Hughes' Poetic Translations

Selected Translations: Poems 

by Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes' Selected Translations, edited by Daniel Weissbort, provides a thorough understanding of Hughes as a limitless interpreter of world literature as well as an English poet. The volume, which collects his work from several decades, covers modernist poetry, classical drama, ancient mythology, and experimental theater.

The book contains passages from religious writings like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, as well as classical Greek dramatists like Euripides' Alcestis and Aeschylus' Oresteia.

It also includes pieces by contemporaries from the 20th century, such as Paul Éluard, Yehuda Amichai, Jürgen Pilinszky, Vasko Popa, and Yves Bonnefoy. Additionally, it contains passages from Hughes's essays, letters, and unpublished manuscripts, as well as passages from Orghast, a dramatic work written in an invented language derived from Greek and Farsi.

Hughes was a well-known proponent of literal rendering as opposed to poetic embellishment. He maintained that adding superfluous devices to convey the "spirit" of a poem weakens the piece. His translations translate ancient violence and metamorphosis into straightforward, muscular English while maintaining the elemental, mythic, and brutal intensity found in his own poetry (such as Crow or Gaudete). Hughes believed that translated poetry was a universal language that could transcend ideological differences, and he co-founded the Modern Poetry in Translation journal in 1965.

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