The Penguin Book of Modern Verse Translation

Book excerpt: This is the first book of its kind. It contains some two hundred and fifty poems by the major English and American poets from Swinburne and Hopkins to Robert Lowell; each poem is a translation of imitation of a work in a foreign tongue. Twenty-two languages are represented in this glittering collection. They range from Hebrew and classical Greek to modern Chinese, from Polish to Korean. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, Richard Wilbur, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald are included--each a master in his own right, but seen here as the re-creator of another poet's voice. George Steiner believes that ours is the most beautiful period of poetic translation since the Elizabethans. Here is his evidence.--Cover