DANTE ALIGHERI (1265-1321) Italian poet who established Tuscan as the literary language of the Peninsula. He celebrated his love for "the glorious lady of his mind," Beatrice, in various works, notably in the Divine Comedy (of which the canto here published from the Purgatorio is a part).

RON BANERJEE Contributing Editor of Metamorphoses, born in India. Poet, translator and critic, he has served in various of the Five College faculties. His translations from the Bengali, Poetry from Bengal, were published by UNESCO. Far From You, from the Czech, appeared in 1980. His latest publication is L'Antica Fiamma.

SANDRO BOTICELLI (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 63 poets in 28 languages over a period of 167 years.

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 in Leverett. She is best known for her translations of Margareta Ekstrom's work, especially the collection Death's Midwives. Currently she is working on an anthology of Swedish women poets.

DAVID DAUBE Emeritus Regius Professor of Civil Law, University of Oxford; Emeritus Director of the Robbins Hebraic and Roman Law Collection and Emeritus Professor, University of California Law School at Berkeley. He is also the grandfather of Metamorphoses' co-editor Matthew Daube.

ALESSANDRO FERACE Born in Bengasi, Libya, lives in Florence, Italy, with an American wife, two children, three dogs, and a very old cat. He works as an editor in the publishing house La Nuova Italia.

DU FU (712-770 A.D.) Long considered one of China's greatest poets; though he continued to compose poetry, his life suffered dreadfully from the rebellion that brought down the Tang dynasty.

DEAN FURBISH A member of the National Slavic Honor Society, he teaches biology and chemistry at Piedmont Community College in Roxboro, NC. His translations have appeared in Quarterly West, Nedge, Portland Review and the Xavier Review among others.

JAMES GIBBS An Englishman living in Munich, where he does freelance translation and teaches English at the British Institute.

CLARENCE KENNEDY (1892-1972) Renaissance scholar famed for his photographs of Italian and Greek sculpture. His life's passion was to make art available and affordable to all. His Siphnian photos were taken while he was a scholar at the American school in Athens and in the following year, under considerable hardship as the sun was so hot at Delphi that the shellac sometimes boiled off his camera and as much of the developing was done in hotel bathrooms. He was instrumental in developing modern techniques in the reproduction of photographs and would have loved the laser printing which has made our reproductions possible. He was on the faculty of Smith College for his entire career.

MELINDA KENNEDY Born in Northampton, spent much of her youth in Italy. Editor, translator, writer, she retired from teaching in 1989 and thereafter became co-editor of Metamorphoses. Her poems have appeared in such journals as The Southern and Massachusetts Review. She lives now in a former station in the Underground Railroad with her dog Ben.

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.

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).

SARA LIDMAN Represents, more than any other writer, the North of Sweden. Most of her output depicts the daily struggle for survival in that region of the country and are marked by anger at injustice and oppression. Her language is a unique blend of dialect, archaisms, and her own genius. Two of her books have been translated into English (The Rainbird, Braziller, 1962; Naboth's Stone, Norvik Press, 1989) as well as two short stories, one published by Metamorphoses and the other by Two Lines. Nadine Gordimer said "translations of her work are a cause for celebration."

JIM MARANIS Head and Professor of Spanish, Amherst College, and a member of the Metamorphoses Editorial Board.

PROSPER MÉRIMÉE (1803-1870) French writer, Senator, and Member of both l'Académie des Inscriptions and l'Académie Française. His mastery of English, Greek, Spanish and later, especially, Russian, sparked in him a passion for modern and ancient literatures as well as a conssuming interest in the history of art, about which he would write extensively. His later years were spent translating the works of Pushkin, Gogol and Turgenev.

W.S. MERWIN Now has settled on the island of Maui in Hawaii, where he divides his time between writing and cultivating his garden of tropical plants. A long time translator, he is one of America's most celebrated poets, having won the most prestigious of America's prizes, including the Bollingen. He was recently a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets.

BILL MULLEN Professor at Bard College. His recent publications include Jefferson and Rome: Foundation and Fabric (de Gruyter, 1998) and The Agenda of the Milesian School (Archaeo Press, Oxford, 1998). His poem "Enchanted Rock" (Yale Review Vol. 85, No. 1, Jan. 1997) was selected by John Hollander to appear in Best American Poems of 1998 (Scribners, Fall 1998). The American Biographical Institute has chosen him this year for inclusion in Five Hundred Leaders of Influence (Seventh Edition, 1998), and the International Biographical Institute in Cambridge, England, has included him in The First Five Hundred.

PINDAR (ca. 552-442 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.

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 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.

EDWARD RADZINSKI (b. 1936) Russian playwright best known for his historical philosophical trilogy, Conversations with Socrates (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 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 archives (1996).

ADAM SORKIN Professor of English at Penn State University, Delaware County and a much published translator of contemporary Romanian poetry, with six books to his credit, the latest a volume of Liliana Ursu's poetry, The Sky Behind the Forest (Bloodaxe, 1997). Forthcoming books include a selection of prose poets Speaking the Silence (Prose Poem Press) and a collection of poets from the city of Iasi, Romania, City of Dreams and Whispers. In 1999, Bloodaxe with publish The Triumph of the Water Witch, a volume of Ioanna Ieronim's prose poems, and BOA will publish Sea-Level Zero, Daniela Crasnaru's poems, both translated with the poet.

LASZLO TIKOS Editor-in-Chief of Metamorphoses. A native of Hungary, he is a professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Massachusetts. The author of many translations from the Russian, he has recently published Gogol's Art: A Search for Identity (Bati Publishers, 1997).

RICHARD WILBUR Has spent his life writing and translating poetry. He is the winner of many American awards, as well as the Prix de Rome and Order des Palmes Académiques. He has served as Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets, as well as Poet Laureate. He is perhaps best known for his translations of Molière and Racine. He divides his time between Cummington, Mass. and Key West and is on the Editorial Board of Metamorphoses.