From GEORGE SZIRTES, poet & translator
Arc is indispensable. There is no other press that publishes poetry from other important languages and cultures, what is more in bilingual editions, in the way Arc does. Arc's list is a vital source of new ideas and new voices in our rather parochial English language poetry, without which UK poetry is more likely to stagnate. I myself have recently edited an anthology of younger Hungarian poets for Arc, in which I try to take stock of the impact of major political and social changes on the imaginations of poets coming to maturity after the key year of 1989. Nobody else has done this, as far as I am aware, and it is Arc who were prepared to publish the book and help to bring some of the contributors over. These contributors will be the major figures in Hungarian poetry for the next twenty years. Some of them already are.
As concerns myself, my work as a poet and translator is widely known in the UK and abroad (books in Italy, Romania and Hungary, with Germany to come) and, despite being a Hungarian refugee, I have won some of the major prizes in English poetry. I stress this because international contact has been vital to me and to others. I have been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 1982 and have been translating poetry and fiction from the Hungarian since 1984, winning various prizes along the way. This isn't about me, of course, it is about my faith in Arc and in my reliance on them. Shutting off support for Arc is shutting the door in the face of important and revivifying work from outside this country, as well as work from within.
It is no use saying that ACE is supporting younger writers when it is clearly closing off the publishers where such writers can appear. Please think again about Arc.