ALDO PALAZZESCHI (1895-1974) Florentine wit, poet and novelist, he started out as a member of the Futurist Movement led by the poet Marinetti which embraced a fusion of sculpture, painting and literature with modern technology and the dynamics of the 20th century machine age. Withdrawing when the Futurists became linked to the rise of Fascism, he devoted himself to the novel, shuttling between Paris and Rome. A major novel, The Sisters Materassi, has been superbly translated by Angus Davidson in 1953.

THALIA PANDIRI, editor-in-chief of Metamorphoses since 1999, is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Smith College. She has published translations from medieval Latin, Greek, Italian and French, and is particularly interested in Italian neodialect poetry and in Greek-based dialects of southern Italy. She is currently working on survivor narratives from the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922 and orally transmitted folk tales from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Asia Minor.

ISABELLA PANFIDO was born in Venice. She hosts a nationwide radio program dedicated to poetry and writes a cultural coumn for the Corriere del Veneto-Corriere della Sera.

ATHINA PAPADAKI A leftist and a feminist, Papadaki writes in the tradition of Elytis and Ritsos; she uses a particularly Greek form of surrealism, centered on the concrete realities of daily life. Drawing on liturgical and mythological references, and on the many levels of spoken Greek, she evokes a rich literary and popular tradition while always staying close to the experience and speech of a wide audience.

JULIO PAREDES was born in Bogotá in 1957. He received his B.A. in Hispanic Literature from the University of the Andes, Bogotá and his M.A. in Medieval Spanish Literature from Complutense University, Madrid. He was awarded two writing grants from Colcultura (Colombia’s N.E.A.) in 1992 and 1994. He published two collections of short stories, Salón de Júpiter y otros cuentos (1994) and Guía para extraviados (Norma Publishers, 1997). He is currently Editorial Director of Reference Books for Norma Publishers.

JOONSEONG PARK was born and raised in Seoul, Korea. He came to the United States in 1994, and is now attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His fiction has appeared in Fiction, Green Mountains Review, American Letters & Commentary, RE:AL, Hawaii Pacific Review.  

GIOVANNI PASCOLI Still beloved in modern Italy for his pastoral poems which won him the accolade of "the last son of Virgil" by d'Annunzio. He was among the many of his generation guided by patriotic fervor, though a brief incarceration in his youth turned him from revolutionary zeal to the celebration of love and the peace of village life.

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI (Bologna 1922-Rome 1975), best known internationally as a pioneering cinema director, was also a novelist, poet, editor, translator, and prolific and scholary critic. His early (1942) Poesie a Casarsa and especially the massive anthology, Poesia dialettale del Novecento, (which he co-edited with Mario Dell'Arco and for which Pasolini did the lion's share of the work, first published in 1952) constituted a turning point in the study, collection, and renascence of dialect poetry. For his poetry, he chose the dialect of his mother's birthplace, Casarsa (Friuli).

BORIS PASTERNAK (1890-1960) Russian poet and novelist. Received Nobel Prize for his novel: Doktor Zhivago in 1957, but was forced by the Communist government to renounce it.

RAJEEV S. PATKE is Associate Professor of English at the National University of Singapore, where he teaches courses on postcolonial literature and coordinates the postgraduate program in literature. His books include The Long Poems of Wallace Stevens (Cambridge University Press, 1985), and the co-edited book Institutions in Cultures: Theory and Practice (Rodopi, 1996). He has also written several essays on Asian poetry, including "Indian Poetry since Independence" for the Oxford Illustrated History of Indian Writing (forthcoming).

DAVID PATTERSON Emeritus President of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.

CESARE PAVESE (1908-1950) was one of a group of anti-Fascist Italian writers who congregated in the cities of the North and produced a flowering of Italian letters unprecedented since the Renaissance. Some, like Pavese, were exiled by Mussolini (in imitation of Augustus Caesar) to outlying provinces. All were denied permanent employment for refusing to sign oaths or to join the Fascio, and made shift with translating and editing. The effect on Pavese was devastating, though he continued until his suicide to write original and significant works.

