Biographies of Contributors

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RAFFAELLO BALDINI (1924-2005) was born in 1924 in Santarcangelo di Romagna, and lived in Milan from 1955 until his death on March 29, 2005. His collections of poetry, all written in the Romagnolo dialect, include: E' solitèri (Galeati, 1976), La nàiva, with an introduction by Dante Isella (Einaudi, 1982); Furistír, with an introduction by Brevini (Einaudi, 1988), Ad Nòta, with an introduction by Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo (Mondadori, 1995); La nàiva, Furistír, Ciacri (Einaudi, 2000). His collection, Intercity (Einaudi, 2003), won the Dino Campana Award. His collection Furistír was awarded the 1988 Viareggio Prize, the first time the prize was awarded to a work written in dialect. His collection, Ad Nòta, was awarded the Bagutta Prize. Baldini wrote three theatrical monologues: Carta cantra, Zitti tutti! and In fondra a destra (Einaudi, 1998).

DAVID BALL's forthcoming translations from the French include Jarry (Ubu The King, WW Norton), "noir" short stories by French contemporary writers (Paris Noir, Akashic Books) and (with Nicole Ball) Abdourahman A. Waberi's satiric novel (In The United States Of Africa, University of Nebraska Press). Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology (University of California Press), which he selected, translated, and presented, won MLA's prize for literary translation in 1996. His own poetry has appeared in six small chapbooks and in various ephemeral journals. His articles on French literary history have appeared in such places as Les Temps Modernes, Raison Presente, Revue de Litterature Comparée, and Modern Philology, and his translations of modern and contemporary French poets have been widely published.

NICOLE BALL has translated books by Catherine Clement (The Weary Sons of Freud) and Maryse Cond (Land of Many Colors) into English from French. Most recently she has translated a Jonathan Kellerman thriller (Survival of the Fittest) into French. She currently teaches French at Smith College.

MARIA NEMCOVA BANERJEE (born in Prague, 1937) Professor of Russian at Smith College. She is the author of Terminal Paradox: The Novels of Milan Kundera and of A Lime Tree in Prague. She serves on the Editorial Board of Metamorphoses.

RON BANERJEE, poet, essayist, and translator, is author of Far From You (Toronto, 1981); Poetry from Bengal (Unesco, 1989); L'Antica Fiamma (Galleria Pegaso Editore, 1995); and Sonnets for the Madonna (Florence, Maschietto & Musolino, 1999). Born in Calcutta, he was educated at Edinburgh, Rome, and Harvard Universities. He has taught English and Comparative Literature at various American Universities, including Smith College and the Five-Colleges; and he has been a Fulbright Professor in India.

BERTRADE B. NGO-NGIJOL BANOUM, a Camerounian, holds a Ph.D. from the University of Essex, England and is Assistant Professor of Black Studies at Lehman College. She has served as a consultant with UNICEF, UNDP, and international NGOs, including Family Care International (FCI), RAINBO, and African Action on AIDS, Inc. (AAA). Her recent publications include a translation from Basaa into English and French, "Fighting Hunger with Cassava: A Gift of 22 Recipes from the Rural Women of Bogso." She has two forthcoming articles, "Basaa Gender in Typological Perspective" and "Gender Identities and Women's Images in Oral Epic Tradition: A Feminist Reading of Bon ba Hiton." She is presently working on a manuscript titled The Epic of Bon ba Hiton: A Hilun Tradition of the Basaa of Southern Cameroon.

ANNA BANTI (1895-1980), born Lucia Lopresti, began her career writing academic art history essays but later chose fiction as her unique voice. She and her husband, Roberto Longhi, founded Paragone, a monthly review of figurative art and literature. Perhaps best known for her Artemisia (1947), Banti is also author of A Piercing Cry (1981), collections of short stories—including Le donne muoiono (1951) and Campi Elisi (1963)—and translations of Colette and Jane Austen. Banti refused categorization as a feminist, but her writing style and perspective are feminocentric.

STANISLAW BARANCZAK (1946- ) Poet, critic, and translator, he is one of the most prominent members of the "New Wave" or "Generation of '68" in Polish poetry, and was a founding member of KOR (Committee for Workers' Defense) in the 1970s. He has taught Polish literature at Harvard University since 1981.

