MIKEL LABOA, born in 1934 in Donostia, Gipuzkoa and by profession a medical doctor and psychiatrist, is nowadays considered, along with Benito Lertxundi, to be one of the most eminent singers of modern Basque music. He has had an enormous influence on contemporary youth. In the 60s he was one of the founders of the legendary collective of Basque musicians, Ez Dok Amairu (We Are Not Thirteen).

OLOF LAGERCRANTZ (1911 - ) is one of Sweden's foremost writers, he is a poet, biographer and critic as well as a political columnist and past editor of Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's largest daily paper. He has offered vivid, memorable treatments of Dante, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Proust, Strindberg as well as of his friend Gunnar Ekelöf, perhaps Sweden's finest poet.

Born in Haiti, author and critic YANICK LAHENS studied at the Université de Paris and taught at the École Normale Supérieure of Haiti when she returned there. She has published essays: l'Exil. Entre l'ancrage et la fuite: l'ecrivain haïtien. Port-au-Prince: Éditions Henri Deschamps, 1990; short stories, Tante Résia et les dieux. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1994 and La petite corruption, Port-au-Prince: Éditions Mémoire, 1999 and Paris: Le Serpent à Plumes, 2001, which also published Dans la maison du père in 2000. Her work has been awarded a prize in Germany, the Literatur Preis.

JOSEPH LAKE Professor of Russian at the University of Massachusetts. A Slavic linguist: his concerns have been primarily in the area of Russian intonation and grammatical features which it determines. He is also active in the arena of religious studies.

INGRID LANSFORD grew up bilingual in a German family in Denmark. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Texas at Austin. After teaching English at a community college she worked as a full-time freelance technical and medical translator for ten years and after 2002, has concentrated on literary translation. She has published six literary prose translations from German in the bilingual journal Dimension2, and recently contributed a translation from Danish to the anthology Thresholds, World Literature from the Heart of Texas (2003), a runner-up for the Texas Institute of Letters Award.

CARROL LASKER holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and is an Assistant Professor of Speech and Theater at CUNY’s New York City Technical College. Born and raised in South Africa, she has published widely on African literature and has translated many works from Afrikaans and Kaaps. These include the poetry and drama of Adam Small as well as Arthur Nuthall Fula’s The Golden Magnet. Currently she is working on a translation of Black South African women’s narratives.

ELSE LASKER-SCHÜLER Born in Elberfield, Germany in 1869. She was primarily a poet—Gottfried Benn, in 1952, called her the greatest lyric poet that Germany had ever had. She wrote fiction as well, and plays, and she illustrated much of her work herself. She received the Kleist prize in 1932, shortly before she was forced to emigrate, first to Zurich and then to Jerusalem where she died in 1945.

REYES LÁZARO is an aspiring translator and guest-editor of this issue. She teaches Spanish language and contemporary literatures and cultures from the Iberian Peninsula at Smith College, where she came from her native Bilbao in 1979. She likes to think that General Franco is partly responsible for this issue, for forcing her grandfather, Felipe Gurtubay, to bury his books in Basque as the dictator’s troops arrived at his hometown, Galdakao, and for forcing her to lose Euskera as a child of six in the early sixties here described by Atxaga. Nunca mais.

ELISABETH BOURQUIN LEETE Born in Geneva, she came to the U.S. in 1953 where she became the New York correspondent for France-Soir. Currently she is teaching French and volunteering for Hospice. She lives in Ashfield.

NIKOLAUS LENAU (1802-1850). He wrote lyric poetry, and verse epics on historical themes, including Faust and Savonarola. Although his poetry does not always escape the shoals of sentimentality and precious rhetoric, he stands out among German Romantic poets of his time because of the musical quality of his verse, his evocations of the landscape of his native eastern Germany, his impressions of tropical settings, and images from a year spent in North America.

SIEGFRIED LENZ, one of Germany’s most accomplished storytellers, was born in Lyck in the former East Prussia in 1926. He was drafted into the German navy at seventeen, deserted toward the end of the war, and spent time in a British internment camp. After several years of studying both German and English literature in Hamburg, he accepted an internship at Die Welt, a German newspaper run by the Allied occupation forces. During his years as an editor, he wrote the novel Es waren Habichte in der Luft (There were Hawks in the Air), which was serialized in Die Welt and gave him his first taste of literary success. Over the past fifty years, Lenz has written more than a dozen novels including The German Lesson (1968), very successful radio plays, many short stories, and numerous essays. He has won a dozen major awards, but the one that means most to him is being made honorary citizen of Hamburg, the city where he has been living for close to sixty years. “Lucas, Gentle Servant” came out in 1953 as one of Lenz’ first short stories.

GIACOMO LEOPARDI (1798-1837) Italian lyric poet, child prodigy, passionate philologist and translator from many languages, he is regarded by Italian critics as second only to Dante. The Canti (1817-37) represent his major work, pastoral and melancholy, they concern themselves with destruction and regeneration.

LERMONOSOV Mikhail Vasilevich Lomonosov (1711-1765) was a renowned scientist and man of letters after whom Moscow State University is named. He was a chemist, physicist, mathematician, and mineralogist. After studying in Germany under the famous Christian Wolff, he returned to Russia, first serving in a junior capacity before heading up the Russian Academy of Science until his death. In letters, Lomonosov made lasting contributions as well. He wrote the first Russian grammar. His first published poem "has since become our [Russia's] classical prosody" (Mirsky, 1958). Lomonosov's "importance as the legislator and actual founder of the literary language of modern Russia cannot be exaggerated" (Mirsky, 1958).

RIKA LESSER (1953 - ) is a poet and translator of Swedish and German literature and has taught literary translation at Columbia University and Yale University. She is the author of three collections of poetry and is celebrated for her translations of poetry. She has won many prizes and awards.

CARLO LEVI (1902-1975) Italian writer, began his career as a painter, exiled for anti-Fascist activities to the hill-town of Lucania, he is known primarily for his Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945) which has been widely translated. Le parole sono pietre was published in 1955.

