Daniel Weissbort

Daniel Weissbort
Daniel Weissbort with Regina Derieva at the Kulturhuset in Stockholm. Ars Interpres Poetry Festival, October, 2004. ...
Born	Daniel Jack Weissbort
Website	http://www.mptmagazine.com/page/danielweissbort

Daniel Weissbort (April 30, 1935 - November 18, 2013) was a poet, translator, multilingual academic and (together with Ted Hughes) Modern Poetry in Translation founder and editor. He died at the age of 78, and was buried in the Brompton Cemetery in west London.

Daniel Weissbort was born in London in 1935, educated at St. Paul's school and Cambridge where he was a History Exhibitioner. Weissbort. In 1965, with Ted Hughes, founded the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT) which he edited for almost 40 years. In the early Seventies he went to the USA where he directed, for over thirty years, the Translation Workshop and MFA Program in Translation at the University of Iowa.

He was a Professor (Emeritus) of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa, Research Fellow in the English Department at King's College, London University and Honorary Professor in the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick.

Daniel Weissbort's anthologies of Russian poetry and of East European poetry are well known and he has also published many collections of his own poetry. Anvil Press has published his translational memoir of the late Joseph Brodsky, From Russian with Love. He has co-edited, for Oxford University Press, a historical reader in translation theory, which was published in 2006. He has written a book on Ted Hughes and Translation and for Faber he has edited the Selected Translations of Ted Hughes.

Daniel died in November 2013.

Ted Hughes has stated that "It’s hard to imagine how anything could be more natural, relaxed and true to the writer's self, true to his secret, personal life, than Daniel Weissbort's poems. Maybe his many years of translating and sieving through translations of worldwide modern poetry have had something to do with it. He seems to have come out somewhere beyond poetic styles and mannerisms. His poems now have a peculiar, naked life. They move in a frankness and inner freedom and simplicity that seem to belong hardly at all to literature. Yet they leave an impression of intense patterns, a rich, artistic substance. In this new collection he has broken into new material, and brought his qualities to a pitch that will, for many of us, change the possibilities of English poetry. That's a large claim, but I think it can be made."