News and Notes

Forgive and Remember • Mary de Rachewiltz, the daughter of Ohio-born Olga Rudge, a concert violinist, and Ezra Pound, has died at the age of 103 at her thirteenth-century castle Schloss Brunnenburg, outside Merano, Italy. Rudge and Pound were not married when she was born and to preserve their artistic freedom they assigned her to the care of what are described, idyllically or patronisingly, as ‘a peasant couple’, Jakob and Hanne Marcher. Rachewiltz learned to be a shepherdess and to speak the local German dialect. Despite her parents’ neglect of her, she became a devoted advocate of her father and his work, forcefully making the case for him in the teeth of his politics until her last years. At Pound’s insistence to start with, she translated the early Cantos into Italian to improve her English.

She opened Schloss Brunnenburg (which she had restored with her husband Boris de Rachewiltz, a Russian-Italian aristocrat who became an Egyptologist, in 1946) to Pound scholars. After his release from incarceration in the United States, Pound lived with her for a time at the Schloss, but preferred Venice and the care of Olga Rudge, who nursed him until his death in 1972.

Mary minimized the importance of her father’s notorious wartime broadcasts on Italian radio and his politics more generally. In 2012 she told the Guardian, ‘He fell into certain antisemitic clichés that were rampant in Europe and the U.S. at the time’, as though that was a sufficient explanation. Her translation of The Cantos was published in 1985. She curated Pound’s largest archival collection, held at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, and established the Ezra Pound Center for Literature at Brunnenburg.


Translation and Medicine • Martin Kratz writes: ‘Our hearts have been breaking for years now’, says Irina Sadovina during an early morning session, while discussing her translation of White Moss by Nenets writer Anna Nerkagi. This was in response to a question by her interlocutor, poet Anita Ngai, who had asked about the reception of works translated from Russian in the current geopolitical climate. According to Sadovina, the book’s reception had been as it was in that room at that moment: people turning up to soft spaces like Manchester Poetry Library, because they, like the translator, believe there is medicine in a book, in the activity of translating, in the gentle conversations around it.

Manchester Poetry Library was hosting the fourth Manchester Translation Series (MTS26), a programme produced annually by poet and editor Brian Sneeden. The two-day programme was a more compact affair than previous week-long iterations, which first began in 2023, with a residency featuring Najwan Darwish and his translator Kareem Abu-Zeid.

I borrow the word ‘medicine’ from Lorna Goodison. It had come up in the discussion we had with Colin Bramwell as part of MTS26 the previous day. I have read two versions of the Inferno, the Hollanders’ and the excellent new one by Goodison. Both times I’ve read it in instalments, because I find it hard to stay in the poem’s murky atmosphere for too long. But Goodison felt the need to push back against my insistence that being in that space must have been so much more difficult for someone translating the book and not just reading it. ‘There’s medicine in this poem’, she says. ‘The things we do matter and have consequences.’

A few days later, I came across the following passage in Tree Spirits Grass Spirits (Nightboat Books, 2023) by Hiromi Ito, translated by Jon L. Pitt, in which Ito is thinking about a particular translation of her own work from Japanese into English: ‘Sometimes, I find places in the translation that make me think, “So that’s what it was,” or, “So that’s what I was trying to say”. It’s like a dream. It feels comforting, like something is being cured deep in my subconscious.’

MTS26 may well have felt dreamlike to speakers like Goodison and Bramwell, as well as Melissa Tanti, Rahul Soni and others as they joined us from timelines so disparate that they were variously talking to us in the evening, too early in the morning or in the middle of the night. But it was dreamlike also in the way it connected translation and the subconscious throughout. As Tanti said: ‘Seeking for the right word, we are reminded of the origin of language – the need to express our desire’. Seeking for the right word, or rather the Word, brings us back to Sadovina. In the novel, a Nenets Word is something carefully sought by elders as a vehicle for what may not always be wisdom exactly, but one for growth and connection, even when the Word is painful. We need more Words.


Poetry Booming Again • It’s odd how the term ‘poetry’ embraces so many forms of publication: epics, lyrics, insta-poems, translations from dead languages, translations from living languages… On 3 August, the Guardian touched a perennial string, with the headline, ‘A Homer run: Poetry poised to hit its all-time UK high’. It spoke of ‘Britain’s poetry sector’ dominated by a film adaptation of the Odyssey: ‘by 2026’s end the category is almost certain to obliterate its all-time high-water since accurate records began’.

As usual what is being measured is not quality but quantity and the source of the statistics is again NielsenIQ BookScan’s Poetry Texts & Poetry Anthologies product class. This excludes a substantial portion of sales including book clubs and direct marketing. The numbers are big: poetry ‘has earned just above £8m in the first 30 weeks of 2026 through BookScan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM), 13.3% up against the same period last year’, thanks to Homer, now also known as Nolan, responsible for 12 percent of the total poetry harvest. Homer may outstrip the 2017 record-holding before the year is out. Donna Ashworth has given Rupi Kaur a serious run for her money in recent years and is the best-selling living poet of the current decade. She has a new book coming out in October and may still outstrip Homer. Not that he will much care.