DAN LEVIN A writer, author of several books and professor Emeritus and former writer-in-residence at Long Island University.

ALEXIS LEVITIN has published translations of poetry (from Portuguese) in 200 magazines, including Partisan Review and American Poetry Review, and 18 books in translation, including seven volumes of poetry by Eugenio de Andrade, which won him the first Pessoa translation prize from Columbia University. His work has been supported by grants from the Witter Bynner Poetry Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. In 2003, New Directions will publish his Forbidden Words: Selected Poems of Eugenio de Andrade.

SARA LIDMAN has been a successful Swedish writer for the past forty years, mostly of novels, short stories and reportage, dealing with unjust treatment of human beings, especially in Lapland where she was born. Nadine Gordimer said "translations of her work are a cause for celebration."

LOTTE LINCK Danish writer, has published a children's book, numerous novels, the last one, Who Plays the Best (Hvem Zeger Bedst) in March 1993. Her poems have appeared since 1985 in major magazines.

Teacher, freelance writer/translator, Fulbright Border Scholar in the San Diego-Tijuana region, JOAN LINDGREN has published widely in magazines such as the American Poetry Review, DoubleTake, and Modern Poetry In Translation. Among her published books is the University of California Press Unthinkable Tenderness, Selected Poems of Juan Gelman (1997.) A manuscript in process, Relinquishing Permanence,  includes translations of three Spanish poets: Claudio Rodriguez, Angel Ruperez, and Jose Angle Valente.  

TORGNY LINDGREN (1938 - ) had his first book published in 1965, became a full-time writer in 1974 and has been a member of the Swedish Academy since 1991. His work includes two volumes of poetry, four volumes of short stories, (one collection published in English under the title Merab’s Beauty) and nine novels, four of which have been translated into English: The Way of the Serpent, Bathsheba, Light, and In Praise of Truth.

EWA LIPSKA (1945- ) began her poetic career at the same time as the "Generation of '68." She was the director of the Austrian Polish Institute until recently, and divides her time between Krakow and Vienna. The poems translated here are from her most recent collection, 1999.

IRENE LISBOA (1892-1958): solitary woman-of-letters who published in various genres. Though well-educated, her status as illegitimate daughter to a wealthy man left her in relative isolation in Portuguese society and publication under the male pseudonym, Joao Falco. Her musings on the inner life are spiced with irony and fly in the face of traditional barriers between prose and verse.

CLARICE LISPECTOR (1924-1977) Though she was born in the Ukraine, her family emigrated two months later to Brazil. Widely regarded as the principal woman writer of Brazil's twentieth century; her books have been translated into several languages.

MAYA J. LOBELLO (born in 1977 in Tehran), became captivated with Hungarian literature while spending a year abroad in Hungary in 1993. After attaining a degree in Central European Studies with a specialization in Polish and Hungarian literature from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, she became a permanent resident of Hungary in 1999. Her publications include a bilingual edition of the oeuvre of the architect Ferenc Cságoly (Kijárat Publishers), a volume about the glass artist János Jegenyés (Kijárat Publishers) and a collection of essays by the renowned architect, Imre Makovecz. Her main interest lies in literature written by Hungarian minorities living in Serbia and Romania. She is currently translating The Age of Ravens by the Romanian-Hungarian author István Szilágyi, a novel recommended by UNESCO’s Clearing House for Literary Translation program.

FRANCO LOI (1930- ), recognized as one of the greatest contemporary poets in Italy, prolific as a critic, scholar, and especially a poet. Born in Genoa of a Sardinian father and a mother from Emilia Romagna, he moved with his family to Milan when he was only seven years old. From 1965, he published his poems in a Milanese dialect he himself has shaped to reflect his unique voice, along with his own Italian translations.

JOHN LONDON holds M.A. and D.Phil. degrees in Modern Languages from Oxford University. Having previously been Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Free University, Berlin, he is currently working in the School of European Languages, University of Wales, Swansea. With David George he has edited Contemporary Catalan Theatre: An Introduction (Sheffield: The Anglo-Catalan Society, 1996). He has also written books and several articles on Spanish theater, Romanian literature, and other subjects. He has translated into English texts by Sergei Belbel, Salvador Dalí, Federico García Lorca, Ramon Llull, Rodolf Sirera, and others.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1807-1882) Classmate of Hawthorne and Franklin Pearce at Bowdoin, professor of modern languages at Harvard. The foremost American poet of his dday, he was known especially for his adaptations from exotic languages and his translation of Dante's Divina Comedia.

FELIX LOPE DE VEGA Y CARPIO (1562-1635) was born in Madrid. Considered the greatest of all Spanish playwrights, he wrote over 2200 plays, of which 500 survive. Endowed with a prodigious intellect—by the age of five he could read Latin and Spanish and wrote poetry—he had the physical energy to match it, and an enthusiasm for taking risks that led him into numerous amorous adventures (he was imprisoned at a very young age and exiled for his affair with a married woman and his quarrel with her father, but never lost his enthusiasm for relationships with women, many of which resulted in offspring). He took part in more than one military expedition, including the Spanish Armada’s unfortunate engagement with the English fleet.

ADÍLIA LOPES (1960-) was born in Lisbon and since 1985 she is perhaps Portugal’s most iconoclastic poet.

N.P. VAN WYK LOUW was born in Sutherland, South Africa in 1906. He was the major Afrikaans poet and public intellectual of his generation, and he and his brother, W.E.G. Louw, were leading figures in the Afrikaans literary movement of the 1930s. In his collection of essays, Lojale verset (1939), Louw argued for the importance of criticism within Afrikaner nationalism. An educationalist by training, Louw taught at the University of Cape Town for nearly two decades before taking up a position as Extraordinary Professor in South African Language, Literature, Culture and History at the University of Amsterdam. During his time abroad, he wrote many of his most important poems, published in Nuwe verse (1954) and Tristia (1962). He also wrote a series of magazine articles defending apartheid "separate development" as a multinationalism consistent with liberal principles. These were published in the collection Liberale Nasionalisme (1958). Returning to South Africa in 1958, he spoke out against some policies of the National Party government, and his play, Die pluimsaad waai ver (1966) was publicly attacked by prime minister H. F. Verwoerd. Chairing the Department of Afrikaans and Nederlands at the University of the Witwatersrand, he died in Johannesburg in 1970.