KONSTANTIN PAVLOV was born in Popovo, later Vitoshko, now at the bottom of Studena Lake, Bulgaria in 1933. He studied law at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria. He was an editor of Radio Sofia, the Publishing House Balgarski Pisatel, and Literaturen Front. He also worked in Bulgarian cinematography. Poet, satirist and screenplay writer, he wrote the screenplays of many Bulgarian movies, and published six books of poems: Satires (1960), Verses (1965), Old Things (1983), Appearance (1989), You, Sweet Agony (1991), and the anthology of his poetry Elegiac Optimism (1993). For about twenty years, he was banned from the public literary space in Bulgaria, persecuted, fired, and left in isolation. His works were frowned upon and, consequently, consciously overlooked and not published. He was a contemporary of the sixties but the rejection of his poems at that time dislocated him into the nineties when his poetry could finally be published and read.

OKOT P’BITEK, (1931-1982) One of Africa’s leading literary icons, he was born at Guru in Nothern Uganda where he received his early education before joining the famous King’s College, Budo. He later trained as a teacher at Mbarara Teachers College. He studied Education and Law at Bristol in the UK and later Literature and Anthropology at Oxford University. During his long and illustrous university career, he lectured at Makerere and Nairobi where he organised many theatre activities and arts festivals. His best known works include: Song of Lawino: A Lament and Song of Ocol, Song of Malaya, and Song of a Prisoner. He is also the author of African Religion in Western Scholarship, Horn of My Love, Africa’s Cultural Revolution, and Artist the Ruler.

IRENE PERCIALI is a graduate student in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her translations of the poet Gabriel Stanescu, done with Adam J. Sorkin, have appeared in the cultural magazine Apostrof in Cluj, in the anthology of Romanian poets edited by Stanescu with Sorkin, Day After Night, and in the journal International Notebook of Poetry.

CAMILO PESSANHA (1867-1926) published only one book in his lifetime, Clepsidra, but he is an important symbolist and transitional figure heralding modernism. He spent much of his adult life in Macau, to which he returned before his deeath. His poetry fluctuates between concrete reality and symbolic forms of a personal nature.

FERNANDO ANTÓNIO NOGUEIRA PESSOA (1888-1935) is widely held to be the greatest Portuguese poet of the 20th century. In fact, he is rivaled only by the near-mythic Luís de Camões (1524?-1579?) for the crown of greatest Portuguese poet ever. Pessoa’s work is well-known in poetry circles the world over and has been translated into several languages. Pessoa is probably best known for his heteronyms—fully developed alter-egos, each with their own biography, poetic essence, and style. However, the poem included in this issue was written by Pessoa “himself.” It is one of the most commonly anthologized of his poems and the 14th line (“O que em mim sente ‘stá pensando” | “What in me feels is thinking”) is one of the two most quoted lines in his very extensive oeuvre. Notably, it is one of the few poems that Pessoa himself boasted about, being particularly proud of the first line of the penultimate stanza (“Ah, poder ser tu, sendo eu!” | “Ah, to be you, being me”).

PAMELA PETRO, author of Sitting Up With the Dead: A Storied Journey through the American South, lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she works as a full-time writer. She has contributed to the New York Times travel section, Atlantic Monthly, Islands, and Forbes publications.

PETER PETRO (1946- ) teaches Slavic Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, B.C. He is the author of Modern Satire: Four Studies (1982) and A History of Slovak Literature (1995), and has translated M. Simecka's The Year of the Frog (1993) and edited the Critical Essays on Milan Kundera (1999). He writes poetry irregularly and reluctantly.

ELIZABETH PETROFF Is the editor of Medieval Women's Visionary Literature (1986). Her latest book is Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism. She teachees Comparative Literature at the U. of Massachusetts.

VALERI PETROV (1920- ) Born in Sofia. A Bulgarian of Jewish background, his real name is Valeri Nisim Mevorakh. He graduated from the Italian school in Sofia (1939), and then from the University of Sofia with a degree in medicine (1944). Participated in the last phase of WWII as a military correspondent. One of the founders and later editor of the most famous and prestigious satiric newspaper, Sturshel (The Gadfly), 1945-62. Press attache in Rome, 1947-50. Author of numerous collections of poems, plays, screenplays, fairy tales, essays, etc. His translations of Shakespeare's plays into Bulgarian are authoritative.

