WALTER ARNDT (b. Constantinople, 1916) Received a classical education at Oxford, Warsaw and elsewhere. Fought in the Polish resistance during World War II, served in the U.S. Office of Strategic Services and later in UN relief. In 1949 he emigrated to the U.S. where he has held various chairs in Slavic literature, notably at Dartmouth, and was awarded the Bollingen Prize for translation in 1963. He has published over a long span of years, translating Goethe, Rilke, Pushkin, Akhmatova, to name a few.

DAVID BALL Teaches French and Comparative Literature at Smith College. His poems, translations and essays have appeared in many journals and collections. The University of California Press will publish his Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology this year.

RON BANERJEE Born in India. Poet, translator and critic, he has served on various of the Five Colleges' Faculties. He lives in Northampton.

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.

IVANA CARLSEN Born in Brazil, she came to the U.S. in 1947 on scholarships to Berkeley and Santa Barbara, to settle in Los Angeles where she lived and worked except for a time in Portugal from 1986-1992. She has been awarded a Literature and Translation Grant from the National Endowment of the Arts.

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.

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.

RITA DINALE Poet, writer, Professor Emerita in Italian Literature at Smith College. Recipient of the Lerici-Pea Poetry Prize in 1987, 1990. Two collections of her poems have appeared in Italy as has work in such journals as Paragone-Letteratura, Alfabeta, Erba d'Arno. Her forthcoming book is a prose memoir of her adolescence in Africa.

MARGARETA EKSTRÖM (b. 1930) Is known as the foremost exponent of the short story in Sweden, though she has published poetry collections and novels as well. Her language is concise and metaphoric, dealing largely with the everyday destinies of old women, children and lovers.

JUAN RODRIGUEZ FREILE (1566-1642?) Author of a popular chronicle which deals with witchcraft trials in the Colombian provinces of New Granada.

FRANTISEK HALAS (1901-1950) A Czech poet of great lyric intensity. Halas is notable for his fractured syntax and the density of his metaphors. He belongs to the second wave of the Czech avant-garde between the two wars.

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 both the visual and literary arts. The poems here translated were among Heym's posthumous notes.

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, as well as of Rita Dinale's Una quieta pazienza.

HENRI MICHAUX (d. 1984 at the age of 85) One of the great visionary figures of the century. His work ranges from poetry to narrative essays, drawings and paintings that have earned him comparisons to Kafka, Paul Klee, Goya and others, though he stands preeminently alone as a writer.

MOLIÈRE (Jean Baptiste Poquelin, 1622-1673) Son of an upholsterer to the court of Louix XIV, he left the court to become manager of an actors' company for which he wrote his numerous plays. These deal largely with the follies and vices of French society of the day.

CHRISTIAN MORGENSTERN (1871-1914) German poet philosopher, translator of Ibsen and Strindberg. Influenced by them, as by Nietzsche and later by Rudolph Steiner. Known particularly for his absurdist poems, despite his more serious, visionary work. Claimed by the Dadaists as one of their own.

ALEXANDER PUSHKIN (1799-1837) Preeminent romantic poet of Russia, disciple of Byron. He was known especially for his lyrical poetry as for his verse romance, Eugene Onegin. His Boris Godunov served as the base of Borodin's opera of that name.

NINA M. SCOTT Professor of Spanish-American literature at the University of Massachusetts, with a specialty in Spanish-American writers. Co-editor of Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings and of Coded Encounters: Writing, Gender and Ethnicity in Colonial Latin America (both U. of Mass. Press), she is now completing a bilingual anthology of early Spanish-American writers.

NATHANIEL SMITH Professor of Catalan, French, Italian, and Provencal languages and literatures, and poetry, particularly of the Middle Ages, at Smith College, the University of Georgia and Boston University. He has published about 100 translations and poems in various journals, as well as 6 books, 25 articles and about 75 book reviews on mostly medieval topics.

LASZLO TIKOS Director of the Translation Center at the University of Massachusetts, where he chairs the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. He is the author of many translations, from the Russian especially.

LAJOS VARGA (b. 1932, Hungary) Poet, essayist. Studied Hungarian language and literature at the University of Debrecen in Hungary, taught in a Gimnazium in Budapest until 1956; then imprisoned for three years for "subversive views," communicated to his students. Not published during the Communist regime until the early 1990's.

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 book of poems Terror and Decorum. His most recent book is Archer in the Marrow (NY, Norton, 1987), and his next book Tide and Continuities (U. of Arkansas Press, 1994) will appear with a rhymed preface by Joseph Brodsky.

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.

RICHARD WILBUR Was invested as Poet Laureate of the U.S. in 1987. The recipient of many awards and honors, and a member of the American Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Poets, he has also enjoyed a distinguished career from which he is now retired. He may be best known for his translations of Molière, though his published poems in his own language continue to evoke accolades at home and abroad.