SAU LUGANO, a Ph.D. student and Instructor in Comparative Literaure at Pennsylvania State University, is Lecturer in the Department of Kiswahili and Other African languages at Kenyatta University, Kenya. Lugano is also a short story writer. Among her published translations in Kiswahili is the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

HENRY LYMAN His translations of the poetry of Aleksis Rannit have appeared in Poetry and New Directions and in two sections published by the Elizabeth Press. He is presently completing a larger, more comprehensive volume.

CARLY MABERRY, editorial, production and web management assistant for Metamorphoses, and Production Editor for both 2008 issues, is a senior English major at Smith College. After working as a STRIDE intern at the Poetry Center at Smith College, she spent a year as a student in Cork, Ireland. She has studied French, German and Irish. Her senior project focuses on Sylvia Plath and identity.

ELENA MACLACHLAN Currently a member of the Italian Department at Smith College. She recently completed her doctoral studies with a dissertation on narrative strategies in the poetry of Chiara Matraini. She has published translations in Dædalus, The Atlantic, Harper's, Paris Review and other magazines.

MITKO MADUNOV (b. 1943 in Strumica, southeastern Macedonia) graduated from the Department of Literature and Literary Theory in Belgrade. His numerous publications include six collections of short stories, three novels, and five plays. His novels The Hedge of the World (1984) and To the Other Country (1993) each won prestigious national awards. "The Bombing" is from his most recent collection, The Tree of Narajana (1998). He lives in Belgrade, where he works in the Public Library.

CARMEN MAGALLON-PORTOLES At the University of Zaragosa, she became engaged in the student struggle against Franco and has remained a political activist ever since. She has published several collections of poetry in her native Spanish.

SYLVIA MAIZELL has studied Russian Literature at the University of Chicago, in Moscow and Saint Petersburg and has taught Russian for many years. She has translated Ludmila Petrushevskaya as well as several published Russian emigres, among them Emil Draitser, Felix Roziner, Azari Messurer, Vladimir Matlin, and Ludmila Petrushevskaya.

BRONISLAW MAJ (1953- ) is a poet, journalist, and actor. He teaches Polish literature at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, and edits the journal Na Glos. He is one of the finest Polish poets to emerge in the 1980's. The poems translated here are from his collection Swiatlo (A Light, 1994).

WENCESLAO MALDONADO was born in Argentina in 1940, and studied there and in Italy, receiving his doctorate in Trieste. He now teaches Classics in Buenos Aires. He has published several books of poems and short stories, including La estación necesaria, El hombre herido, Tierra intranquila, Dioses del deseo antiguo, Ceremonial de una familia oscura, Arquitectura gótica, and Fronteras.

KALINA MALESKA is pursuing postgraduate studies at the University of Skopje, from which she holds a degree in English. She has published translations of short stories and poems from English into Macedonian.

BODIL MALMSTEN One of the most popular poets in Sweden, she lives in Stockholm.

ALAN MANDELBAUM Famed for his many translations from the Classics, including Ovid's Metamorphoses (1993), and varoius Italian poets, he is a professor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem.

OSIP MANDELSTAM (1891-1938) is one of the major Russian poets of the 20th century. Mandelstam’s first collection (Stone) was published in 1913. Like Akhmatova, he was a member of the Acmeist movement. Mandelstam’s prose works include "The Noise of Time" and "The Egyptian Stamp." He was arrested during the Stalinist terror and died in a Soviet labor camp in 1938. His work, translated into many languages, has had extraordinary impact on several generations of Russian readers.

EEVA-LIISA MANNER (b. 1921) One of Finland's leading writers. She is a poet, dramatist, critic, and translator. Among her eleven collections of poetry are Orfiset Laulut (Songs of Orpheus), Farenheit 121, and Kuolleet Vedet (Dead Waters). Täma Mätka (This Journey), 1956, became one of the most influential books of poetry for the Finnish modernist movement. Her many translations, from English, German, Spanish and Swedish include Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Herman Hesse, and Tomas Transtromer. She is the recipient of numerous awards.

JIM MARANIS Head and Professor of Spanish, Amherst College, and a member of the Metamorphoses Editorial Board.

MARIA-MERCÉ MARÇAL had several volumes of poetry to her credit when she died of cancer in 1998, at the age of 46. She wrote a number of essays as well, a few stories, and a novel based on the biography and work of Pauline Mary Tarn, poet of American birth and French expression, known by her pen name, Renée Vivien. One of Marçal’s early works is a collection of fifteen sestinas, in which she successfully uses the medieval form for modern preoccupations and imagery.

ANNA MARGOLIN Born in Russia in 1894, she arrived in New York City at the age of 18; she led a tempestuous and unconventional ilfe. Her writings won her critical acclaim, but little public recognition. She died, a recluse, in 1952.

FRANCESCO MARRONI, born in Italy in 1949, is Professor of English Literature at the University of Pescara, where he is Director of the Center for Victorian and Edwardian Studies (C.U.S.V.E.). He is also Editor-in-Chief of the following academic journals: Merope, Rivista di Studi Vittoriani and Traduttologia. He is member of the editorial board of The Gaskell Society Journal (Manchester). His books include La verità difficile: Uno studio sui romanzi di George Eliot (Bologna, 1980); Invito alla lettura di Henry James (Milan, 1983); La fabbrica nella valle: Saggio sulla narrativa di Elizabeth Gaskell (Bari, 1987); La poesia di Thomas Hardy (Bari, 1997); Spettri senza nome. Modelli epistemici e narrativa vittoriana (Pescara, 1997); Disarmonie vittoriane: Rivisitazioni del canone della narrativa inglese dell’Ottocento (Rome, 2002) and Miti e mondi vittoriani: La cultura inglese dell’Ottocento (Rome, 2004). He has edited works by George Orwell (1982), Thomas Hardy (1991, 2000), E. L. Doctorow (1993), Henry James (1994), Walter Scott (1994, 2004), R. L. Stevenson (2000) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (2003). He has translated narrative works by Washington Irving, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing, G. B. Shaw and George Eliot. Also a writer of fiction, Marroni has published four collections of short stories: Silverdale (Palermo, 2000), Brughiere (Bari, 2002), Il silenzio dell’Escorial (Bari, 2002) and Finisterre (Pescara, 2004). A new collection of short stories, Vedute di Manchester, is due out by the beginning of 2006. He has authored a campus novel, Il fantasma di Rembrandt, which is forthcoming.

