The Visible Poets series

In her introduction to the 'Visible Poets' series, Jean Boase-Beier explains how the series reflects a particular approach to translation:

"There is a prevailing view of translated poetry, especially in England, which maintains that it should read as though it had originally been written in English. The books in the 'Visible Poets' series aim to challenge that view. They assume that the reader of poetry is by definition someone who wants to experience the strange, the unusual, the new, the foreign, someone who delights in the stretching and distortion of language which makes any poetry, translated or not, alive and distinctive.

"The translators of the poets in this series aim not to hide but to reveal the original, to make it visible and, in so doing, to render visible the translator's task too. The reader is invited not only to experience the unique fusion of the creative talents of poet and translator embodied in the English poems in these collections, but also to speculate on the processes of their creation and so to gain a deeper understanding and enjoyment of both original and translated poems."

"While not always enjoying the work in this series, I applaud Arc's dedication in bringing us new poets and their worlds, commonplace and bizarre, in English. Not everything unknown can be easily understood and quantified, and that is a good thing. It kept the reviewer absorbed, and it will keep the reader sharp." Fiona Curran, Orbis 138, Autumn 2006