From DAVID and HELEN CONSTANTINE, Editors Modern Poetry in Translation
So now Arc, instead of getting on with what it is there for, what it does supremely well, must spend time, energy and vital money trying to persuade the Arts Council to reverse a decision that everybody having anything to do with poetry thinks wrong. Glance at Arc’s leaflet (their plea to be allowed to survive): the ACE logo is bang in the middle of the first page, where it proudly belongs, giving public money to support a press that for more than thirty years has done so much for the good of poetry, which is to say for the public good. The languages translated, the poets brought into English, that massive mutual benefit, the prizes won… It is wonderful to behold – and shameful that it has to be set out like that and distributed, to persuade where such persuasion should not be needed.
Discussing the condition of the arts, the word ‘ecology’ is used a lot nowadays. Poetry in that ecology is both indestructible and very precarious. Poetry will always get written because human beings need it. But poetry won’t survive and work where it belongs, in public life, in the res publica, unless the State, acknowledging that need, supports it. In this spring’s distribution and refusal of funds Modern Poetry in Translation was one of the lucky ones and we are glad and grateful. But the refusal to fund Arc (and Enitharmon, the PBS, the Poetry Trust and others) touches us very closely. We are weakened without them. Arc and MPT have many poets and translators in common. Next week we shall publish a pamphlet of new poems by the Estonian poet Kristiina Ehin, translated by Ilmar Lehtpere. Poet and translator came to us in the confidence and with the reputation given to them by Arc. Larisa Miller, Miklós Radnóti, Francis Jones, Amarjit Chandan, Doris Kareva, Soleïman Adel Guémar… these are our writers too. Our condition is weakened when we can’t look to friends and colleagues around us and share with them. The cuts diminish our capacity for mutual aid.
Britain, despite its difficulties, is still ‘a rich and fruitful land’. Poetry is not a luxury, and poetry from abroad, well translated, fetched into English so that our native writing and culture shall be continually confronted by the foreign, does it still need saying how much this island in its insularity needs all that? We repeat: Arc for many years has been energetic in the public interest. We are only asking that they be allowed to continue their good work.