HALINA ABLAMOWICZ is Assistant Professor of Speech in the English Department at Tennessee Tech University. She studied Russian at the University of Wroclaw in Poland and earned an MA in that language from the Lenin Pedagogical Institute in Moscow. She holds a PhD in Speech Communication from the University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale. Her 1994 article “Shame as Abject Communication: A Semiotic View” appeared in The American Journal of Semiotics, and has been reprinted subsequently as well as translated into Portuguese.

JUAN GERARDO AGUILAR was born in Zacatecas, Mexico, in 1976. He studied literature at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Zacatecas. His stories and essays have appeared in literary journals in his native country. Currently, he is working on Vicios, a book of short fiction.

SOPHIA DE MELLO BREYNER ANDRESEN has published twenty volumes of poetry, seven children’s books, three collections of cultural essays, and two short story collections. As Portugal’s leading woman-of-letters, she has won all of her country’s literary awards, as well as France’s prestigious Prix Jean Malrieu. Here in the USA, Alexis Levitin has placed translations of her poems in numerous magazines, including Boulevard, Chelsea, Translation, The Literary Review, Cimarron Review, Denver Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, and Prairie Schooner. Sophia, frail and lovely, died rather suddenly on July 2nd of 2004. Both Portugal’s Prime-Minister and President attended her funeral.

LAUREN H. ARMSTRONG graduated from Smith College with a BA in American Studies in 2005. She was the production editor for four issues of Metamorphoses including the Spring/Fall 2004 Double Issue, Words and Worlds. She has been a freelance layout and production editor for three years starting with her first project in 2002 of publishing a magazine titled UnPublished. Her most recent project, in addition to working on Metamorphoses, was the 2004 Attorney General of New Mexico Annual Report.

MARGOT ATWELL graduated from Smith College with a BA in English literature in 2005. In 2002, she co-founded Labrys, a magazine for Smith student and alumnae art and literature, which she edited for three years. She intends to make her career in the field of publishing.

BERNARDO ATXAGA is a pseudonym for Basque writer José Irazu Garmendía, author of novels, poems, short stories and children´s books both in Euskera and in Spanish. Atxaga´s work has earned him various literary prizes, among them the Premio Nacional de Narrativa (1989) for Obabakoak. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

MICHELE MCKAY AYENSWORTH teaches languages and literature at Huston-Tillotson College in Austin, Texas. She has an MA in French from Yale University and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Texas at Austin. Between 1974 and 1997 she lived in Buenos Aires, where she helped to found Lincoln University College and studied modern Argentine literature with Beatriz Sarlo at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1998 she was awarded a Moody Fellowship to complete her translation of Argentine writer Roberto Arlt’s novel Mad Toy, which was published by Duke UP in 2002 and honored as a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters’s Soeurette-Diehl Translation Award. Her translations of short stories by Argentine writer Fernando Sorrentino have appeared online at Badosa.Com and in Thresholds: An Anthology of World Literature from the Heart of Texas. This anthology, to which she contributed two translated poems as well, and which she helped to edit, was a finalist for the 2004 Soeurette-Diehl Translation Award.

GIOVANNA BELLESIA graduated in 1978 from the Interpreter School in Milan and earned a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a dissertation on the translation work of Montale, Pavese and Vittorini during Fascism. She is Professor of Italian Language and Literature at Smith College. Her current project, in collaboration with Victoria Poletto and Alessandra di Maio, is an anthology of short stories (in English translation) by women who have emigrated to Italy from developing countries.

ANNIE BOUTELLE teaches at Smith College, where she founded the Poetry Center. Her first book of poems, Becoming Bone, based on the life of Celia Thaxter, will be published in summer 2005 by the University of Arkansas Press. Her second book of poems, Nest of Thistles, won the Morse prize from Northeastern University Press and will be published in fall 2005 by University Press of New England.