IMRE BARNA (1951- ) was born in Budapest, where he earned a degree in Italian and German languages and literatures. Long-time Editor-in-Chief of Európa Publishing House and a former Director of the Hungarian Academy in Rome, he also teaches courses on literary translation at the University of Budapest. He has published translations into Hungarian from Italian, Geman, English, and French, and authored critical essays on literature and cinema. His translation of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Roses, won the Wessely Book of the Year prize in 1989, and in 1993 his translation of Foucault's Pendulum was awarded the Forintos prize.

SARAH BARR is an instructor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at The American University in Cairo, having earned an MA in German and an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Arkansas. For her translations of Colonies of Love she has won two Lily Peter Fellowships, the Gary Wilson Award from the University of Arkansas Press, a Fulbright Translation Thesis Fellowship, an American Literary Translators Association Conference Fellowship, and a Walton Fellowship.

DON BARTELL received his BA in Spanish and French at Portland State University and his MA in Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Portugal, an instructor at the University of Illinois, and a visiting lecturer at Northwestern University. He has published translations of Jorge de Sena and for several years has been preparing translations of Estellés and Martí i Pol. He has co-authored, with Lluís Cugota, articles on genetic engineering and virtual reality in La Vanguardia. He is currently a case manager with Adult and Family Services for the State of Oregon. He wishes to express his gratitude to his friend Ivan Cunillera for reviewing the translations of Martí i Pol and for making many helpful suggestions.

LARBI BATMA (1948-98) is best known for founding the influential Moroccan musical group Nass El Ghiwane. A well-rounded artist, he was also an actor, a playwright, and a poet. Upon being diagnosed with lung cancer, he decided to write his autobiography. Throughout his life, he avidly researched Moroccan folklore and brought considerable amounts of obscure poetry and music to mainstream awareness.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE (1821-1867), French symbolist poet and critic. Les Fleurs du mal (1857, enlarged 1861, 1868), the only volume of his poems published during his lifetime, was publicly condemned as obscene. Best known for these poems, which came to be recognized as a work of original genius, Baudelaire has been a major influence in the Western poetic tradition. A collection of poetic prose pieces was published posthumously as Petits pomes en prose (1869). His criticism was collected posthumously in Curiosits esthtiques (1868) and L'Art romantique (1869).

For GEORGES BAUDOUX, see article, within.

MARIA POGLITSCH BAUER (1949 - ) was born in Carinthia, Austria and studied English and History in Vienna and Baltimore, MD. A free-lance writer and translator, she also teaches English as a Second Language at a Southern California community college.

MICHAEL BEARD has frequently collaborated with Adnan Haydar in writings on Iranian and Lebanese literature. He teaches English literature at the University of North Dakota and is the author of several books in his own right.

ADRIANA BEBIANO is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anglo-American Studies and a researcher in the Centro de Estudos Sociais, at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. Her work is mainly on contemporary Anglo-American fiction. Translating poetry happens from time to time—and it makes her happy.

E.M. BEEKMAN Has published twenty-two books. They include a twelve volume series of Dutch colonial literature in English translation, as well as poetry, prose, and scholarly monographs. He has translated a wide variety of Dutch authors from the sixteenth century to the present and twice received the translation award from Columbia University.

IRINA BELAYA is a journalist and editor from St. Petersburg, Russia. She is also an author of several books of poetry and short prose and a song composer and singer. She has worked with some popular Russian bands and created many songs based on her own poetry and poems by Lokki Walle (the pen name of Elena Gorsheneva). She is currently a student at the Moscow Institute of World Literature.

GIOVANNA BELLESIA holds a degree from the Interpreter School in Milan and an PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with a dissertation on the translation work of Montale, Pavese and Vittorini during Fascism. She is Professor of Italian Language and Literature at Smith College. Together with Victoria Poletto and Alessandra Di Maio she is preparing an anthology of short stories (in English translation) by women who have emigrated to Italy from developing countries.

RUY BELO (1933-1978) one of the most important Portuguese poets of the twentieth century, he was a doctor of canonical law and, though freed from orthodoxy, remained deeply religious in his quest to understand the purpose of human existence in a mutable world.

ELENA GIANINI BELOTTI was born in Rome. She is the award-winning author of numerous works, among them: Dalla parte della bambine (1973), Amore e pregiudizio (1988, Premio Donna Città di Roma), Adagio un poco mosso (1993), Pimpì oselì (1995), Apri le porte all'alba (1999), and Voli (2001, Premio Rapallo Carige), all published by Feltrinelli. With Rizzoli she has published Prima le donne e i bambini (1980 and 1998), Non di sola madre (1983), Il fiore dell'ibisco (1985, Premio Napoli), and Prima della quiete (2003, Premio Grinzane Cavour, Premio Viadana, Premio Maiori). Her most recent book is Pane amaro (Rizzoli, 2006). She divides her time between Rome and the Sienese countryside.

ZIVA BEN-PORAT is a professor of Poetics and Comparative Literature and the director of The Porter Institute for Poetics and semiotics at Tel Aviv University. She has worked on intertextuality, allusion in particular, and on the relations between artistic presentations, cultural concepts and mental representations. She is currently involved in an IST EC project, CULTOS, that develops authoring tools and transformers for the construction and presentation of multi-media threads organized by linking explicitly tagged intertextual relations between artifacts or segments thereof.

ELENA BENELLI holds a Laurea in Lingue e Letterature Straniere Moderne e Contemporanee from the University of Trieste and she is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Montreal. She is currently the coordinator for the Italian Language Program at the University of Montreal where she teaches Advanced Italian Grammar and Contemporary Italian Literature courses. She has previously taught Italian at McGill University. Her main fields of research are contemporary Italian fiction and contemporary Italian migrant writers.

MATHIEU BÉNÉZET was born in Perpignan in 1946. He lives and works in Paris where he has been a radio producer at France Culture for over fifteen years. Notably he has produced: the Sunday literary program Entre-revues and directed the radio workshop Atelier de Création. He also runs the Le Manifeste collection Éditions Comp'Act. He has created several journals such as Empreintes, L'Hebdomadaire grammaturgique erreurs, and Première Livraison and published more than thirty books.

ROSS M. BENJAMIN holds a BA in Critical Theory from Vassar College and received a Fulbright Research Scholarship to Berlin, Germany. He has published reviews, interviews, and an essay on Derrida and translates from German.

MARTIN WILMOT BENNETT's collection of poems, Loose Watches, was published by the University of Salzburg Press. He has had three stories read on BBC World Service and other works appear in Modern Poetry in Translation, Stand, Wascana Review, and elsewhere. Some of his poetry is available on www.unf.edu/mudlark.

ZIAD BENTAHAR holds a BA from Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco and an MA from Pennsylvania State University, where he is currently a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature. His primary focus is African Literature, with a particular interest in the Maghreb and connections between North and sub-Saharan Africa.

SASA BENULIC was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where she studied English and Comparative Literature and then taught English at a secondary school. She holds an MA in American Literature and teaches American Culture and Language Acquisition Classes at the University of Ljubljana.

MARK BERG holds a BA in Russian Language and Literature from George Washington University. He also studied Italian at George Washington University and Spanish at Harvard University. He is currently an independent writer and works at Harvard Law School Library.

JOHN BERGER, novelist, painter, and art historian, was born in London in 1926. In 1952 Berger began writing for London's New Statesman, and quickly became an influential Marxist art critic. Since then he has published a number of art books including the famous Ways of Seeing, which was turned into a television series by the BBC. Beginning with his first novel in 1958, Berger has also produced a significant body of fiction, including G. (1972), winner of England's Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He is also the author of screenplays and four plays for the stage. For the past twenty years Berger has lived in a small village in the French Alps. Fascinated by the traditions and endangered way of life of the mountain people, he has written about them both in his fiction and nonfiction.

JOEL BERKOWITZ is Corob Fellow in Yiddish at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and Hebrew Centre Lecturer in Yiddish at Oxford University. He is the author of Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage (University of Iowa Press, forthcoming 2002) and editor of The Yiddish Theatre: New Approaches (Litmas Library, forthcoming 2002).

ADRIA BERNARDI's novel, Openwork, was published by Southern Methodist University Press in 2006. She is the author of In the Gathering Woods, a collection of stories awarded the Drew Heinz Prize. Her novel, The Day Laid on the Altar, was awarded the 1999 Bakeless Fiction Prize. She has translated Gianni Celati's Adventures in Africa and Tonino Guerra's poetry in Abandoned Places. Her translation of Baldini's Page Proof (Carta canta), edited by Daniele Benati, was published by Bordighera Press. Her translation of Raffaello Baldini's poems have appeared in Agni, Hunger Mountain, Arts & Letters, Two Lines, Beacons, Margie: The American Journal of Poetry, Metamorphoses, Seneca Review, Italian Translation Review, Diner and Poetry Daily. She is currently completing a translation of a volume of poetry by Baldini. She teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers at Clark University.

BERNART DE VENTADORN (?1130-?1195), one of the best known Provençal troubadours, was born in Aquitaine. Forty-five of his lyrics have survived, and nineteen of the melodies he composed.

CONON DE BÉTHUNE (fl. ca. 1180-1219/20) was born into a noble family of the Artois region in northern France; he was well known during his lifetime as a warrior, diplomat, and statesman, playing a leading role in the Fourth Crusade. Along with Blondel de Nesle, Gace Brulé, and the Châtelain de Coucy, he belonged to the first generation of trouvères. About a dozen songs are attributed to him.

PATRICK BEURARD-VALDOYE's recent works include Itinerrance, sites, cites, citains (Obsidiane, Sens); Theorie des noms (L'oeil du poete, Textuel, Paris); Notre etrange prison (L'arbre a paroles, Belgique). His poems have been translated into several languages. He lives in Paris.

CALIXTHE BEYALA was born in Cameroon in 1960. Since 1987, she has published eleven novels, a number of which have been translated into English. She has won two prestigious French literary awards: the Prix François Mauriac for her novel Assèze l'Africaine (1994), and the Grand Prix du Roman de l'Academie Française for her novel Les Honneurs perdues (1996). One of the most influential African voices in Paris, where she lives, Beyala is the founder and president of Collectif Égalité, an organization dedicated to promoting fair representation of French people of African descent in the French media.

H.N. BIALIK (1873-1934) the greatest Hebrew poet of modern times, Bialik wrote essays and stories as well as working with translating and editing. He helped free Hebrew poetry from Biblical dominance while still retaining a connection to its roots. He often wrote about the crisis of faith which touched his generation as they sought to retain their medieval Jewish roots in a modern secularized world.

NEDRA EILEEN BICKHAM is a translator, musician, teacher, and explorer of the unique coexistence of language and music. Her translations of short stories by the German author Julia Franck have appeared in Passport: The Arkansas Review of Literary Translation, Absinthe: New European Writing, and lauter niemand: Berliner Zeitschrift fur Lyrik und Prosa. Her translations of poetry by Andreas Randow have appeared in Perihelion Poetry Journal. She is working on a master's degree in German Language and Literature from Tufts University.

WOLF BIERMANN, born in Hamburg in 1936, moved to the German Democratic Republic in 1953. Banned from performing and publishing there since 1965, he was expatriated during a concert tour to West Germany in 1976, causing many East German artists to leave the country in his wake. This poet, singer/songwriter and essayist has been one of the most eminent and prickly literary figures and critics of Germany before and since the reunification in 1989. Biermann received the Nationalpreis for his work in 1998.

MURRAY BIGGS Rhodes Scholar, former director of the MIT Shakespeare Ensemble, now teaches at Yale; he is well known as a lecturer on drama and literature and has spent the winter back in his old stamping grounds in London at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

RHONDA BLAIR is a professor of Theatre in Southern Methodist University. A director, solo performer, and actor, she teaches critical studies and performance theories. Her translations of The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard, and Hedda Gabler have been given a number of productions. Her writing appears in Method Acting Reconsidered, Upstaging Big Daddy: Directing Theater as if Gender and Race Mattered, Theatre Topics and elsewhere.

IVAN BLATNY (born in Brno, 1919, died 1990 in England) As a young poet, he captured Brno for Czech poetry, turning its humdrum streets into an enchanting setting for small epiphanies. Since Nezval, no one has widened the rhythm of intoning and repetition as well as Blatny, who took lessons from Eliot's The Wasteland. In the aftermath of the War, Blatny, emerging transformed from the matrix of Skupina 42, was seen as one of the most promising younger poets. The three poems translated by Deborah Garfinkle come from Hledání prítomného casu (In Search of Time Present, 1947), the last volume of poetry he published in Czechoslovakia. In 1948, Blatny left for England and instantly cut off his moorings by declaring himself an exile. For more than thirty years he vanished from Czech poetry, until rediscovered as an inmate of a mental institution in Ipswich, still writing. His two volumes of verse, Stará bydliste (Old Dwellings, 1979) and Obecná skola Bixley (Grade School Bixley, 1987), conferred a cultic status on the forgotten poet. The latter collection speaks in an alien, multilingual idiom of Blatny's invention expressing the terminal condition of his exile with the intelligence of a Surrealist voyant derailed from his life's history.

MANUEL MARIA BARBOSA DU BOCAGE (1765-1805) a leading eighteenth century poet who travelled the world of Portugal's empire and drew parallels between himself and his predecessor, Camões. He was a typical romantic in his hatred of despotism, his love of personal freedom, his attachment to darkness and night, and his obsession with impending death.

PATRICIA J. BOEHNE is the Chair of Foreign Languages at Eastern College, St. Davids, PA. She received a BA, MA, and PhD from Indiana University, Bloomington, IN and was the first American to have a doctoral examination conducted in Catalan. She has held NDEA, NEH, and Mellon Fellowships and has taught at Indiana University, Bradley University, and Franklin and Marshall College. Among her publications are Dream and Fantasy in 14th and 15th Century Catalan Prose (1975), poetry translations for An Introduction to Catalan Poetry by Josep Roca-Pons (1977), J.V. Foix (1980), The Renaissance Catalan Novel (1989), numerous articles, and other translations of Foix's poetry. She was in correspondence with Foix from 1973 until his death in 1987, visited him several times in Barcelona and at his home on the Costa Brava, and researched in his personal archives. Her translations have been emended by the poet himself. Her anthology of his work, The Angular Sea, is in preparation. As a member of the Board of the North American Catalan Society since its inception in 1978, she has served in various offices, including as President from 1993-95.

LOREDANA BOGLIUN-DEBELJUH was born in Pola, Croatia in 1955. She holds a degree in psychology, and is a critic and fiction writer as well as a poet who writes both in standard Italian and in dialect. Her poems first appeared in 1972, and since then she has published numerous volumes of poetry in the (ancient) Istriot dialect of Dignano. Her work has been translated into many languages and she has won numerous prizes, among them the Istria Nobilissima prize for poetry and prose. She writes in both dialect and standard Italian and also translates, from Istrian dialect and from Croatian into Italian. An important cultural figure and also a political activist, she is Vice-President of the Giunta Regionale Istriana and a consigliere of the Assemblea dell'Unione Italiana.

LAURENCE BOGOSLAW received his PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Michigan in 1995. He currently lives in Minneapolis, where he is the co-founder and Coordinator of the Minnesota Translation Laboratory at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Bogoslaw's prose translation has appeared previously in Metamorphoses (1994), and his scholarly work on verse translation has appeared in the volume "Slavic Verse" (Slavjanskij Stikh, Moscow, 1996).

SISSELA BOK is a writer and philosopher born in Sweden. Formerly a Professor at Brandeis University, she is now a Distinguished Fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. Her books include: Lying: Moral Choice in Private and Public Life; Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation; A Strategy for Peace: Human Values and the Threat of War; Alva Myrdal: A Daughter's Memoir.

LUIGI BONAFFINI has translated books by Dino Campana, Mario Luzi, Vittorio Sereni, Giose Rimanelli, Giuseppe Jovine, Achille Serrao, Eugenio Cirese, Albino Pierro, Cesare Ruffato, Stephen Massimilla, Antonio Spagnuolo, Luciano Troisio, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Mariano Bàino. He has also translated widely from dialect poetry for various anthologies he has edited. He was awarded the Translation Prize from the Italian Ministry for Foreign Affairs as well as the Translation Prize from the Italian Ministry for Cultural Affairs for his translations, respectively, of Mario Luzi's Phrases and Passages of a Salutary Song and For the Baptism of our Fragments. He also received the Bordighera Translation Prize. In 2003 he received the Italian National Translation Prize.

EGON BONDY (b. 1930) Anarchist Czech poet now living in Prague where he lectures on Buddhism.

DEBORAH BONNER received her BA degree from Cornell University and since then has worked as a translator in Catalan, Spanish, and English in Barcelona and New York. Her translations from Catalan include Llorenç Villalonga's novel Bearn, Gabriel Janer Manila's non-fiction work Marcos, and translations of poetry in periodicals such as Catalan Writing, Seneca Review, and Translation.

ITXARO BORDA was born in Baiona/Bayonne (Basque Country) in 1959. She has degrees in Agriculture and History and works in the post office. She founded Maiatz, a literary journal (1982), together with Luzien Etxezaharreta. Her first book was published in 1984, Bizitza nola badoan (And So Life Goes, poetry). In 2002 she won the Euskadi Award with her novel 100% Basque, which has recently been published in French, translated by the author.

HEIDI VON BORN was born in Stockholm and has published twenty-seven books: novels, a short story collection, a few poetry collections, and a children's book. She is also a critic and has written drama for radio and television, translated poetry by Margaret Atwood and others.

ANA MARIA ANDRINO BOTELHO was born in Manica (Mozambique). She spent her adolescence in Maputo, until the civil war forced her to seek refuge in Portugal. She received a degree in Law from Lisbon and in Philosophy from Rome. She now lives between Rome and Geneva, where she works in the field of humanitarian mine removal and disarmament. She writes in Portugese, French, and Italian. Some of her poems have been set to music by contemporary composers, and her poetry is the constant unifier of the various places and times of her life. Her poetry collection, dall'esilio (Rome: Fermenti), was published in 2002.

SANDRO BOTTICELLI (1444-1510) Italian painter at the court of Lorenzo de' Medici.

DAVID BOURBEAU A master book-binder and proprietor of Thistle Bindery in Florence, Massachusetts. He has been invited by the Italian Ministry of Culture to participate in an international exhibition to honor the bicentennial of the birth of Giacomo Leopardi. The book produced especially for this exhibition is a collection of translations of Leopardi's "L'Infinito" by sixty-three poets in twenty-eight languages over a period of 167 years.

MARCEL BOURQUIN Student of theology in Switzerland. Idealist, mystic, pacifist, socialist, he was never admitted to the Consistoires de Pasteurs in Geneva because of his political beliefs. Died praying for the New Pope who was inaugurated that day, March 3, 1939. Left a treasure trove of letters of which this is a fair example.

ANNIE BOUTELLE, born and raised in Scotland, was educated at the University of St. Andrews and New York University. Author of Thistle and Rose: A Study of Hugh MacDiarmid's Poetry, she has written numerous scholarly and popular essays. She teaches in the English Department at Smith College, whose Poetry Center she founded in 1998. Her sequence of poems based on the life of Celia Thaxter was a finalist for the 1999 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, and she has published poems in Poetry, Yankee, Ekphrasis, The Green Mountains Review, and The Hudson Review. Poems are forthcoming in The Larcom Review, American Poets and Poetry, Poet Lore, Iris, Painted Bride, and Nimrod.

SANDRO BOTTICELLI (1444-1510) Italian painter at the court of Lorenzo de' Medici.

ROSA ALICE BRANCO is completing a doctorate in the Psychology of Perception at the New University in Lisbon. She is an editor at the literary magazine Limiar. Her four collections of poetry are: Beloved Woman, Animals of the Earth, Short Monadology, and The Happy Hand. Some of her poems, translated by Alexis Levitin, appear or will appear in Prairie Schooner, Artful Dodge, The Hollins Critic, Osiris, and The Temple.

FIAMA HASSE PAIS BRANDÄO is the major poet of her generation in Portugal. She has published fourteen volumes of poetry, the most recent of which, Epistles and Memoranda, won the D. Dinis Prize in late 1997 and the Grande Premio de Poesia from the Portuguese Writers Association in February 1998. Her work has appeared in French, Italian, Spanish, German, Polish, and English. In the U.S., Levitin's authorized translations of Fiama's disturbingly powerful poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including The Partisan Review, The Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, Seneca Review, Artful Dodge, The Connecticut Poetry Review, The Green Mountain Review, and Abraxas.

SUSAN BRANTLY is professor of Scandinavian Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, specializing in Swedish.

GEORGES BRAQUE (1882-1963) French painter, with Picasso an initiator of the cubist movement. His aphorisms on the need for order and intelligence gave voice informally to the aspirations of the cubists whose influence is still resonating in contemporary art.

MARÍA ISABEL ALONSO BRETO holds a PhD in English Philology from the University of Barcelona where she is currently a member of the Department of English and German Literatures. Her areas of interest include literary translation (especially women's poetry written in English) and creative writing.

BRHAN was born in Asmara (Eritrea). Since 1984 he has lived in Tuscany, where he earned his degree from the Humanities Department of the University of Florence. He has published in various anthologies, including Quaderno africano I of the Cittadini della Poesia series (Florence: Loggia de' Lanzi, 1998), and the poetry collection L'ombra del poeta (Viareggio: Mauro Baroni, 1997).

DANIEL G. BRINTON American ethnologist, a pioneer in the study of the languages of Meso-Americans.

JOSEPH BRODSKY (1930-1995) Russian-American poet, Nobel Prize Winner. Author of half a dozen volumes of poetry in Russian and English (with many self-translations), essayist, formerly Professor of Literature at Mount Holyoke, and at the other Colleges in the Five Colleges Area. Served as a member of the Editorial Board of Metamorphoses before his death.

MARIE BRONSARD lives and works in southern France. Since 1986 she has published narratives, memoirs, and collections of shorter pieces, mostly in prose, but including poetry as well. Among her latest works are her memoir, Mélancolies d'Une Amazone, published in 2004, and Monodies augmented by Lueurs, a selection of Ms. Bronsard's short pieces of prose and poetry, which appeared in 2006.

VINCENT BROOK (1946- ) Has a PhD in film and television from UCLA, has written numerous articles for leading academic journals, and is the author of Something Ain't Kosher Here: The Rise of the "Jewish" Sitcom (Rutgers University Press, 2003). The son of German-Jewish émigrés, Vincent studied, travelled, and worked in Germany in the late 1960s/early 1970s. He is currently editing an anthology for Rutgers on Jewish identity in postmodern American culture.

DIANA BROWN is Associate Professor at Dana College in Blair, Nebraska. She received her PhD at L'Alliance Francaise, La Sorbonne. In 1996, her book-length translation into both English and Italian of Olga Bressano de Alonso's Fugacidad y otros poemas was published in Argentina.

IAN BROWNLIE received his MA in Russian from the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. His current whereabouts are unknown.

PETERS BRUVERIS was born in Riga in 1957, and after graduating from the Department of Art and Culture at the Latvian State Conservatory worked as a literary consultant to the newspaper Latvijas Jaunatne (Latvian Youth) and as the director of the literary department of the newspaper Literatura un Maksla (Art and Literature). Eight collections of his poetry have been published: Black Thrush, Red Cherries (1987), Amber Skulls (1991), Sitting On A Park Bench (1994), Black Bird's Nest in the Heart (1995), Flowers for Losers! (1999), Love Me God (2000), The Landscape of Language (2004), and Behind Glass (2006). He has also written four books for children. Bruveris has written librettos, song lyrics as well as texts for animation films. He translated and edited a collection of Turkish poetry entitled "Courtyards Filled with Pigeons" (1988, together with Uldis Berzis), translated the works of Lithuanian poets Kornelijs Platelis, Sigits Gedas, Henriks Raudausks, Toms Venclova, as well as many other works of poetry, and has translated poetry and prose from Azerbaijani, the Crimean Tatar language, Russian, Germany, and Prussian. His poetry has been published in Lithuanian, Russian, Swedish, German, Slovenian, Ukrainian, and English translation. He has received the Klavs Elsbergs Award (1987), the Publisher Preses Nams Award in Literature in 2000 and 2001, the Days of Poetry Prize in 2001 and 2005, the Award in Literature from the Baltic Assembly in 2004, the Ojars Vacietis Poetry Prize (2006), and the National Prize for Best Book (2007).

ANDRZEJ BURSA (1932-1957) Before his life was cut short at age twenty-five by a malformed aorta, he published thirty-seven poems, a novel, and two plays. A native of Krakow, he attended Jagiellonian University, after which he worked as a journalist. Bursa's adolescence and early adult life span some of the darkest years of modern Polish history—from the Nazi invasion and brutal occupation during World War II to the Soviet occupation and Cold War. Bursa bitterly attacks social and political injustice, as well as cant, pretense, and hypocrisy. Bursa's language can be deliberately anti-poetic. He mixes obscure words, neologisms, regionalisms, slang, and occasional vulgarity. His grammar is often raw, elliptical, and clumsy, perhaps intended to reflect the caustic disillusionment of his generation. Below the surface of this poète maudit sneering cynicism, however, one finds serious moral questioning along with genuine tenderness and compassion for the poor and disenfranchised. His poems lament the erosion of traditional values caused by conflicting geo-political ideologies. Bursa's reputation increased rapidly after his death, his small oeuvre developing a cult following among young people.

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