From ANNA CROWE, poet & translator & co-founder of StAnza Poetry Festival
The Arts Council decision to cancel funding for Arc from 2012 is utterly incomprehensible. I can only assume that those who take these decisions know absolutely nothing about the high regard in which this publisher stands in the world of literature and poetry publishing, especially the publishing of poetry in translation. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of translating the poetry of other nations and cultures in terms of the understanding and goodwill it fosters and brings into existence. English readers NEED to be be able to read the best poetry that is being written elsewhere, and Arc has for the past ten years pioneered bilingual editions of poetry.
I am a published poet and translator. I co-founded StAnza, Scotland's International Poetry Festival, and was its artistic director for the first seven years. I have twice won the Peterloo Poetry Competition, and my last book, 'Figure in a Landscape', was a PBS Pamphlet Choice in 2010. My book of translations of the Catalan poet, Joan Margarit, 'Tugs in the fog', was the PBS Recommended Translation in 2006. A second volume, 'Strangely Happy', is being published this year, both by Bloodaxe. I had been asked by Tony Ward of Arc to start work this
year on an anthology of Catalan poetry, in their series 'New Voices from Europe and Beyond'. He had also accepted a proposal to publish a volume of poems in translation of the eminent Mexican poet, Pedro Serrano, whose work is becoming widely appreciated in Britain from readings he has given at festivals and academic institutions. With these proposed cuts, it seems that none of this will happen.
The poet Sarah Maguire, director of the Poetry Translation Centre at
SOAS, said in a lecture she gave on Poetry Translation at StAnza, that "to translate poetry is the opposite of to make war". For the past ten years, Arc has been at the forefront of this positive and peaceful activity, having brought out more than 40 volumes of poetry in parallel text, a unique achievement, and one which deserves medals, not cuts! I am sure that literary bodies such as the Cervantes Insitute and the Ramon Llull Institute will find the decision of the Arts Council deliberately to stamp on the work of such high calibre as incomprehensible and reprehensible as does the rest of the poetry world. This decision needs to be reviewed and reversed, as quickly as possible, if the Arts Council is to retain any credibility with the wider public.