Well, a spot of news from our international man of letters (and new grandfather, congratulations!) Bill Manhire. Bill and a bunch of other top-ten NZ poets (Vince O'Sullivan, Tusiata Avia and current Te Mata NZ Poet Laureate Jenny Bornholdt) are larking about in Europe at the moment having just been at a poetry festival at Antwerp (which I can’t find any details on, dammit, any light-shedding gratefully accepted).

What I do know is that in the next couple of days some of the abovementioned poets will be heading to the Poetry International Festival at Rotterdam. They’re picking up Gregory O’Brien on the way. After that, Mr O’Brien, Ian Wedde and Tusiata Avia are heading over to Moscow, goodness me, to represent all things Kiwi at the launch of an anthology of NZ poetry in Russian transalation. Blimey eh? The wild world of internationally jetsetting NZ poets. Not to mention it's so hip to translate these days in the wake of the International Man Booker. How very nice to know that some of the cream of NZ poets are out there putting it about…

Anyway, I was most intrigued about this last item, and looked up the editor, who turns out to be Mark Williams, Associate Professor of English at Canterbury University. He has been kind enough to send a snap-shot of some of the behind-the-scenes goings-on (enough hyphens – ed.) while welding together the NZ and the Russian in the anthology, which is called Land of Seas (lovely cover above).

Over to you, Professor:

'The idea for this anthology came from Evgeny Pavlov in the Russian Department at Canterbury University. Evgeny has translated the work of the celebrated Russian poet, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, himself the editor of two Russian anthologies of American poetry. Arkadii proposed a New Zealand anthology and the idea grew from there. We began putting it together in 2001. My job was to select and arrange the poems and provide an introduction for the Russian reader for whom New Zealand meant mainly pastoral scenes and milk products in the supermarkets.

So we wanted to present a more complex picture of New Zealand by way of its poetry, representing its history, its modernity, its cities, its humour and its particular ethnic arrangements between Maori and Pakeha. We decided to arrange it by poems rather than poets and to work through a series of loose themes, so that each poem talked backwards and forwards to the others in the book. Taken as a whole the poems constitute a kind of conversation among noisy, diverse and sometimes squabbling neighbours, siblings and citizens.

Once the poems were selected and arranged the really big task began: translation. Evgeny managed a large team of translators, all of them Russian poets, led by Arkadii, and the poems were sent out to translators likely to be most sympathetic to the kinds of poetry they represented. Arkadii, for example, translated Curnow, Wedde and Leggott, but found poems that rhymed not entirely agreeable. Sometimes the poems needed to be translated first into a more accessible version of English for the translator to work from. Evgeny and I sat down with a colleague in Linguistics at Canterbury, Kon Kuiper – also a poet – to wrestle with the linguistic complexities of David Eggleton’s ‘Painting Mt Taranaki’. We wanted poems like that, rich in local resonance, as well as more universal ones, like Andrew Johnston’s.

Sometimes the poems that worked in New Zealand seemed odd to Russian ears. I had put a series of poems to do with work in, a favourite theme on the socialistic 1930s and ‘40s. To Evgeny’s ear some of these conjured up the dreary days of socialist realist orthodoxy in Russia. So we pruned them. Arkadii himself came from a background in the Samiszat movement of underground writing in the 1960s and favoured a more avant-garde and language based approach to poetry. We aimed for peaceful co-existence among the different styles and schools operating here. It was a curious and exhilarating experience to think about New Zealand poetry from a perspective outside the country itself. In the end, we wanted to catch both the particularity of New Zealand poetry, its internal discussions and preoccupations, and its place in the world, which has swept through the local transforming it. But of course New Zealand poetry also has a place in that world and is having its own impact and influence.

Some of that impact is registered in the launch of the book at the New Zealand Embassy in Moscow. A distinguished line-up of Russian poets, critics, artists and gallery owners will attend, a number coming from St Petersburg with Arkadii. Creative New Zealand has generously paid to fly three New Zealand poets, Greg O’Brien, Ian Wedde and Tusiata Avia to read at the launch and engage in some cultural interaction. Greg has also written a terrific foreword to the book, which brilliantly sets New Zealand in a context that Russians will find strangely familiar.

So the book is about to fly and we hope that it will not only bring New Zealand to Russians but in the future bring more Russians to New Zealand.'