MARJORIE AGOSIN Born in Chile in 1955. Prominent human-rights activist and poet, short-story writer and editor of numerous anthologies, now teaching at Wellesley College. Her books include Cirlce of Madness, Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (1991), and Dear Anna Frank (1992) among others.

MARIA NEMCOVÀ BANERJEE Chair of the Department of Russian Language and Literature at Smith College, as well as a professor of Comparative Literature, she was formerly co-chair of the Five College Translation Seminar. She is the author of Terminal Paradox: The Novels of Milan Kundera.

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.

JOSEPH BRODSKY (1940-1996) Russian-American poet, Nobel Prize Winner. Author of half a dozen volumes of poetry in Russian and English (with many self-translations). Essayist, Professor of Literature at the Five Colleges. Was briefly a member of the editorial board of Metamorphoses before his death.

MANLIO CANCOGNI Born in Bologna of Tuscan parents, he later transferred to Rome, where he completed his doctoral studies in history and philosophy and began publishing short stories in Letteratura, Frontispizio and La Ruota, before becoming special correspondent for L'Europeo and L'Espresso and later La Fiera Letteraria. Then followed many novels and a twelve-year stay as Lecturer at Smith College. He now divides his time between Manhattan and Marina di Pietra Santa.

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.

NANCY DERSOFI She is a product of Radcliffe, and Harvard, where she did her doctoral studies. Since 1972 she has taught at Bryn Mawr, where she is now a professor of Italian and Contemporary Literature. Her main interests lie in the Italian Renaissance and the Theater.

EGLAL DOSS-QUINBY Currently on the faculty of Smith College, has published two books on Old French lyric poetry, as well as various articles and reviews, including Les refrains chez les trouvères du XIIIe siecle au début du XIVe (Peter Lang, 1984).

GUNNAR EKELÖF (1907-1968) Swedish lyric modernist. Three general selections of his poems have appeared in English translations by Rober Bly, James Larson with Leonard Nathan, and Muriel Rukeyser with Leif Sjöberg, as well as the booklength poem A Molna Elegy; also W.H. Auden, with Leif Sjöberg's Diwan over the Prince of Emgion and The Tale of Fatumeh.

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. We are here reprinting several of his poems which appeared in our last issue, but which were mangled during the course of production.

DEAN FURBISH A member of the National Slavic Honor Society, he teaches biology and chemistry at Piedmont Community College in Roxboro, NC. His translations of short stories and poetry have appeared in numerous journals. New works -- translations and his own poetry -- are to appear in The Lyric, Re: Arts & Letters, Piedmont Literary Review, and Sulphur R. Literary Review.

JOHN KEATS (1705-1821) Recognized as one of the mainstays of British poetry, friend of Shelley, he concentrated his brief life on writing. He sailed for Rome in 1820, hoping to conquer tuberculosis, but died there soon after.

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 publications are few, but have appeared in such journals as The Southern and Massachusetts Review.

ALEXIS LEVITIN Teaches at the State University of Plattsburgh. His translations of Eugenio de Andrade's poems won him the first Pessoa translation prize from Columbia University. His Soulstorm was published by New Directions.

SARA LIDMAN Has been a successful Swedish writer for the past forty years, mostly of novels, short stories and reportage, dealing with unjust treatment of human beings, especially in Lapland where she was born. Nadine Gordimer said "translations of her work are a cause for celebration."

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 Portugese 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 (192401977) 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 20th century; her books have been translated into several languages.

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.

MARIA LÚCIA MILLÉO MARTINS Born and educated in the south of Brazil, is currently on a Ph.D. program at UMass. In 1992, she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to do research on Elizabeth Bishop's special collections in Vassar and Harvard, a scholarship renewed in 1994. She is collaborating as a translator and editor of an Anthology of Contemporary American Poets (bilingual), 1997 (U. Federal de Sta. Catarina).

BEVERLY MATHERNE Has two bilingual chapbooks: Je me souviens de la Louisiane (March Street Press) and Images cadiennes (Ridgewood Press). Widely published in journals, including Kansas Quarterly, Squaw Review, and Verse, she is on the writing faculty of Northern Michigan University.

STEVE O'HALLORAN A poet residing in Northampton.

GIOVANNI PASCOLI 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.

CESARE PAVESE (1908-1950) Born in the Piedmont whose voice he became, one of Italy's foremost writers, an Anti-Fascist who served time in prison and in exile, where he wrote Lavorare Stanca. La Luna e i Falò (The Moon and the Bonfires) won him Italy's Premio Strega, its foremost literary prize, shortly before his suicide.

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).

ALEKSIS RANNIT Born in Kallaste, Estonia in 1914, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1953, and served as Curator of the Slavic and East European Collections at Yale. His selected poems Valimik appeared shortly before his death in 1984.

RAINER MARIA RILKE (1875-1926) Foremost German poet; born in Prague he moved with his wife Clara Westhoff in 1901 to Paris where they worked on studies of the sculptor Rodin. After the outbreak of World War I, he lived mostly in Munich and later in Switzerland, where he wrote the now much-translated Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus.

ANA REGINA FARIA DOS SANTOS Ph.D. candidate in Brazilian literature, with a minor in Modern Spanish Literature, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

SAPPHO Greek lyric poet of the 7th century B.C., who lived most of her life in Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. Almost all of her works have survived in fragments alone.

CAROLYN SMITH's interest in Greek lyric poetry stems from her early years in a Foreign Service family, which included postings to Rome and Athens. She received a B.A. in Classical Civilization from Oberlin College and an M.A. in Classics from New York University. A freelance writer and editor living in New York City, she is a member of the Vera Lachmann Reading Group, which meets regularly to translate and discuss the Homeric texts.

BRITA STENDAHL Born and educated in Sweden, she has lived in Cambridge, Mass., since 1954, teaching Scandinavian literature and modernist history. The author of books on Sören Kierkegaard and Fredrika Bremer, she is also well-known as a translator of Swedish literature.

KRISTIAN SUDA Has taught at the Film Institute in Prague. He is a poet and editor of Milda Sovckova's works.

KYAMIL TANGALYCHEV Tartar-Russian poet, lives in Saransk, Russia, where he works as a political affairs newspaper editor. An essayist as well on Russian poets and poetry, he has written recently on the idea of a contemporary Tartar metaphor. His poetry was introduced in Sulphur River Literary Review.

LASZLO TIKOS Editor in Chief of Metamorphoses. A native of Hungary, he is a professor of Slavic Langauges and Literatures 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 Publishrs 1997).

ELIZABETH WELT TRAHAN Founded the Division of Translation and Interpretation at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in 1968 and directed it until 1974. Since then she has been teaching and has published on translation theory and done various translations from the Russian and German.