LOURDES MANYÉ I MARTÍ is from Barcelona, where she received a B.A. in English. She received an M.A. in American Literature (1990) and an M.A. in Spanish Literature (1991) from the University of South Carolina, where she is working on a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. She currently teaches Spanish at Furman University. She translated Richard Russo's Mohawk and Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier into Catalan, and is now translating Miquel Martí i Pol with her husband, Wayne Cox.

ANNABEL MARTIN was born in New Jersey in 1961, and spent her youth in Bilbao. A graduate of the University of Deusto in Bilbao, she earned her PhD in Spanish and Comparative Literature from North Carolina State University, and has since taught at North Carolina State and Emory College. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Dartmouth College.

JOSEPA MARTÍNEZ I ALBERT was born in Guadassuar (Valencia) in 1942. She holds an M.A. in the Theory and Practice of Literary Translation from Essex University in England, an M.A. in Pedagogy, and a degree in Modern Philology from the University of Valencia. At present, she holds a chair in English at the Escola Oficial d'Idiomes in Valencia. She has translated into Catalan several short stories by Poe as well as essays and poetry, and into Spanish material on modern art, and, most recently Viajeros Británicos por la Valencia de la Ilustración (siglo XVIII), in the series "Asi nos vieron" (Ajuntaent de València, 1996).

YZABELLE MARTINEAU (Ph.D., McGill University) has taught French literature and Quebec culture in the University of Western Ontario. She works as a translator and editor for various publishing houses in Quebec and teaches Quebec literature and culture at Concordia University (Montreal). She has just published a book on plagiarism, Le faux littéraire: Plagiat littéraire, intertextualité et dialogisme (Quebec, Nota Bene, 2002). She has also published articles on plagiarism and New-Caledonian literature.

LUCIFERO MARTINI was born in 1916, in Fiume (Istria). An anti-Fascist Partisan, he was one of the intellectuals who spearheaded a literary and cultural movement in Istria after WWII, to preserve an Italian cultural presence in the newly-formed Yugoslavia. In addition to poetry, he also collected and edited testimonial narratives of Istriot Italians in the 1940's.

MARIA LÚCIA MILLÉO MARTINS Born and educated in the south of Brazil, is currently on a Ph.D. program at UMass. In 1992, she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to do research on Elizabeth Bishop's special collections in Vassar and Harvard, a scholarship renewed in 1994. She is collaborating as translator and editor of an Anthology of Contemporary American Poets (bilingual), 1997 (U. Federal de Sta. Catarina).

HARRY MARTINSSON (1904-1978) was one of the two Nobel Prize laureates in literature in 1974. After three decades as a poet and prose writer of exceptional claims upon the imagination and affections of his Swedish readership, he published in 1956 his 103-poem sequence Aniara. It was published, in a revised edition in 1999 by Story Line Press, Ashland, Oregon.

MARIO MATERASSI is Professor of Literature of the United States at the  University of Florence, where he has also directed the Department of Modern Philology.  His scholarly publications include two books on Faulkner (I romanzi di Faulkner, 1968; Faulkner, ancora, 2003); on African American literature and culture (Mississippi: documenti della resistenza afroamericana, 1971; Voci nere, 1975;  Il ponte sullo Harlem River, 1977); on Jewish American writers (Rothiana: Henry Roth nella critica italiana, 1985;  Scrittori ebrei americani, 2 vols., 1989; Figlie di Sarah, 1996). He has edited works by James Baldwin (1968); Melville (1969);  Henry Roth (Shifting Landscape: A Composite, Philadelphia 1987), Cynthia Ozick (1990), Hugh Nissenson (1991), photographer C.F. Lummis (1991),  Kate Chopin (1993), Roberta Kalechofsky (1995, 1998), Faulkner (8 volumes), Toni Morrison (2003). He has published essays on Melville, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Mailer, Bowles, Hillerman, Cesare Pavese, Moravia, Tomasi di Lampedusa, and many others; on Chicano literature (Anaya, Leo Romero); on the detective novel in the Southwest; a book on New York (Il baco nella mela, 1981). His translations include Roth’s Call It Sleep, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Soldiers’ Pay (also, forthcoming, Sanctuary and Light in August), Ford’s The Good Soldier, Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself, Ozick’s The Messiah of Stockholm. Also a writer of short fiction, Materassi has published two collections of short stories which have won critical acclaim:  Il romitorio (1989) and I malaccompagnati (2000). In 1998, in collaboration with American artist John Giannotti, he published Toccando i muri/Touching the walls . Two of his stories have been anthologized, and two won first and second prize, respectively, in national competitions. He has also published stories in English, in The Quarterly (1995), Blue Mesa Review (1995), and Italian Quarterly (1998). Notizie dell’ora morta, a new collection, is due out in the spring of 2004. It will include “Niente di personale.”

BEVERLEY MATHERNE Has two bilingual chapbooks: Je me souviens de la Louisiane (March Street Press) and Images cadiennes (Ridgewood Press). Widely published in journals, including Kansas Quarterly, Squaw Review, and Verse, she is on the writing faculty of Northern Michigan University.