MIKHAIL PETROVICH (1935- ) Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Ioffe Physical Technical Institute in Russia. A friend of Brodsky for more than 30 years, a specialist on Brodsky's poetry. He has been conducting research at Princeton University.

LUDMILA PETRUSHEVSKAYA (1938- ) has been called “one of Russia’s finest living writers,” and her work has been widely translated. The Time: Night was short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize and translated into over twenty languages. In 2002 she received Russia’s prestigious Triumph Prize for lifetime achievement. Other works include Immortal Love; On the Way to Eros; The Mystery of the House; Real-Life Tales; Find Me, Sleep.

SERGE PEY was born in Toulouse in 1950. He writes his texts on sticks and he realizes ritual installations of poems. Writer, teacher, oral improviser, he divides his time between Toulouse and Mexico. Serge Pey is also the founder of the Direct Poetry Festival, and of the reviews Tribu and Emeute. He has published over a dozen books, notably La définition de l'aigle, Notre Dame la noire ou l'Evangile du Serpent, La mère du cercle. http://www.wizya.net/pey.htm

INA PFITZNER received a Ph.D. in French Literature from Louisiana State University. She continued work in Paris this summer, with a scholarship from the Institut de Washington, on the subject of exile and translation in works by Panaït Istrati, Samuel Beckett and Paul Celan. Her literary translations have appeared in Chelsea and Exquisite Corpse.

ADEODATO PIAZZA NICOLAI, teacher, poet, essayist and translator, was born in Vigo de Cadore, provincia de Belluno, in 1944 and emigrated to Chicago with his family in 1959. He holds a B.A. from Wabash College and an M.A. from the University of Chicago. In 1996 he retired from Inland Steel after thirty years with the company, and has since devoted himself full-time to writing and translating. He has published poetry, translations and essays in Italian and American journals. Among the numerous books he has authored: La visita di Rebecca (1979), I due volti di Janus (1980), and La doppia finzione (Insula editore, 198). In addition to original poetry in Ladino, Italian, and English, his published and forthcoming translations of a wide range of poets into English are from the Ladino dialect of Cadore, from Venetian, from the dialect of Friuli, and from standard Italian. He has also translated poems by Adrienne Rich into Italian, and is preparing an anthology (in Italian) of African-American women poets, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan, Maya Angelou, Rita Dove, and others; for this project he has received a Sonia Raiziss Giop Foundation Grant in Translating, sponsored by the National Italian-American Foundation. Currently he lives in Italy, and is active as a lecturer, instructor, translator. He is a member of the Comitato Scientifico dell'Istituto Culturale delle Comunità dei Ladini Storici delle Dolomiti Bellunesi and also conducts workshops on the Ladino dialect of Cadore.

MARCIN PIEKOSZEWSKI holds an M.A. in English literature from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and has worked on translations of American playwright John Stepping’s works for the Polish theatre.

PINDAR (ca. 522-442 B.C.) Greek lyric poet, employed by many winners at the Olympic Games to celebrate their victories, exercised a great influence on subsequent Latin poets. The English ode form is based on his odes.

GISÈLE PINEAU Born in Paris (1956); a truly transatlantic writer. As in her own childhood, her fictional characters go back and forth between France and the Caribbean, French and Creole, hope and disillusionment. Her novels include La Grande Drive des esprits (1993), L'Espérance-macadam (1995), L'Exil selon Julia (1996), L'Âme prêtée aux oiseaux (1998); she has published an essay, Femmes des Antilles (1998), and two children's books.

RICHARD J. PIOLI Has translated modern Italian writers for various publications and has translated and edited the collection entitled Stung by Salt and War: Creative Texts of the Italian Avant-Gardist F.T. Marinetti (1987). He is currently working on a translation of the poetry of D'Annunzio.

BARBARA POGACNIK is a Slovenian poet and translator whose poems have been published or are forthcoming in Literatura, Nova Revija, Apokalipsa, Sodobnost in Slovenia, VERSUs/m ( Romania) and Profemina (Belgrade). Her poetry collection Inundations is just out from Mladinska knjiga in Slovenia. She lives in Ljubjlana, Slovenia.

