From MARY O'DONNELL, poet, short-story writer, novelist, essayist, journalist, broadcaster & translator (Ireland)
It is always difficult to be dispassionate about cuts in arts funding, especially in the case of specific organisations or institutions. For this reason, I am writing to express dismay about the future cut - a complete elimination - of funding for Arc Publications. I write, not only as an Arc-published Irish poet ('The Ark Builders', 2009), whose work since publishing with Arc has received enormous publicity and interest throughout Spain, and is currently being translated there. I write also as one who has endorsed one of Arc's poetry-in-translation titles, "The Fishermen Sleep" by German poet Sabine Lange.
Indeed a great part of this publisher's gift to the British cultural world (and far beyond) undoubtedly rests with the keen attention paid to the voice of poets we might not otherwise ever hear of - from Mourid Barghouti, the Palestinian poet, to Irish-language poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh and Sabine Lange (above). It is this kind of attention to other languages and what is happening within them that sets Arc apart from the rest.
Naturally, as a practising poet the visibility of whose work has increased considerably because of the presence of Arc, I am personally disappointed. But the thrust of this letter is not based on self-interest, so much as wondering how many more drops of the financial axe will occur before the voice of poetry - after all, at the heart of the culture whether we admit it or not - is eliminated completely? The answer to this question is critical to all of us, because the cross-pollination that occurs through the refinement of language, whether in translation or in English, is a vital part of the literate world we pay so much lip-service to.
Finally, one has to ask if we are doomed as a result of the cuts taken in a spirit of largely virtuous pragmatism, to know the price of everything, but the value of nothing?