From ILDIKO TAKACS, Director, Cultural Counsellor, Hungarian Cultural Centre, London, President of EUNIC London Cluster
The Hungarian Cultural Centre has had several years of fruitful cooperation with Arc Publications, a small poetry press that brings out poetry in translation among many of its pioneering projects. Arc has long been known to be ready to take risks and promote poets writing in such small languages as Hungarian. Not only that, but the Hungarian Cultural Centre has always noted Arc for the high quality of their publications, a very good example of which is New Order: Hungarian Poets of the Post 1989 Generation (2010), edited by the renowned Hungarian-born English poet, George Szirtes. The publication is daring and crucial in that it provides the opportunity for a dozen young Hungarian poets to have their voices heard in English and be read by a much wider audience than without it.
The Hungarian Cultural Centre had several joint projects with Arc Publications in the past. At present we are organising further joined projects which involve two Hungarian poets being presented at the Ledbury Poetry Festival and the Hebden Bridge Arts Festival this year. The decision of Arts Council England to stop the funding of Arc Publications at the end of the coming financial year puts our projects with this invaluable small poetry press at risk. The Hungarian Cultural Centre has always known Arc Publications to play a similarly crucial role to the journal Modern Poetry in Translation, which has been granted the funding for supporting ‘poetry, new writers and literature in translation.’