VINCENT BROOK (1946-) Has A Ph.D. in film and television from UCLA, has written numerous articles for leading academic journals, and is the author of Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the “Jewish” Sitcom (Rutgers University Press, 2003). The son of German-Jewish émigrés, Vincent studied, travelled, and worked in Germany in the late 1960s/early 1970s. He is currently editing an anthology for Rutgers on Jewish identity in postmodern American culture.

ANDRZEJ BURSA (1932-1957). Before his life was cut short at age 25 by a malformed aorta, he published 37 poems, a novel, and two plays. A native of Krakow, he attended Jagiellonian University, after which he worked as a journalist. Bursa’s adolescence and early adult life span some of the darkest years of modern Polish history—from the Nazi invasion and brutal occupation during World War II to the Soviet occupation and Cold War. Bursa bitterly attacks social and political injustice, as well as cant, pretense, and hypocrisy. Bursa’s language can be deliberately anti-poetic. He mixes obscure words, neologisms, regionalisms, slang, and occasional vulgarity. His grammar is often raw, elliptical, and clumsy, perhaps intended to reflect the caustic disillusionment of his generation. Below the surface of this poète maudit sneering cynicism, however, one finds serious moral questioning along with genuine tenderness and compassion for the poor and disenfranchised. His poems lament the erosion of traditional values caused by conflicting geo-political ideologies. Bursa’s reputation increased rapidly after his death, his small oeuvre developing a cult following among young people.

KEVIN CHRISTIANSON holds a PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. His own poems have appeared in Minnesota Review, The Formalist, and New Letters. A professor of English, he teaches courses in creative writing, poetry, and world literature at Tennessee Tech University. In 1999-2000 he received a Fulbright to teach American literature at Nicholas Copernicus University in Torun, Poland. In 1998 he was elected member of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences.

CRAIG DAVIS teaches Old and Middle English, Old Norse and Medieval Welsh language and literature at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he has directed the Medieval Studies and Comparative Literature programs. He studied in Wales and Iceland before taking his doctorate in English at the University of Virginia. He has written on the legendary history of Britain, the Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies, the sagas of Icelanders, Chaucer, and Old English poetry, including a book entitled, ‘Beowulf ’ and the Demise of Germanic Legend in England (1996). His recent research is on ethnogenesis and the date of Beowulf ’s composition. He is currently translating the earliest texts of the Arthurian legend in Wales for a new anthology. His translations here appear by courtesy of College Publishing, Glen Allen, Virginia.

RITA DINALE was born in Pisa, received a doctorate in Italian Literature from the University of Florence, and lived in Rome (where she worked as a journalist) and Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) before settling in the United States. She was Professor of Italian Language and Literature at Smith College for many years, until her retirement. Her poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies; she has published one collection of prose pieces (Una ragazzina svagata e allegra) and three of poetry (Tutti i luoghi che ho visto; Una quieta pazienza; L’Olimpo è vuoto). She was awarded the Lerici-Pea Prize for Poetry twice, in 1987 and 1990. Currently, she is working on a new collection of poems.

EGLAL DOSS-QUINBY, Professor of French Studies at Smith College, specializes in Old French lyric poetry. She has published several books, including a critical edition of the songs of the women trouvères, with scholarly translations and music, prepared with Joan Grimbert, Wendy Pfeffer, and Elizabeth Aubrey. In collaboration with Samuel N. Rosenberg and Elizabeth Aubrey, she has just edited and translated the corpus of thirteenth-century dance-songs.

LUC GILLEMAN was born and raised in Ostend, a coastal town in the Flemish part of Belgium. After a brief stint as radio-officer in the merchant marine, he studied Dutch and English philology at the University of Brussels, then worked free-lance for the Association du Patrimoine Artistique, translating books on Belgian art and architecture. He moved to the United States in 1987 on a Belgian American Educational Fellowship and in 1995 obtained a Ph.D. in English from Indiana University, Bloomington. He is Associate Professor at Smith College where he teaches in English and Comparative Literature. His book John Osborne: Vituperative Artist was published by Routledge in 2001. More recently, he has turned to translating Flemish authors. His article on Hugo Claus, with a translation of some of that author’s poetry, appeared in the Fall 2003 issue of Metamorphoses. He is currently working on a number of articles and a book about the search for structure in modern plays.

