Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort, as co-founders of the quarterly magazine Modern Poetry in Translation, had a working relationship over many years. Weissbort provides a unique insight into Hughes’s views on translation and on his interest in making accessible the work of foreign-language poets and classical drama.

"Poetry is less and less a prisoner of its own language", Hughes wrote, inaugurating the first Poetry International. With many examples, Weissbort examines the ways in which Hughes worked with texts, often in collaboration with the original writers, from modern European poets, especially those of or associated with Eastern Europe, to Pushkin, Racine, Ovid and including Hughes’s invented language for Orghast.

Daniel Weissbort, along with Ted Hughes, founded the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation in 1965. Weissbort remained editor until 2003. He directed the Translation Program at the University of Iowa, where he is an Emeritus Professor. He is Honorary Professor in the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick. Weissbort has published numerous collections of translations and anthologies, and he edited Ted Hughes: Selected Translations for Faber, as well as collections of his own poetry, most recently, Letters to Ted (2003). Ted Hughes and Weissbort co-edited Selected Poems of Yehuda Amichai, published in 2000.