Biographies of Contributors

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MERIEM PAGES is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and Stanford University, where she obtained an MA in History. She received an MA and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with a dissertation focusing on the image of the Assassins in medieval Europe. She is Assistant Professor of medieval English literature at Keene State College.

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 twentieth 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 holds a PhD from Columbia University and is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. Her current projects include survivor narratives from the Asia Minor Disaster and the revival of griko and grecanico dialects in Southern Italy.

LEIF PANDURO (1923-1977) began his professional life as a Danish dentist. After spending seven years in Sweden without being able to make a living, he returned to Denmark. Fortunately, when he tried to supplement his meager income from dentistry by writing, his success was almost instantaneous. Panduro became one of Denmark's foremost twentieth century authors, distinguishing himself primarily as an absurdist playwright, script writer, and novelist beloved for social satire and memorable characters. In addition to many other prizes and awards, he received the Golden Laurels for 1970 and the Danish Academy's Literature Prize for 1971. The story "A Ride in the Night" was published in 1965, the year in which Panduro became a full-time writer.

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 Bogota in 1957. He received his BA in Hispanic Literature from the University of the Andes, Bogota and his MA 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, Salon de Jupiter y otros cuentos (1994) and Guia para extraviados (Norma Publishers, 1997). He is currently Editorial Director of Reference Books for Norma Publishers.

JASON PARK is a writer and translator. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and currently a PhD candidate in English at the University of Waterloo in Canada. His fiction has appeared in Prism International, Fiction, and elsewhere. He won a PEN Translation Fund grant and a KLTI translation grant for his translation of Song Yong's story collection.

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 is 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.

The late OKOT P'BITEK (1931-1982), was one of Africa's leading literary icons. He was born at Guru in Northern 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 organized 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 death. 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 twentieth century. In fact, he is rivaled only by the near-mythic Luís de Camöes (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 fourteenth 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.

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

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.

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 definition de l'aigle, Notre Dame la noire ou l'Evangile du Serpent, La mere du cercle. http://www.wizya.net/pey.htm

INA PFITZNER received a PhD 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 BA 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 MA 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 American poet, 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 thirty-one 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 Romneascu, 1994); Night or Day (Editions Paralela '45, 1998) and Operations in Green (Editions Cartea Romneascu, 2006).

AARON POOCHIGIAN's translations, with introduction and notes, of Sappho's poems and fragments are due out from Penguin Classics in 2009. His translations of Aeschylus, Aratus, and Apollonius of Rhodes will appear in the forthcoming Norton Anthology of Greek Literature in Translation, edited by Rachel Hadas. His original poems and translations have appeared in numerous journals, including Chronogram: A Journal of Arts and Culture, Classical Journal, The Dark Horse, Smartish Pace, and Unsplendid. He holds a PhD in Classics from the University of Minnesota and is currently D.L. Jordon Fellow at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia.

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 Prize of the Union of Romanian Writers, the country's highest literary award.

ANTONIO PORCHIA (1886-1968) Born in Italy, Porchia lived from 1911 in Buenos Aires, writing in Spanish and working as a potter or carpenter. Voces, from which these aphorisms were taken, appeared in several editions since 1943.

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 PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts.

HEIDELINDE PRÜGER 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 BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his PhD 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."

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