NÁNDOR GION, a member of the large Hungarian minority group living in the Voivoidina region of the former Yugoslavia, published his novel Soldier with a Flower in 1972. Set in his home town and written in a traditional style and in classical Hungarian, the novel attracted a great deal of attention because it exposed the plight and loss of identity of Hungarians and other ethnic groups in the Yugoslav State which came into being after World War I.

LUIS DE GÓNGORA (Y ARGOTE) was born in Cordoba, Spain in 1561 and died there in 1627. After a riotous youth, he was eventually ordained after he was fifty years old and was chaplain to Philip III in Madrid. His earlier poetry is characterized by the use of short, traditional meters and light subject matter; after 1610, his work became much more abstruse and difficult, with many references to Greek mythology, full of neologisms and rhetorical figures such as hyperbaton.

TOSHIYA A. KAMEI, an English graduate student, lives in East Texas. He has been accepted into the MFA program at the University of Arkansas.

STEPHANIE KRAFT is a journalist who has visited Poland each year since 1988 and observed the changes there since the end of the communist era. She has just completed a translation of Emancypantki, a novel about feminism by the acclaimed nineteenth-century Polish author Boleslaw Prus.

INGRID LANSFORD is a writer and translator who grew up in Denmark and Germany. She has published prose translations in the German-English journal Dimension2 and the anthology Thresholds (2003). In 2004 she received the Leif and Inger Sjøberg Prize of the American-Scandinavian Foundation for her translation of seven of the Love Stories from Many Lands by Danish author Meir Aron Goldschmidt.

CARROL LASKER holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and is an Assistant Professor of Speech and Theater at CUNY’s New York City Technical College. Born and raised in South Africa, she has published widely on African literature and has translated many works from Afrikaans and Kaaps. These include the poetry and drama of Adam Small as well as Arthur Nuthall Fula’s The Golden Magnet. Her current project is recording and translating Black South African women’s narratives.

ALEXIS LEVITIN has published over twenty books of translation, most recently Forbidden Words: Selected Poetry of Eugenio de Andrade (New Directions, 2003). Levitin’s translation of Guernica by Carlos de Oliveira (from which Metamorphoses published a 24-poem sequence called “Stalactite”) was published by Guernica Editions of Toronto in the winter of 2004. During the last quarter century, Levitin has published about fifty of Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen’s poems in twenty-two literary magazines and in two anthologies. Seventeen poems drawn from Conch Shell from Cos have been accepted by and are forthcoming in Osiris, Northwest Review, Sulphur River Literary Review, Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies, and Natural Bridge.

MAYA J. LOBELLO (born in 1977 in Tehran), became captivated with Hungarian literature while spending a year abroad in Hungary in 1993. After attaining a degree in Central European Studies with a specialization in Polish and Hungarian literature from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, she became a permanent resident of Hungary in 1999. Her publications include a bilingual edition of the oeuvre of the architect Ferenc Cságoly (Kijárat Publishers), a volume about the glass artist János Jegenyés (Kijárat Publishers) and a collection of essays by the renowned architect, Imre Makovecz. Her main interest lies in literature written by Hungarian minorities living in Serbia and Romania. She is currently translating The Age of Ravens by the Romanian-Hungarian author István Szilágyi, a novel recommended by UNESCO’s Clearing House for Literary Translation program.

FELIX LOPE DE VEGA Y CARPIO (1562-1635) was born in Madrid. Considered the greatest of all Spanish playwrights, he wrote over 2200 plays, of which 500 survive. Endowed with a prodigious intellect—by the age of five he could read Latin and Spanish and wrote poetry—he had the physical energy to match it, and an enthusiasm for taking risks that led him into numerous amorous adventures (he was imprisoned at a very young age and exiled for his affair with a married woman and his quarrel with her father, but never lost his enthusiasm for relationships with women, many of which resulted in offspring). He took part in more than one military expedition, including the Spanish Armada’s unfortunate engagement with the English fleet.

