and East European poetry as well as collections of his own poetry. Ted Hughes and Weissbort edited a Selected Poems of Yehuda Amichai (Faber, 2000). Weissbort is Honorary Professor in the Centre for Translation at the University of Warwick. Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was born in Yorkshire. His first book, The Hawk in the Rain, was published in 1957 by Faber and Faber and was followed by many volumes of poetry and prose for adults and children. He received the Whitbread Book of the Year for two consecutive years for his last published collections of poetry, Tales from Ovid (1997) and Birthday Letters (1998). He was Poet Laureate from 1984, and in 1998 he was appointed to the Order of Merit. Among Ted Hughes's translations Faber and Faber have published Aeschylus The Oresteia (1999), Euripides's Alcestis (2000) and Tales from Ovid (2002).