TAMAS ACZEL Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Massachusetts; poet, novelist. Left his native Hungary in 1956 and after a stay of some ten years in Paris and London settled in Amherst. His latest novel, The Hunt (Faber and Faber, London, 1990) is preceded by several collections of poetry and four other novels, written in English and translated into Hungarian.

HÉLÈNE CANTARELLA Writer, critic, translator, teacher of languages, Emerita. For many years wrote reviews for The New York Times, The New Leader and other periodicals. Former Chief of the Foreign Language Section of the Motion Picture Bureau of the Office of War Information, then Coordinator of Films at Smith College. Currently living in Leeds, Massachusetts.

EVA CLAESON Writer and translator, living with her husband and dog in Pelham. Is best known for her translation of Margareta Ekström's work, especially the collection Death's Midwives.

BARBRO DAHLIN Psychiatrist, poet and novelist who lives in Stockholm, Sweden.

RUBEN DARÍO (b. Nicaragua, 1867; d. 1916) Creator of Modernism in its Latin American manifestation. He is most widely known for his volume Azul (1888) which was influenced by the French Parnassian school. He is credited with bringing innovations, vividness, and Exotismo into modern Spanish poetry.

ELLEN ELIAS-BURSAC (b. Cambridge, Massachusetts) Lived in Zagreb, Yugoslavia 18 years, working as a translator and in coordinating junior study abroad for American students. She lives in Cambridge and works as free-lance literary translator and scholar of the South Slavic literatures. Her translation of Slavenska Drakulic's novel Holograms of Fear was published by Norton in 1992.

BETTY FALKENBERG Writer, translator and critic living in South Hadley. Her work has appeared in Die Neue Rundschau, The International Poetry Review, Boulevard, Partisan Review, The New Leader, Dimension and other periodicals in Germany and the U.S. At present she is completing a volume of short stories.

ROGER GREENWALD Poet and translator from New York who now lives in Toronto, where he edits Writ magazine. He has published one book of poems, Connecting Flight, and several volumes of poetry in translation, including The Silence Afterwards: Selected Poems of Rolf Jacobsen (Princeton U.P., 1985).

PAVEL GRIGORYUK Russian Evangelical Christian, Pentacostalist. Survivor of six of Stalin's prison camps and jails. Emigrated to the United States in 1990 and now lives in Southampton, MA. The excerpt here is taken from his autobiography, collected and to be published soon as Oral Histories of the Russian Evangelical Christians by Laszlo Tikos.

GEORG HEYM (1887-1912) German poet, little known in the U.S., is nevertheless widely acknowledged as an exponent of the German Expressionist movement in letters and, like Stefan George, incarnated the moment of transition from French-influenced Symbolism to the more revolutionary German movement in both the visual and literary arts. The poems here translated were among Heym's posthumous notes.

FRANK HUGUS Head, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Massachusetts. Has published book-length translations and translations of short stories and plays from the Danish. He regularly teaches courses in the Danish language and on literature in translation.

ROLF JACOBSEN (b. Norway 1907) One of the greatest Norwegian poets of this century. He has received several major awards in Norway and Sweden, including two from the Swedish Academy. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.

MELINDA KENNEDY Retired teacher, editor, translator, writer, currently living in Northampton. Has published little but has recently completed a translation of the poems of the anti-fascist poet Salvatore Quasimodo.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

SALVATORE QUASIMODO (1901-1968) Italian poet and Nobel laureate. Born in Sicily, he lived most of his life in Rome and Milan. Known as an anti-Fascist critic, translator and poet, though he did not, like his brother-in-law Elio Vittorini, take an active role in the Resistance, relying on his poetry to make his position known.

LEIF SJÖBERG Translator and Professor Emeritus in Scandinavian Studies and Comparative Literatures at SUNY, Stony Brook. He lives in New York City.

PETER VIERECK Poet, translator and professor of Russian history at Mount Holyoke College. He has received Guggenheim fellowships in both poetry and prose and the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry book Terror and Decorum. His most recent book is Archer (NY, Norton, 1987). These translations are from his forthcoming book (awaiting a publisher), Transplanting: The Double Star of Stefan George and Georg Heym.

KELLY WASHBOURNE Translator and poet, currently teaching at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst). His work has appeared in Voices International, Magic Realism, Fistion, Xenophilia and Midnight Zoo.