Privileging • On 28 July Heather Cox Richardson in her always vivid ‘Letter from an American’ reported that ‘the Trump-appointed judges of the Presidential 1776 Award competition, emceed by Education Secretary Linda McMahon, apparently rigged the competition to cut out a seventeen-year-old Indian immigrant in favor of a homeschooled blonde girl from Wyoming, a Michigan boy who attended a private Catholic school, and a girl from Washington who told CNN she supported Trump and wanted to see “everyone walking away from the competition knowing this is the greatest country of the world.” In order to privilege white contestants over an immigrant, the judges apparently changed the acceptable answers to questions about our history. This story mirrors the larger attempt of the Trump administration to rewrite the history of the United States. Trump officials reject our traditional understanding that the country was based on the ideas the Founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence and that Americans from all walks of life have struggled ever since to make those principles come to life.’


Deliver-rumi • A news story reported throughout the Anglophone world featured Wang Jibing, a food delivery rider in China, who ‘scooped’ one of China’s top literary awards, Lu Xun Literary Prize, named for ‘the father of modern Chinese literature’. Wang Jibing had posted essays and poems on social media for years before the work caught China’s literary ear. The book including his work, compiled from manuscripts on scraps of paper jotted down between deliveries, is called Low Flight and grows out of his daily experiences. The poet is fifty-six years old, and he became a delivery rider in 2019. He belongs to a culture of blue-collar workers now praised for their writing, a trend that reflects the pressures they face in China’s ‘massive gig economy’. Wang is not giving up the day job, despite the relatively lucrative win. He loves the work and ‘it keeps me fit’.


A new noise • the87press welcomes readers to The Hythe Review, launched as part of a commitment to widening critical conversations in literature, and poetry more specifically. It is produced in partnership with the Open Library of Humanities and other funding bodies such as Arts Council England.

ISSUE 1 – SPRING/SUMMER 2026 is edited by Kashif Sharma-Patel, Azad Ashim Sharma, Abeera Khan, Victoria Adukwei Bulley and Alycia Pirmohamed. The issue includes an editorial, thirteen ‘pieces of poetry’, three review essays and an interview. Haider Al-Ghazali’s ‘Obituary Poem for Fatima Hassouna’ follows in a Palestinian tradition that often uses verse in a funerary context. Poems by Nasser Rabah, one of the great poets still living in Gaza, are included. Sumia Juxun writes in response to Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, while Shripad Sinnakaar speaks of caste, crows, and dark-blueish kohl. Anthony Vahni Capildeo presents four sharp new poems, while Jay Gao extracts for us several pages from his Bark, Archive, Splinter sequence, and Canisia Lubrin’s Bright Machine is also excerpted.


Edward Lucie-Smith • The art critic and poet Edward Lucie-Smith has died. He was born in Jamaica, where his family had lived since the seventeenth century. After studying at Oxford, he moved to London, and was a prominent figure in The Group. He wrote essays, reviews and books of art criticism, and persisted in a strong belief in his poetic work, eager for a secure readership which he never quite found. His art studies and anthologies were often well received and he had to his credit such titles as The Male Nude: A Modern View (1985), Ars Erotica: An Arousing History of Erotic Art (1997), Sexuality in Western Art (1991), Movements in Art since 1945 (2001), and A Dictionary of Art Terms and Art Today (2003). Beryl Cook, a collaborator, painted him as a nude faun with a quill in his hoofy hand. Lucie-Smith curated exhibitions, including surveys of British art at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, The New British Painting (which toured US venues in 1988–90) and two artist retrospectives, Lin Emery and George Dunbar, both for the New Orleans Museum of Art.


Peter Pegnall • Quentin Cowdry writes: The British poet and poetry impresario Peter Pegnall died in May, aged seventy-six. The author of eight collections and editor of several anthologies, Peter was a lyric poet whose work always engaged, often at a profound level, while verging on self-mythology. He had a remarkable skill in devising images and phrases. A former pupil of Seamus Heaney’s, Peter also wrote obituaries for the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph and poetry reviews for Poetry Ireland, the Catholic Herald and others.

Alongside his writing, he devoted much of his life outside work as a secondary school English teacher to mentoring poets, running poetry workshops and staging events in the UK and overseas, notably the annual Anglo-Portuguese festival, A Casa dos Poetas. A great believer in poetry as a source of healing and personal growth, he also took poetry into care homes and prisons in various parts of the UK.

Born in West London, Peter was a pupil at Latymer Upper School before reading English at the University of Ulster and going on to take a BPhil in Shakespeare at the University of York. Hugely intelligent and well read, Peter was a larger than life character whose gift for writing and appreciating verse and supporting emerging voices was widely valued in the UK and further afield.