Centres of Cataclysm - Couverture souple

David Constantine has published several volumes of poetry (Elder 2014 being the most recent); also two novels (the second, The Life-Writer, in 2015) and four volumes of short stories. He is an editor and translator of Hölderlin, Goethe, Kleist and Brecht. For his stories he won the BBC National and the Frank O Connor International Awards (2010, 2013). With Helen Constantine he edited Modern Poetry in Translation, 2003-12.

Helen Constantine taught languages in schools until 2000, when she became a full-time translator. Her volumes of translated stories, Paris Tales, Paris Metro Tales and French Tales are published by OUP, and a fourth volume, Paris Street Tales will be published in September. She is general editor of a series of City Tales for Oxford University Press. Her translations include Mademoiselle de Maupin by Théophile Gautier, Dangerous Liaisons by Choderlos de Laclos, The Wild Ass's Skin by Balzac, The Conquest of Plassans by Zola and Flaubert s Sentimental Education for OUP. She is married to the writer David Constantine, and formerly co-edited Modern Poetry in Translation.

Sasha Dugdale is editor of Modern Poetry in Translation. She has translated a number of contemporary Russian poets, including Tatiana Shcherbina, Elena Shvarts and Maria Stepanova. Her translations of Elena Shvarts Birdsong on the Seabed (Bloodaxe Books, 2008) were shortlisted for the Popescu and Academica Rossica Awards. She has published three collections of poetry with Carcanet, the most recent being Red House (2011), and she co-edited The Best British Poetry 2012 (Salt). She is co-director of the Winchester Poetry Festival.

Centres of Cataclysm celebrates the fifty-year history of Modern Poetry in Translation, one of the world's most innovative and exciting poetry magazines. Founded in 1965 by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort, MPT has constantly introduced courageous and revolutionary poets of the 20th and 21st century to English-speaking readers. Ted Hughes thought of MPT as an airport for incoming translations - from the whole world, across frontiers of space and time. These are poems we cannot do without.

The anthology is not arranged chronologically but, from a variety of perspectives, it addresses half a century of war, oppression, revolution, hope and survival. In so doing, it truthfully says and vigorously defends the human. In among the poems are illuminating letters, essays and notes on the poets, on the world in which they lived and on the enterprise of translating them.

' MPT seeks a real diversity of voices: women and men equally, different centuries, countries, races, creeds, languages, cultures, ideas. The very essence of the founding principle was: Your view is not the only one.' David & Helen Constantine

'The burning heart of cataclysm at the centre of the anthology is drawn out; through translation, migration and exile, it is transplanted into another soil. The word spoken under duress becomes a word of affirmation: a protection and a stating of our own humanity.' Sasha Dugdale