Weissbort, Daniel

Daniel Weissbort (1935- ) is a poet, translator, and scholar who was a close friend and colleague of poet Ted Hughes. He met Hughes while they were both students at Cambridge University, from which he graduated in 1956. Hughes and Weissbort founded the journal Modern Poetry in Translation devoted to introducing the work of foreign language poets to English readers. From 1974 until the late 1990s, Weissbort was employed by the University of Iowa, first as the director of its translation workshop, and later as an associate professor of English and comparative literature.

Weissbort has authored several published volumes of poetry, including Lake: New and Selected Poems (1992) and What Was All the Fuss About? (1998). He has served as editor of various anthologies of poetry, and he has translated and edited the works of authors including Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Nikolay Zabolotsky, and Luis Mercier Vega. Among other prizes, Weissbort was awarded the British Arts Council award, 1971, 1972, 1980; and the Jacob Glatstein Memorial Prize, Poetry magazine, 1978.

Daniel Weissbort was born in London in 1935. He was a friend of Ted Hughes whom he met whilst at Cambridge University in the 1950s. In 1965 Weissbort and Hughes founded the journal, Modern Poetry in Translation.

Weissbort is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has edited a number of anthologies of Russian and East European poetry.

Epithet: poet, writer and editor