SYLVIA PLATH was an American poet, and author of The Bell Jar and two books of poetry, The Colossus and Ariel, which have continued to attract critical acclaim. Her troubled life and suicide in 1963 at the age of 31 not only cut short a brilliant career, but have also colored subsequent criticism. Her marriage to Britain's poet laureate, Ted Hughes, has recently been celebrated by him in Birthday Letters.

VICTORIA OFFREDI POLETTO was born and raised in England to Italian parents and has taught language and literature and worked as a translator for the last thirty-five years in Europe, the Middle East and America. Since 1991 she has taught literature, language, and the theory and practice of translation. Currently she is preparing an anthology of works by immigrant women in Italy translated into English with Giovanna Bellesia and Alessandra Di Maio.

SIMONA POPESCU teaches French at the University of Bucharest and has published three collections of poetry : The Xylophone and Other poems (Editions Litera, 1990), Juventus (Editions Cartea Româneasc?, 1994); Night or Day (Editions Paralela '45, 1998) and Operations in Green (Editions Cartea Româneasc?, 2006).

RITVA POOM Has translated widely from Finnish and Estonian, especially the Kalevala Mythologyich which she also edited (U. of Indiana, 1989). Her translation of Eeva-Liisa Manner's Fog Horses earned a Translation Award from the Columbia U. Translation Center, and she is the recipient of the 1993 Translation Award of the American Scandinavian Foundation.

IOAN ES. POP, born in 1958 in northern Romania, received his degree from Baia Mare University in 1983. He taught Romanian language and literature for six years in the small town of Ieud, the starting point for his first volume of poems, Ieudul fara iesire ("Ieud, No Way Out," Bucharest: Cartea Romaneasca, 1994,), which includes the series "15 oltetului st., room 305" and "the banquet." That volume won numerous prizes and awards, as did Porcec (a fictitious proper name), from which the "House" series is taken (Bucharest: Carta Romanesca, 1996). In September 1989, Pop moved to Bucharest as a worker in the construction of the infamous Casa Popurului (the People’s House, as the one-time dictator Ceausescu’s palace was known), an experience that inspired a series of poems about "dormitory" conditions for the unmarried workers. In April, 1990, he joined the literary magazine Luceafarul and is now senior editor for culture at Ziarul Financiar ("The Financial Journal"). His latest collection, Pantelimon 113 bis (Bucharest: Cartea Romanesca, 1999), won the Poetry Pize of the Union of Romanian Writers, the country’s highest literary award.

ANTONIO PORPETTA Spanish writer, has published eight books of poetry since 1978 and an anthology. He has won several prizes for poetry. His work has been translated into several languages, the latest a book-length translation of Ardieron ya los sándalos into German.

PHOEBE PORTER received her BA in Spanish from Bryn Mawr College in 1975, her MA (1980) and her PhD (1985) in Hispanic Studies from Brown University. She has taught Spanish at a number of institutions including Wellesley Senior High School, Smith College, Colgate University and the University of New Hampshire. Her area of specialization is the Modern Spanish Novel with an emphasis on women writers from Spain. Her publications include articles on Emilia Pardo Bazán, Rosalía de Castro, and Benito Perez Galdós. She has also co-authored an anthology of Latin American short stories, Exploraciones imaginativas: Quince cuentos hispanoamericanos (MacMillan), and has translated a Spanish novel into English, Fiesta al noroeste by Ana María Matute (Celebration in the Northwest, Nebraska Press).

ADÉLIA PRADO One of Brazil's best-known contemporary poets, with six books of poetry to her name, including O Coracao Disparado which won the presitigious Jabuti Prize in 1978. Several of her books, including the chapbook The Headlong Heart have appeared in English translated by Ellen Watson.

LYNN PRINCE Co-editor of Metamorphoses. Is currently working towards a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts.

HEIDELINDE PRUGER was born in Vienna in 1973, earned the degree of Mag. phil. from the University of Klagenfurt with first-class honors in 1998, and is a doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh. Her fields of specialization are Scottish and Austrian literature, and she has received scholarships, prizes and honors for her work. Her first collection of poems, Bilder einer Stimme, was published in 1999 by Bibliothek der Provinz. Her study of William Soutar, The Righteousness of Life, was nominated for the Saltire Scottish First Book of the Year Award. She has published critical articles on a range of authors and subjects, and edited Alex Galloway, At the Year ‘s Fa : Selected Poems in Scots and English (2000).

RONALD PUPPO, born in San Francisco, received his B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his Ph.D. from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 1995. He has published articles in several newspapers and magazines, including Avui, La Vanguardia, and El Diari de Barcelona. His translations from English to Catalan include texts by Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Crevecoeur, and Irving in Independència i unió dels Estats Units d'Amèrica (Barcelona: Llibres de l'Index, 1993) and Karl Popper's Lògica de la investigació cientifica (Barcelona: Laia, 1985). From Catalan to Castilian to English, he has translated catalogs, songbooks, and a contribution in El Dublin de James Joyce (Barcelona: Destino, 1995). He is Professor of Anglo-Saxon Civilization and Culture at the Faculty of Translation and Interpretation of Osona, part of University Studies of Vic (imminently Universitat de Vic). He is currently working on a full-length English translation of Jacint Verdaguer's epic Canigó.

ALEXANDER PUSHKIN (1799-1837), whom most Russian readers regard as their greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian poetry, was a French poet before he was a Russian one, and was much influenced by eighteenth-century French poets such as Chénier. Later he was very taken with Byron, but, as his poem on Chénier suggests, his esteem for Chénier seemed to grow as his enthusiasm for Byron waned. The epigraph is from “La Jeune Captive.”  

ROCIO QESPI (ROCIO QUISPE-AGNOLI) is Assistant professor of Colonial and Postcolonial Latin American Studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Michigan State University. She is also Core Faculty of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Women in Development. She earned a M.A. in Sciences du Langage in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toulouse II, and an A.M. and Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies at Brown University. She has received several research grants and fellowships from the Taiwan Government, Spain’s Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional, Brown University, the Newberry Library, the Universidad de Salamanca, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos de Sevilla. La fe indígena en la escritura: asimilación y resistencia en los Andes colonials (Lima: Universidad de San Marcos Press, 2006) led to public presentations/interviews on Peru’s NPR and TV. In 2006 she also edited a special issue of Cuaderno Internacional de Estudios Hispánicos y Lingüística entitled Beyond the Convent: Colonial Women’s Voices and Daily Challenges in Spanish America. As a writer of short fiction, she has received the Atenea literary award (Salamanca, Spain 1999) for El cementerio de Acarí, also the first finalist in the Ana María Matute Literary Competition (Madrid, Spain 1999). It has been published in the collection Ellas también cuentan (Madrid: Torremozas, 2001). El cuarto mandamiento received La Regenta literary award for short fiction (Salamanca 1999) and it has been published in Writing Towards Hope (New Haven: Yale UP, 2006). A collection of her short stories is slated to be published in Peru (Mundo Ajeno).

SALVATORE QUASIMODO (1901-1968) was a prolific poet, writer, critic, and translator, he was awarded the Nobel prize in 1959.

ANTERO DE QUENTAL (1842-1891) born in the Azores, he studied at Coimbra and was central in introducing socialist ideas to Portugal. The leading figure of the so-called Generation of the Seventies, he relied on the classical form of the sonnet to give order to an inner life threatened with chaos.

FRANCISCO DE QUEVEDO Y VILLEGAS (1580-1645) was the leading satirist of Spain’s Golden Age.

 GIOVANNI RABONI was born in Milan, Italy, in 1932. He has worked as an editor for Mondadori book publishers as well as a literary critic for Europeo magazine and drama critic for Corriere della Sera. He is the author of eleven volumes of poetry, which were collected in 1997 as Tutte le Poesie (Garzanti Publishers). The translations published in this issue are from Ogni Terzo Pensiero, which won the Viareggio-Repaci prize for poetry in 1994. He has translated French authors Baudelaire, Apollinaire, and Racine into Italian. During the 1990’s, he published Alla Ricerca del Tempo Perduto, a complete translation into Italian of Proust’s A la Récherche du Temps Perdu. Raboni lives and works in Milan.

EDWARD RADZINSKI (b. 1936): Russian playwright best known for his "historical philosophical trilogy": Conversations with Socraties (1971), Lunin (1977) and Theater at the Time of Nero and Seneca (1981). The unifying idea of all three plays is that no authority, however oppressive, can enslave the human spirit. He also wrote the comedy / satire Don Juan Continued (1979) and other plays dealing with contemporary issues. He is also the author of The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II (1992) and Stalin, the first in-depth biography based on explosive new documents from Russia's secret issues (1996).

TEGAN RALEIGH studied French at Reed College, and is pursuing an M.F.A. in literary translation at the University of Iowa, where she also teache rhetoric.

ALEKSIS RANNIT was born in Kallaste, Estonia in 1914, and emigrated to the U. S. in 1953, and served as Curator of the Slavic and East European Collections at Yale. His selected poems Valimik appeared shortly before his death in 1984.

JENNIFER RATHBURN is a Lecturer in Spanish at Mount Holyoke College. She specializes in US-Mexico Border literature, poetry translation and contemporary Argentinean theatre. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona.

JOSE RÉGIO (1901-1969) published equally in poetry, fiction, drama, the essay, and criticism. One of the founders of the famous literary magazine Presença in 1927, he was influenced by Dostoevsky and preoccupied with the problem of a self torn between good and evil. His work is religiously grounded and confessional in nature.

PRIMOZ REPAR’s poetry collections include There is a Tiny Web Beyond the Word (1994), Book of Prayers (1995) and The Alchemy of a Heartbeat (1998). His book Essays about the Apocalypse was published in 2000. He is the chief editor of the cultural journal Apokalipsa and lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

CLAY RESNICK lives in Boston.

KATHLEEN RETTIG is Assistant Professor at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska and has worked as Chief Editor of the Nebraska English Journal, The Midlands Conference Journal and the Patrick Kavanagh Journal. She has published on Shakespeare and contemporary women authors. She is the interim director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Co-major at Creighton University.

BOHUSLAV REYNEK (1892-1971) An underestimated poet of great authenticity, Reynek exemplifies the undercurrent of mystical Catholicism in Czech culture. His roots are in Skupina Floriána (Florian's Group), dominated by the Catholic rebel Jakub Deml (19878-1961), whose visionary prose won the admiration of Roman Jakobson. Unlike Deml, Reynek was not an anarchist; his faith leaned to the anguished Catholicism of the French masters he admired: Bloy, Claudel and Bernanos. As a nature poet, Reynek adds a mystical dimension to the Czech landscape, as shown by "frost" (from Mráz v okne, Frost in the Window, 1950-55). All three poems translated by Alfred Thomas are from the postwar decade.

MILAN RICHTER (1948- ) a specialist in German and English, and a Slovak diplomat in Norway, made his name as a translator (Dickinson, Hemingway, Lundkvist, Neruda, Cardenal, Transtromer), and an author of some half a dozen collections of poetry. Translations of his poetry have appeared in Austria and Norway.

RAINER MARIA RILKE (1875-1926) was born and educated in Prague, where he published his first collection of poems in 1894. He traveled widely in Europe before arriving in Paris in 1902 to work as secretary for the sculptor August Rodin. He kept this job for less than a year, but lived and wrote in the city, supported by patrons, until 1909. His signature poetic compositions, Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, were both published in 1923. It was only after this achievement that Rilke, living in Switzerland and battling terminal illness, wrote his cycle of French poems about the rose. Les Roses was published, along with another French cycle, Les Fenêtres, in 1927. His French verse remains obscure relative to his well known and extensively translated German work.

MANUEL RIVAS, a journalist, novelist and screenwriter, was born in La Coruña, Galicia, in 1957. Many of his articles have been collected in Toxos e flores (1992), Galicia, el bonsai atlántico (Aguilar, 1994), El periodismo es un cuento (Alfaguara, 1997), and Galicia, Galicia (Aguilar, 2001). Writing in Galician, he has won both the Galician Critics’ Prize and the Spanish Critics’ Prize. His collection of short stories, ¿Qué me quieres, amor? (Alfaguara, 1996) won the National Narrative Prize. One of the short stories included in it, “La Lengua de la Mariposa” was made into a movie, “Butterfly.” Rivas is an active participant in the ‘Nunca Mais’ movement against the Prestige disaster off the coast of his native Galicia.

Poet, essayist, translator, editor, founder and president for thirty years of the Centro Romanesco Trilussa, GIORGIO ROBERTI energetically promoted Romanesco language, culture and poetry. Among many awards, his 'na zeppa a l'occhio' (A Stick in the Eye) won the Premio Internazionale per la Satira, and his Antiche farmacie romane won the Premio Internazionale di saggistaca. His 1974 translation into Romanesco of Er Vangelo seconno S. Marco [The Gospel According to Mark] has been much praised and often reprinted. After his death in November, 2002, a speecial issue of the magazine Romanità was dedicated to him.

ADELA ROBLES-SÁEZ, born in Alcoi, is a native speaker of Catalan. She studied "filologia anglesa i italiana" at the University of Valencia, and in 1995 obtained her M.A. in Comparative Literature at West Virginia University. She is currently working towards her Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of California at Berkeley, where she is researching the application of cognitive linguistics to literature. She is especially interested in translation, and has published translations of several twentieth-century Catalan writers in Iowa Review, vol. 23, no. 2 (1993), 3-19.

LOUIS J. RODRIGUES was educated at the Universities of Madras, London (King's), Cambridge (Trinity Hall) and Barcelona; he holds a doctorate in Anglo-Saxon. He has published two books of verse and a series of parallel-text verse translations from Anglo-Saxon. Jointly with his wife Josefina Bernet, he has published Short Story Translation - from theory to practice besides four bilingual Spanish-English titles. He was one of the chief collaborators in the Third Version of the Collins Spanish Dictionary. He contributed translations of eight of J.V. Foix's sonnets and the article by Joaquim Molas, "J.V. Foix or Total Investigation," in Catalan Review, vol. I, no. 1 (1986). In 1993 his manuscript A Choice of Salvador Espriu's Verse, was awarded the Translation Prize for Poetry in the Primers Jocs Florals de la Diàspora Catalana (Center for Catalan Studies and Fundacio Pauli Bellet). His translation of Salvador Espriu: Selected Poems is scheduled for publication by Carcanet (Manchester, England).

CLAUDIO RODRIGUEZ (1934—1999, Spain) Frequent winner of literary prizes, university professor translator of T.S. Eliot, and member of the Royal Spanish Academy, Claudio Rodriguez evolved as a poet into the tradition of the Spanish mystic, of ecstatic poets such as San Juan de la Cruz. The last of his five books, Casí una leyenda (Tusquets, Barcelona, 1991), is one of the publisher’s series, “Nuevos Textos Sagrados.”  The poet’s wonder and perplexity in face of the relentless process of change fuel his journey into the physicality of moment and matter. His long lines and transparent language suit his meditations upon death, nature, and the possibility of transcendency.  

JEANETTE SHULENBERGER ROGERS is a writer, translator and editor who lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. She is writing a historical fiction novel that is set during the era of the troubadours and the Crusades; the novel includes a dozen troubadour songs which Rogers is translating. Rogers met modern Occitan poet Miquèl Decòr in 2004 when she was in France seeking ways to learn Occitan. This translation effort has been mutually beneficial, since working with Decòr’s poetry has helped her learn Oc. Also, Miquèl Decòr is well-versed in the topic of Rogers’ novel and has answered nagging questions and done research when the questions have been too obscure – an invaluable aid to any writer of historical fiction. In addition, Jeannette Rogers is a nontraditional student of English, French and Medieval History at Meredith College and is extremely grateful for the support she has received from Meredith for numerous writing and translation projects.

MONTSERRAT ROIG was born in Barcelona in 1946. She studied Theater and then Spanish philology at the University of Barcelona, where she later became a professor of Catalán. A journalist as well as an academic, she has written for El País, La Calle, and other major newspapers and also conducted interviews on her own television show. She won various awards for both fiction and non-fiction: her first novel Molta roba i poc sabó... i tan neta que la volen (1971) won the Premio Victor Catalá, and her extensive research on Catalans in concentration camps earned her the Premio de la Crítica Serra d’Or. Roig died in Barcelona in 1991.

JUAN ARMANDO ROJAS, Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at Amherst College, has published Lluvia de lunas (Mexico City, 1999) and Río vertebral (Chihuahua, 2002). His work has also been included in several anthologies. Rojas received a B.A. and M.A. in Spanish from the University of Texas at El Paso, and a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona.

THOMAS H. ROHLICH is Professor of Japanese Language and Literature at Smith College, where he has recently developed a seminar on Kyoto for first-year students. His most recent publication is an essay called “Kyoto Then and Now” in the catalogue of the Smith College Museum of Art’s special exhibition entitled “Confronting Tradition: Contemporary Art from Kyoto.”

PIERRE DE RONSARD (1524-1585) was courtier-poet who began his career as a page and then a squire at the French court, but became leader of the Pléiade at the Collège de Coqueret. As poet royal, he wrote odes in the Pindaric and Horatian tradition, Petrarchan sonnets, elegies, eclogues, songs, love lyrics, patriotic poems, and even attempted an epic (La Franciade) which remained unfinished. The most famous of his love poems appear in Sonnets pour Hélène (1578).

AARON ROSENBERG is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University. His research is on African dance and music.

SAMUEL N. ROSENBERG, Professor Emeritus of French and Italian at Indiana University, is principally interested in medieval lyric poetry and Arthurian narrative. His books and shorter publications include critical editions of trouvère songs, prepared in collaboration with musicologists, translations of these and of large parts of the Lancelot-Grail cycle, and a forthcoming retelling of the story of Lancelot’s two loves, Guenevere and Galehaut, written with Patricia Terry.

M. L. ROSENTHAL (1917-96), was among this country's leading men of letters. He taught at New York University from 1945 on, and was a visiting scholar and lecturer throughout the world. He was author of a number of widely acclaimed books of criticism, most recently The Poet's Art, Our Life in Poetry: Selected Essays, and Running to Paradise: Yeats' Poetic Art. His many volumes of poetry include Blue Boy on Skates: Poems, Beyond Power: New Poems, The View from the Peacock's Tail, She: A Sequence of Poems, and Poems, 1964-80. For a recent appreciation, see Barry Wallenstein, "Free of Cant: M. L. Rosenthal, 1917-1996," in American Poet, winter 1996-97, 6-11.

BARTOLOMEU ROSSELLO-PORCEL Born Mallorca 1913, studied in Barcelona and published 2 brief collections of poetry before dying of tuberculosis at the age of 24.

IXIAR ROZAS began his writing life studying journalism in Iruea (Pamplona). After moving to Barcelona, he wrote his first novel, Edo zu edo ni (Either You or I; 2000), and later the poetry collection Patio bat bi itsasoen artean (A Courtyard Bewteen the Two Seas; 2001, Ernestina Champourcin Prize). After returning to the Basque country, he wrote several young adult books, scripts for television and radio, and a book of short stories.

MILAN RUFUS (1928- ) lectured on literature at the Comenius University in Bratislava. He is considered Slovakia's leading poet, with some two dozen collections of poetry and essays. A relgious poet, Rufus believes that no matter how tragic the position of man, his faith gives him hope to love and improve his world. Widely translated into some thirty languages, Rufus's collections sometimes sell over a hundred thousand copies in Slovakia, a nation with a population of less than six million.

DORIS RUNEY is a bilingual (Romanian and English) writer and poet with a background in the fine and performing arts, pursuing graduate work in Translation Studies at Wayne State University while also working as a freelance writer and creative artist, and teaching. Her dissertation is a praxis in translation and adaptation of Ionel Teodoreanu’s novel, Lorelei, which she also hopes to produce as an independent film.

RUTEBEUF was born in Champagne some time before 1249, lived in Paris, and died some time after 1277. He wrote 56 works which survive in 14 manuscripts. The works are lyric, dramatic, polemical, and religious, many of them complaintes. Scholars have characterized Rutebeuf as the first "personal" poet of the French language. His style is remarkable for its intricate word play, and his voice, marked by a strong persona, prefigures that of Villon.

VIKTOR RYDBERG (1828-1895) poet, novelist of ideas, biblical historian, political and drama critic, journalist, lecturer was the central literary figure of his age. Prolific and enormously influential in his own time, he was a member of the Swedish Academy.