MARGALIT MATITIAHU writes poetry in Hebrew and Ladino. She has published research articles on the Ladino press in Thessaloniki, Greece between 1860-1940, and has been a regular participant for 25 years on Israel’s Radio Ladino program. Since 1986, she has lectured at Bar-Ilan University. She is the winner of the Fernando Jeno Award (1994), the international prize for Jewish literature given by the Jewish community of Mexico; of the Ateneo de Jaen Award (1996), the international literature prize for poetry in Jaen, Andalusia, Spain; and of the Priminster Literature Award (1999), Israel. Since 1986 she has served as secretary-general of the Writers’ Union in Israel and she has participated in the International Congress of Poets all over the world since 1991. She has published numerous collections of poetry in both Hebrew and Ladino, in Spain and Israel.

CHIARA MATRAINI (1515-1604?) Spent most of her life in Lucca, where she was born and died. Her earliest book of poetry deals with earthly love; her last, with love of God. Separating them are four decades of activity, including a sojourn in Genova and the composition of several treatises on religious subjects.

ALAMIN MAZRUI, a Kenyan, is Associate Professor of African and African-American Studies at Ohio State University. He is the author of a collection of poems, Kilio cha Haki, 1988 (A Cry for Justice). Mazrui holds an M.Ed in Language Education from Rutgers University and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford University in California. He has taught at universities in Kenya, Nigeria and the USA and has served as a consultant to non-governmental organizations in Africa on such subjects as language and urbanization and language and the law. He has a special interest in human rights and civil liberties and has written policy reports on those subjects. He has published plays, poetry and several scholarly works in Kiswahili including Uchambuzi wa Fasihi (Heinemann, Kenya, 1992), co-authored with Benedict Syambo; The Swahili Idiom and Identity (Africa World Press, 1994), with Ibrahim Noor Shariff; Political Culture of Language: Swahili, Society and the State (IGCS, Binghamton University, 1996; Second Edition,1999), with Ali A. Mazrui; and Power of Babel: Language and Governance in the African Experience (University of Chicago Press,1998), also co-authored with Ali A. Mazrui.

VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY (1893-1930) Leading poet of the Russian Revolution in the early Soviet period. At the age of fifteen he joined the Russian Democratic Workers' Party and was repeatedly jailed for subversive activity. He began to write poetry in 1909 while in solitary confinement. He later attended the Moscow Art School, joined the Russian Futurist movement and became one of its leading spokesmen. 1912 saw the publication of a manifesto, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. By 1913 he was writing poetic dramas and major poems, using colloquial language and introducing technical innovations. He developed a declamatory, didactic style suitable for public recitation, and was extremely popular, particularly after the Revolution. In 1924 he wrote a 3000 line elegy on the death of Lenin, but in the last years of his life he openly criticized the government, and Stalin, in satirical plays and other works. He committed suicide in 1930.

MWENDA MBATIAH holds a Ph.D from the University of Nairobi where he is a Lecturer in the Department of Kiswahili.

JOSEPH L. MBELE, a Tanzanian, is Associate Professor of English and Folklore at St. Olaf College. He formerly taught in the Literature Department at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. His research centers on folklore, especially the epic and folktale. He has published papers in such journals as Africana Journal, Kiswahili, Research in African Literatures, African Languages and Cultures, and The Literary Griot as well as a book, Matengo Folktales.

LYNETTE F. McGRATH holds a doctorate in English from the University of Illinois; she teaches English and Women's Studies at West Chester University. Her publications have been chiefly on women's literature of the Renaissance; she and Nathaniel Smith have jointly published translations of several Catalan poets.

MARTIN McKINSEY’s translations of Modern Greek include Late into the Night: The Last Poems of Yannis Ritsos (Oberlin UP) and Andreas Franghias’ The Courtyard, which won the 1996 Greek State Prize for Translation. He has published translations of numerous contemporary Greek fiction writers. He teaches modern literature at the University of New Hampshire.

JULIE McLUCAS was born in Motherwell, Scotland, in 1956. She holds an M.A. degree in French and Hispanic Studies from Glasgow University and a degree in Anglo-Germanic Philology from the University of Valencia. At present, she teaches English in the Institut de Batzillerat (high school) of Calp, Alicante.

KATHLEEN McNERNEY is an eclectic scholar whose works include books on the fifteenth-century poet Ausias March and the novelist Joanot Martorell as well as works on contemporary Catalan women writers. She has also written about Spanish, French, and Latin-American authors, both classic and contemporary. She teaches literature, humanities, and women’s studies at West Virginia University. In 1990, she was awarded the Catalonia Prize for diffusion of Catalan culture, and in 1995 she was designated Benedum Distinguished Scholar by her institution.

MIREN AGUR MEABE, born in Lekeitio in 1962, she now lives in Bilbao. She has a degree in Basque philology. She was a teacher for a few years and now publishes Basque text books. She writes poetry and children’s literature, and has to her credit many award winning books for children and young people including The House By the Cliff (2000, Eusakdi Prize). She has published two collections of poetry, Oi, hondarrezko emakaitz (1999) and Azalaren Kodea (2000), which received the Spanish Critics’ Prize on the year of its publication, and was translated into Spanish by the author and published under the title El código de la piel (2002). www.miren-agur-meabe.com.

IÑAKI MENDIGUREN has a degree in History. Among many other works he has translated the Harry Potter books into Basque (one of which earned him the 2002 Euskadi Award for the Best Literary Translation). He has also had two novels published. With his wife, Sarah Turtle, he is responsible for translating news items from Basque into English for the English Edition of the on-line Basque-language newspaper BERRIA.

GIAMBATTISTA MENEI teaches at the University of Pescara in Italy.

W.S. MERWIN Has now settled on the island of Maui in Hawaii, where he divides his time between writing and cultivating his garden of tropical plants. A long-time translator, he is one of America's most celebrated poets, having won the most prestigious of America's prizes. He was recently a Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets.

PROSPER MÉRIMÉE (1803-1870) French writer, Senator, and Member of both l'Académie des Inscriptions and l'Académie Française. His mastery of English, Greek, Spanish and later, especially, Russian, sparked in him a passion for modern and ancient literatures as well as a conssuming interest in the history of art, about which he would write extensively. His later years were spent translating the works of Pushkin, Gogol and Turgenev.

GEORGE MESSO was born in 1969. His books include From The Pine Observatory (Halfacrown Books, 2000), and The Complete Poems of Jean Genet (translated with Jeremy Reed). He has been a translator-in-residence at The British Centre for Literary Translation, writer-in-residence at the International Writers’ & Translators’ Centre of Rhodes, The Baltic Centre in Sweden, and was Hawthornden Fellow in Poetry for June/July 2002 at Hawthornden Castle, Scotland. His poetry has been anthologized in Framing Reference (ed. Valerie Kennedy, 2001) and Reactions (ed. Esther Morgan, 2002). He is the founding editor of the international journal Near East Review. He teaches in the Faculty of Humanities & Letters at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey.

PETER MEYER (1935-) has a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from Bonn University. Inspired by the work of Ralph Nader, he became an environmental activist in the 1970s. In 1991 he was elected to the Berlin Parliament, where he became head of the environmental faction of the Social Democratic party, chair of the “Sustainable Berlin” Commission, and chief editor of the white paper Sustainable Berlin (Zukunftsfähiges Berlin, in German). In 1999, Peter retired from party politics. In 2003, with the help of his American cousin, Vincent Brook, he translated his short story Gleichviel (All the Same) into English.

HENRI MICHAUX (d. 1984 at the age of 85) One of the great visionary figures of the century. His work ranges from poetry to narrative essays, drawings and paintings that have earned him comparisons to Kafka, Paul Klee, Goya and others, though he stands preeminently alone as a writer.

CHRISTOFOROS MILIONIS (1932- ) was born in Ioannina, Greece. A classical philologist and literary critic as well as a prolific writer of fiction, he has taught in Greece and Cyprus and served on the editorial boards of several pioneering literary journals. In 1986 he won the First National Short Fiction Prize for his collection of short stories, Kalamas and Acheron. In 2000 he received the Diavazo Magazine prize for fiction for his collection The Ghosts of York. In addition to several volumes of critical essays, he has published two novels, a collection of novellas, and nine collections of short stories. His work has been translated into Russian, Italian, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Hungarian and English.

ELIZABETH GAMBLE MILLER Associate professor of Spanish at SMU in Texas. Has published translations of poetry and fiction in numerous journals and an anthology of Latin American authors. An honorary member of the Academia Salvadorena de la Lengua, the Academia Iberoamericana de Poesia and Prometeo de Madrid, she is on the board of editors of Translation Review and edits ALTA's newsletter.

KRYSTYNA MILOBEDZKA (1932- ) made her poetic debut in 1960 with her collection Anaglify (Anaglyphs), from which these poems are taken. In addition to her distinctive and original poetic work, she has also written plays and theaer criticism.

LENCE MILOSEVSKA, a poet and writer of short stories, has a degree in English from Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, Macedonia, and lived and worked in Great Britain for two years. She currently works as an editor at Kultura Publishing House in Skopje and regularly translates from English, Serbian, and Croatian into Macedonian. Her translation of Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories won a national award, as did her rendering of Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving (both from English to Macedonian).

BLAZE MINEVSKI (b. 1961 in Gevgelija) is a reporter for the Macedonian daily Nova Makedonija, having studied journalism in Skopje. He has published three novels and several volumes of short stories, selections of which have been translated into other languages, including English. His most recent novel bears the revealing title We Should Have Taken a Picture Before We Started Hating Each Other (1998).

GASTON MIRON (1928-1996) was born in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts in the Laurentians, north of Montreal. Some consider him the "national poet" of French-speaking Quebec. A passionate defender of Quebecois language and literature, and a fierce separatist, he composed a body of poetry at once intimate and combative, and applied the unique structures and sounds of Quebecois syntax and vocabulary to create a poetic language that became his signature. He is best known for his anthology, L'homme rapaillé (1970). Among his literary prizes are the Prix Apollinaire (France) and the prix du Québec, Athanase David.

VERNE MOBERG is a lecturer in Scandinavian languages in the Swedish program at Columbia University. She has worked as a translator and editor in book publishing in New York and Stockholm, and has taught and written about women’s literature.

JUDITH MOFFETT is the author of nine books in five genres including poetry and Swedish translation. She was awarded the Swedish Academy’s Translation Prize in 1983. Her translations in this issue will appear in her tenth book, an anthology to be called The North! To the North! Five Poets of Nineteenth Century Sweden, forthcoming from Southern Illinois University Press.

MOLIÈRE (Jean Baptiste Poquelin, 1622-1673) Son of an upholsterer to the court of Louix XIV, he left the court to become manager of an actors' company for which he wrote his numerous plays. These deal largely with the follies and vices of French society of the day.

AMÀLIA RODRIGUEZ MONROY is Associate Professor of English and Translation Studies at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. She has written extensively on American poetry, translation theory, and literary theory, notably Bakhtin and Lacan. Among her works are "An Other Word: Language and the Ethics of Social Interaction in Bakhtin, Freud and Lacan"; "Bajtin y Lacan: la cuestión del inconsciente"; "De la traducción como mestizaji: hacia una descolonización del texto cultural"; and, more recently, "Bajtin y el deseo del Otro: lenguaje, cultura y el espacio de la ética." She has translated Robert Lowell's For the Union Dead and Other Poems into Spanish (1990) and her book-length study on Lowell's autobiographical mode is in press. She directs a series on cultural studies for Anthropos and the University of Puerto Rico Press.

EUGENIO MONTALE Italian poet, born 1896, like Ungaretti and Palazzeschi a leader in the renewal of Italian poetry. Though his production was slight, his poetry has won world-wide reputation, he was literary editor and music critic for the influential Corriere della Sera.

SARAH MOON graduated from Smith College in 2004 with majors in Comparative Literature and Spanish. She hopes to attend graduate school for an M.F.A in poetry and a M.A. in Translation Studies in Fall 2005.

ANDREA MOORHEAD was born in 1947 in Buffalo, New York. Editor of Osiris and co-director of the Deerfield Academy Press, Moorhead publishes poetry and prose in both English and French. Her most recent collections of poems are From A Grove Of Aspen (1997, University of Salzburg) and le vert est fragile (1999, Écrits des Forges). Her translations include The Edges of Light, selected poems of Hélène Dorion (1995, Guernica Editions) and Updates, poems by Françoise Hàn (1999, Éditions en Forêt/Verlag Im Wald). She is preparing a translation of Madeleine Gagnon's Rêve de pierre.

CHRISTIAN MORGENSTERN (1871-1914) German poet philosopher, translator of Ibsen and Strindberg. Influenced by them, as by Nietzsche and later by Rudolph Steiner. Known particularly for his absurdist poems, despite his more serious, visionary work. Claimed by the Dadaists as one of their own.

YUNNA MORITS (born in Kiev, 1937) one of Russian's leading contemporary poets. Although she achieved prominence during the Thaw, in the Soviet era her poems were published much more rarely than her readers wished. A book of her selected poems, V Logove Golose, was published in Moscow in 1990 to great acclaim. She lives in Moscow.

SANDRA MOUSSEMPÉS, born in Paris in 1965, has published two volumes of poetry, Exercices d'incendie (Éditions Fourbis 1994) and Vestiges de fillette (Flammarion 1997). Her poems and short stories have been published in many collected works and journals. Future publications include two short stories in NRF and translations from Vestiges de fillette by Serge Gavronsky in Sites, the Journal of 20th Century French Studies (in print 2000). In 1995, she received a prestigious residency grant at the Villa Médicis, Académie de France in Rome, and has since received many other grants, including the Mission Stendhal in London (1994; 1997), Semaines littéraires de Genshagen in Berlin (1999) and a residency at the Villa Kujoyama in Japan (2000).

FATIMA MUJCINOVIC is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Westminster College, Salt Lake City. She was born and raised in Sarajevo, Bosnia, and in 1994 she was forced to leave her country and come to the U.S. to continue her undergraduate studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

PAUL MULDOON’s most recent volume is Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. Born in 1951 in County Armagh, Muldoon now teaches at Princeton University and in 1999 was elected Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. Paul Muldoon’s main collections of poetry are New Weather (1973), Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting The British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), Hay (1998), Poems 1968-1998 (2001).

KATWIWA MULE, a Kenyan, is Assistant Professor of African and Comparative Literature at Smith College, specializes on African women’s drama and has published essays on Maria ma Bâ, Penina Mlama, and other Kiswahili women playwrights. He has also translated two plays, Penina Mlama’s Nguzo Mama (Mother Pillar) and Amandina Lihamba’s Mkutano wa Pili wa Ndege (The Second Conference of Birds).

WILLIAM MULLEN Professor at Bard College. His recent publications include Jefferson and Rome: Foundation and Fabric and The Agenda of the Milesian School. His poem "Enchanted Rock" was selected by John Hollander to appear in Best American Poems of 1998. The American Biographical Institute has chosen him this year for inclusion in Five Hundred Leaders of Influence, and the International Biographical Institute in Cambridge, England, has included him in The First Five Hundred.

DANIEL MURPHY teaches in the Department of Modern Languages at Hollins University where he offers classes on Hispanic literature, and on Spanish language and culture. His special scholarly interest is in poetry and he is the author of Vicente Aleixandre’s Stream of Lyric Consciousness (Bucknell University Press, 2001).

BETTY ROSE NAGLE is Associate Professor in the Department of Classical Studies at Indiana University. Her translation of the Silvae, a collection of occasional poetry by the 1st century CE Roman poet Statius, is forthcoming from Indiana University Press in Spring 2004. She has also translated the Fasti, a poem about the Roman calendar of religious festivals by the Augustan Age Roman poet Ovid and has published a a monograph on the poetry Ovid wrote from exile on the Black Sea, as well as articles on narrative strategies in Ovid’s masterwork, the Metamorphoses.  

MINA NEDIALKOVA Born in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1974, she attended a Russian language elementary and junior high school. She has studied at the Sorbonne and is now at Smith College.

GIAMPIERO NERI (1927—) was born in Erba, Italy and lives in Milan. A leading exponent of the Milan school, he has published seven volumes of poetry: L’aspetto occidentale del vestito [The Western Look of Dress] (Milan: Guanda, 1976), Liceo [High School] (Milan-Palermo: Acquario-Guanda, 1986), Dallo stesso luogo [From the Same Place] (Milan: Coliseum, 1992), Teatro naturale [Natural Theater] (Milan: Mondadori, 1998), Erbario con figure [Herbarium with Pictures] (Como: Lietocolle, 2000), Finale (Como: Dialogolibri, 2002), Armi e mestieri [Weapons and Trades] (Milan: Mondadori, 2004). A collection of his prose writings will be published by Lietocolle: La serie dei fatti, quindici prose di Giampiero Neri [The Series of Facts, Fifteen Prose Writings by Giampiero Neri], edited and with an introduction by Victoria Surliuga.

ANDY NEWCOMB often co-translates Russian poetry with Nina Kossman. He collaborated with Kossman on some of the Tsvetaeva translation in Poem of the End.

KAREN NEWMAN is a Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Brown University, and is a comparatist working in early modern literature and culture, English, French and Italian. Her books include Shakespeare’s Rhetoric of Comic Character, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama, and most recently, Fetal Positions: Individualism, Science, Visuality. She has also published articles on various Renaissance topics.

TEODORO NDJOCK NGANA was born in 1952 in Ilanga (Cameroon). Son of a farming family of Basaa origin, he is noted for his political work in the struggle for Cameroon independence. In 1972, he enrolled in the University of Yaoundé, where he began to write poetry that dealt with social issues. He lives with his Italian wife and daughter in Rome. His poetry has appeared in a number of anthologies, including Quaderno africano I, in the Cittadini della Poesia series (Florence: Loggia de' Lanzi, 1998). He has published a collection of verse entitled Nhindo Nero (Rome: Anterem, 1994), and the poem Il segreto della capanna (Rome: Lilith, 1998), with parallel text by the author himself in the Basaa language.

PIERRE NGIJOL NGIJOL, a Camerounian, holds a Ph.D in African literature from University of Bordeaux, France. He is a retired Professor of African languages and literatures and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Yaounde, Cameroon. One of his greatest achievements was his pioneering work in making Basaa oral epic literature accessible to a wider audience by translating it into French. His initiative culminated in the collection, transcription and translation of the epic of Bon ba Hiton, as narrated by the bard Njib Njib of Matomb. In 1980, his dissertation was published in Cameroon as Les Fils de Hitong, by the Centre d’Edition et de Production Pour l’Enseignement et la Recherche (CEPER).

SOPHIA NIKOLAÏDOU was born in Thessaloniki in 1968. She studied classical literature and lives and works in Thessaloniki. She has published two short story collections, One Blonde Well Done (Athens: Kedros, 1997) and Fear Will Get to You and You’ll be Alone (Athens: Kedros, 1999) both minimalist in style, followed by a novel, The Planet Prespa. A Grand Story (Athens: Kedros, 2002), which combines elements of the detective thriller, the gothic romance, and the campus novel.

DIMITRIS NOLLAS is one of the most accomplished fiction writers in Greece. His ten books include short story collections, novellas, and The Sepulcher by the Sea, a novel that won the 1993 Greek State Prize for Fiction. A selection from his short fiction has appeared in French (Éditions Hatier).

MWENDA NTARANGWI is Director of the St. Lawrence University study abroad program in Kenya. He holds Ph.D in Anthropology from the University of Illinois and has published widely in the areas of gender, popular culture, and study abroad. His current interests include teaching and research in the social sciences in Africa. Ntarangwi's book Gender, Identity and Performance is forthcoming from Africa World Press, New Jersey.

 JAMES O’BRIEN is Professor Emeritus of Japanese at the University of Wisconsin. He continues to translate modern Japanese poems and to publish these as the occasion presents itself. Poems by Kitahara Hakushu (1885-1942) and Hagiwara Sakutaro (1886-1942) appeared in the Fall, 2002 issue of Metamorphoses.

STEVE O'HALLORAN is a poet residing in Northampton.

JEONG-HUI OH is one of the most acclaimed writers of the post-Korean War generation and her short stories often deal with the interior landscape of women. Since making her debut in 1968, she has published four short story collections, the latest one in 1994, and has won many prestigious literary awards in Korea including the Yi Sang Literature Award in 1979.

AKINLOYE OJO, a native of Nigeria, received his BA from the University of Ibadan. He holds an MA from Cornell and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Georgia where he now teaches Yoruba and African Studies. His research interest is in socio-linguistics. His first collection of poems, In Flight was published in 2000.

CARLOS DE OLIVEIRA (1921-1981) published five novels and ten collections of poetry and was also a painter. Considered a neo-realist, he also reveals symbolist, surrealist, and cubist tendencies. Outside of Portugal and Brazil, de Oliveira is best known in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and England. One of his novels, Bee in the Rain, was turned into a movie. Alexis Levitin's authorized translations of his work have appeared in or are forthcoming in: Beacons, Cream City Review, Great River Review, Greenfield Review, International Poetry Review, Luna, Marlboro Review, Mid-American Review, Nimrod, the new renaissance, Osiris, Paintbrush, and Visions International.

ZAJA OMBOGA, born in Kenya, is Lecturer in the Department of Kiswahili, College of Education and External Studies of the University of Nairobi, Kenya, where he teaches Kiswahili language and literature and courses in translation. His published translations include the popular Longhorn Reading Scheme for children Books 1-10: Sungura Yuko Hapa, Nyumba ya Sungura, Sungura ni Mbaya, Sungura ya Wapi? Karamu, Ulimbo Langoni, Mwanamke na Malewe, Hadithi za Mamba, Mbawa za Kobe, and Kiundu Akosa Karamu. His book on translation, Mbinu na Stadi za Mawasilano, is currently under review by Longhorn. He has also published a resource handbook for retirees called Ubunifu na Biashara Ndogo Ndogo, Mwongozo kwa Wastaagu (Civil Service Reform Programme, Voluntary Early Retirement Scheme).

JAN ONDRUS (1932- ) is the author of six collections of poetry. He has been hailed by a prominent critic, Milan Hamada, as an "absolute poet," one whose concern with the fundamental problems of modern man make him a bearer of a universal message accessible world-wide.

REMMY ONGALA was born in 1947 Ramadhani Mtoro Ongala in the extreme East of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since 1978, he has been living in Tanzania. He labels his type of music "Bongo Beat" and he has proclaimed himself the voice of the downtrodden in Tanzania. He is known for his politically outspoken and socially controversial song lyrics.

DIMITRI ORAM has studied Russian in Scotland, the United States, and at the University of Yaroslavl in Russia. He is currently a student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

LYDIA MIRANDA ORAM holds a B.A. from Smith College, an M.A. in Italian from Columbia University, and an M.Phil. in Comparative Literature from New York University, where she is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature and Cinema Studies. She has published critical articles on Italian and Spanish fiction and translations from Spanish and Italian.

JULIA OTXOA was born in 1953 in San Sebastián (Guipúzcoa). Poet and writer, her work has won various prizes. She is a regular contributor to magazines and newspapers, currently writing for Diario Vasco de San Sebastián; Diario Bilbao; the magazine Leer in Madrid, among others.  She has written over seven volumes of poetry and has been anthologized in several books of both regional and national contemporary poetry.

ORM ØVERLAND teaches American literature and American Studies at the University of Bergen in Norway. Recent books are Immigrant Minds, American Identities: Making the United States Home, 1870-1930 (2000) and The Western Home: A Literary History of Norwegian America (1996), both with University of Illinois Press. For the latter he was awarded the American Studies Network Prize for best European book in American Studies 1996-1997. In cooperation with the Longfellow Institute, Harvard University, he is the editor of a forthcoming translation of a Norwegian-American novel about Minneapolis in the 1880s, A Saloonkeeper's Daughter by Drude Krogh Janson (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). In 1998 he was awarded The Norwegian Association of Literary Translators' Fiftieth Anniversary Book Reviewer Prize.