From RICHARD DOVE, poet & translator
It is devastating news that Arc Publications is down to lose its Arts Council funding from 2012 onwards - not just for me, as the translator of one of the volumes in their "Visible Poets" translation series, but for the literary landscape in the UK. A cursory look at Arc's current titles and backlist makes it immediately clear that they are committed not just to first-class work written in these islands but also (and not least) to innovative literary developments right round Europe and beyond. To that extent, they are a legitimate successor to the "Modern Poetry in Translation" project initiated in the 1960s by Ted Hughes, dedicated to importing new energies into British writing. This is not the first time that a disaster of this magnitude has threatened; in the early 1990s, in an earlier retrenchment exercise, the Arts Council funding for AGENDA, at the time Britain's only truly cosmopolitan poetry magazine, was withdrawn after more than 30 years, dealing a severe body-blow to the Poundian editor William Cookson. It is self-evident that the government has to make cuts at a time of austerity; but these must be judicious, removing superfluous fat and not muscle and bone. I urge you to reconsider and reverse the calamitous decision to withdraw funding from one of the publishing houses which is giving so much to the literary life of our country; it would be hard to think of a case where the term "counterproductive" would be more appropriate.