WENCESLAO MALDONADO was born in Argentina in 1940, and studied there and in Italy, receiving his doctorate in Trieste. He now teaches Classics in Buenos Aires. He has published several books of poems and short stories, including La estación necesaria, El hombre herido, Tierra intranquila, Dioses del deseo antiguo, Ceremonial de una familia oscura, Arquitectura gótica, and Fronteras.

FRANCESCO MARRONI, born in Italy in 1949, is Professor of English Literature at the University of Pescara, where he is Director of the Center for Victorian and Edwardian Studies (C.U.S.V.E.). He is also Editor-in-Chief of the following academic journals: Merope, Rivista di Studi Vittoriani and Traduttologia. He is member of the editorial board of The Gaskell Society Journal (Manchester). His books include La verità difficile: Uno studio sui romanzi di George Eliot (Bologna, 1980); Invito alla lettura di Henry James (Milan, 1983); La fabbrica nella valle: Saggio sulla narrativa di Elizabeth Gaskell (Bari, 1987); La poesia di Thomas Hardy (Bari, 1997); Spettri senza nome. Modelli epistemici e narrativa vittoriana (Pescara, 1997); Disarmonie vittoriane: Rivisitazioni del canone della narrativa inglese dell’Ottocento (Rome, 2002) and Miti e mondi vittoriani: La cultura inglese dell’Ottocento (Rome, 2004). He has edited works by George Orwell (1982), Thomas Hardy (1991, 2000), E. L. Doctorow (1993), Henry James (1994), Walter Scott (1994, 2004), R. L. Stevenson (2000) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (2003). He has translated narrative works by Washington Irving, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing, G. B. Shaw and George Eliot. Also a writer of fiction, Marroni has published four collections of short stories: Silverdale (Palermo, 2000), Brughiere (Bari, 2002), Il silenzio dell’Escorial (Bari, 2002) and Finisterre (Pescara, 2004). A new collection of short stories, Vedute di Manchester, is due out by the beginning of 2006. He has authored a campus novel, Il fantasma di Rembrandt, which is forthcoming.

PETER MEYER (1935-) has a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from Bonn University. Inspired by the work of Ralph Nader, he became an environmental activist in the 1970s. In 1991 he was elected to the Berlin Parliament, where he became head of the environmental faction of the Social Democratic party, chair of the “Sustainable Berlin” Commission, and chief editor of the white paper Sustainable Berlin (Zukunftsfähiges Berlin, in German). In 1999, Peter retired from party politics. In 2003, with the help of his American cousin, Vincent Brook, he translated his short story Gleichviel (All the Same) into English.

JAMES O’BRIEN is Professor Emeritus of Japanese at the University of Wisconsin. He continues to translate modern Japanese poems and to publish these as the occasion presents itself. Poems by Kitahara Hakushu (1885-1942) and Hagiwara Sakutaro (1886-1942) appeared in the Fall, 2002 issue of Metamorphoses.

LYDIA ORAM holds a B.A. in Spanish from Smith College and an MA in Italian literature from Columbia University. Currently a doctoral student in Comparative Literature and Cinema Studies at New York University, she has published translations from Italian (Manlio Cancogni) and Spanish (Almudena Grandes), as well as critical work on Elsa Morante.

THALIA PANDIRI, Editor-in-Chief of Metamorphoses since 1999, is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Smith College. She is currently writing on the twelfth-century visionary Elisabeth of Schönau as well as translating and writing about survivor narratives from the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922. She has begun collecting material for Other Italies, Italy’s Others, the 2006 special issue of Metamorphoses, and is researching the survival and renascence of Griko, a Greek-based dialect in Southern Italy.

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.

FERNANDO ANTