Biographies of Contributors

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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 1960s he was one of the founders of the legendary collective of Basque musicians, Ez Dok Amairu (We Are Not Thirteen).

JEAN DE LA FONTAINE (1621-1695), who has been called "l'Homere des Francais," died more than 300 years ago, yet his Fables, first published in 1668 and 1678, continue to be appreciated for their charm and worldly wisdom. Drawing first upon the classical models of Aesop and Phaedrus, he gradually expanded the range of his sources and also brought in topical allusions to both the domestic affairs of the court of Louis XIV and France's role on the larger world stage. Indeed, the shrewdness of his insights makes them applicable even today. Though he was perceived by his contemporaries as absentminded and unable to manage his own affairs, he never lacked patrons who supported him. Fable XIX of Book VIII, "L'avantage de la science," explicitly celebrates the superiority of his kind of intelligence and wit over that of men seemingly more important and successful.

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.

SUHEIL LAHER is a doctoral candidate in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. He holds a BS in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MS from Marshall University, and an MA in Islamic Studies from Boston University, where he has also worked as a lecturer of Modern Standard Arabic. Since 1998, he has served as Muslim Chaplain at MIT.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.

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.

ESTELA LAMAT, a Chilean poet associated with the so-called "novisima" generation, is the author of Sangre Seca (Contrabando del bando en contra, 2005), Yo, La Peor de Todas (2006), and the forthcoming Colmillo molido, which will complete the trilogy.

INGRID LANSFORD holds a PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin. Her prose translations from Danish, English, and German have appeared in a dozen journals and anthologies. She received the Leif and Inger Sjöberg Translation Prize of the American-Scandinavian Foundation in 2004 and a grant from Denmark’s Kunststyrelsen in 2007.

CARROL LASKER holds a PhD 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. Her current project is recording and translating 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.

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.

MICHAEL LEONG was educated at Dartmouth College (AB '00), Sarah Lawrence College (MFA '03), and Rutgers University (MA '07) and is currently working on a dissertation about the contemporary long poem and the archive. His poetry and reviews have appeared in various journals including Atlanta Review, Bird Dog, Cranky, GutCult, jubilat, Pindeldyboz, Snow Monkey, and Tin House. His translations of Estela Lamat along with a critical introduction are forthcoming in Double Room. The two poems printed in this issue of Metamorphoses will be published in I, the Worst of All by BlazeVOX.

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.

HEZY LESKLY (1952-1994) was born in Rehovot, Israel to Czech parents. After dropping out of high school, he devoted himself to an extensive study of dance and choreography. He lived for several years in Holland where he studied multimedia arts. Upon his return to Israel, he began a brief but productive career as a dance critic, playwright, and choreographer. His first collection of poems, The Finger, appeared in 1986, and by the time of his death from AIDS, he was regarded as one of the major literary voices of his generation. His last book, Dear Perverts, was published posthumously in 1994.

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's twenty-fifth book of translations, Astrid Cabral's Cage, was published by Host Publications in July 2008. Earlier books include Clarice Lispector's Soulstorm and Eugenio de Andrade's Forbidden Words (both published by New Directions). His work has appeared in over two hundred magazines, including Kenyon Review, New England Review, Partisan Review, New Letters, and American Poetry Review.

SARA LIDMAN (1923- ) is a novelist and essayist whose fame rests primarily on a series of five novels dealing with the bringing of the railroad to Lappland, written between 1977 and 1985 and generally referred to as Jernbane serien (Cranewater Chronicle) which is presently being revised by the translators. During the 1990s she added two further novels to the series. She has received numerous important prizes and was given the title of Honorary Professor in 1999.

ERIK LIDDELL holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto and teaches Early Modern Studies at the University of King's College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He has written on Statius, Vergil, Rousseau and Melville and has been a contributor to the Collaborative Translation Project for the Encyclopedie of Diderot and d'Alembert.

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 (1892-1977) 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, João 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.

VICTORIA LIVINGSTONE has been working as a (Spanish to English) translator for the past three years and is a graduate student in Hispanic Literatures and Cultures at Boston College.

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.

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).

JOHN LONDON holds MA and DPhil 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 Pierce at Bowdoin, professor of modern languages at Harvard. The foremost American poet of his day, 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.

JOHNNY LORENZ was born in 1972, son of Brazilian immigrants to the United States. He is a professor in the English Department at Montclair State University. His poems, articles, and translations have appeared in a variety of journals.

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 hi smost 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 Witwatersrand, he died in Johannesburg in 1970.

YANN LOVELOCK lives and works in Birmingham, England. In addition to numerous collections of his own poetry and scholarly work, he has published translations from French, Dutch, Walloon, Flemish, Urdu, Spanish, and Danish and held guest editorships, notably for Modern Poetry in Translation (University of London) Dutch & Flemish issue 1997. As a Buddhist, he has been widely involved in educational work and inter-faith dialogue.

SAU LUGANO, a PhD student and Instructor in Comparative Literature 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.

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