Menard Press was founded as a small magazine in 1969 and brought out its first book in 1971. It has specialised in literary translation, mainly of poetry. In addition to literary texts – original and translated poetry, original and translated fiction, art and literary criticism – the press has published essays on the nuclear issue (by Sir Martin Ryle and Lord Zuckerman, among others) as well as works and testimonies by survivors of Nazism, including the first English edition of Primo Levi’s poems.

Menard Press inherited F.T. Prince from Fulcrum Press in 1975; other senior poets on the list are Brian Coffey (Advent and The Death of Hektor) and Nicholas Moore (Spleen). Translated poets include Nerval, Mallarmé, Rilke and Mandelstam, plus Sylvia Plath’s translations of Ronsard and one of Elaine Feinstein’s selections from the work of Marina Tsvetayeva. Among the works of prose criticism Menard has published are studies of Charles Reznikoff, Fernando Pessoa and Primo Levi, Octavio Paz’s intellectual autobiography Itinerario and Geoffrey Dutton’s extraordinary account of his garden in Scotland, Harvesting the Edge, illustrated not by photos but by his poems.

Now available, the 40th Anniversary Menard keepsake/catalogue contains accounts of the press by the publisher, facsimile reproductions of press memorabilia and a complete list of Menard titles.

R.I.P. Ewald Osers, 1917-2011, Menard author (out of print translations of Rudolf Langer and Walter Helmut Fritz), master translator and friend.