Biography
Daniel Weissbort was born in London in 1935, to a Polish-Jewish family who had emigrated to England in 1933 following Hitler's accession to the German chancellorship. He was educated at St Paul's School and Queens' College, Cambridge, where he was a History Exhibitioner, graduating with a BA in 1956. In 1965, with Ted Hughes, Weissbort founded the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT) which he edited for almost 40 years. In the early 1970s, he went to the USA where he directed, for over thirty years, the Translation Workshop and MFA Program in Translation at the University of Iowa.
He was a Professor (Emeritus) of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa, Research Fellow in the English Department at King's College, London University and Honorary Professor in the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick.
In 1965, Ted Hughes founded with Daniel Weissbort the journal Modern Poetry in Translation. Weissbort and Hughes were instrumental in bringing to the English-speaking world the work of many poets who were hardly known from countries like Poland and Hungary which were controlled by the Soviet Union. This included bringing to the West the work of Czesław Miłosz, who would later go on to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Hughes wrote an introduction to a translation of Vasko Popa: Collected Poems in the Persea Series of Poetry in Translation under Daniel Weissbort, General Editor, which was reviewed favourably by literary critic John Bayley of Oxford University in The New York Review of Books.
Daniel Weissbort's anthologies of Russian poetry and of East European poetry are well known and he also published many collections of his own poetry. Anvil Press published his translational memoir of Joseph Brodsky, From Russian with Love. He co-edited, for Oxford University Press, a historical reader in translation theory, which was published in 2006. He wrote a book on Ted Hughes and translation and for Faber he edited the Selected Translations of Ted Hughes. The Guardian newspaper wrote that Weissbort founded Carcanet Press. Weissbort translated Missing Person by Patrick Modiano who received the Nobel Prize for Literature. His work Selected Poems of Nikolay Zabolotsky won the AATSEEL Best Translation into English prize in 2001.
Daniel Weissbort died in November 2013.
On the Stanford University site of The Book Haven by Cynthia Haven, in an obituary of Daniel Weissbort, Daniel Weissbort is defined as a "master translator." Also on this Stanford University web site, Weissbort is called a champion of translation. Weissbort has genius in translation, obituary of Weissbort in Translationista.
Ted Hughes has stated that "It's hard to imagine how anything could be more natural, relaxed and true to the writer's self, true to his secret, personal life, than Daniel Weissbort's poems. Maybe his many years of translating and sieving through translations of worldwide modern poetry have had something to do with it. He seems to have come out somewhere beyond poetic styles and mannerisms. His poems now have a peculiar, naked life. They move in a frankness and inner freedom and simplicity that seem to belong hardly at all to literature. Yet they leave an impression of intense patterns, a rich, artistic substance. In this new collection he has broken into new material, and brought his qualities to a pitch that will, for many of us, change the possibilities of English poetry. That's a large claim, but I think it can be made."
His brother was the painter George Weissbort.
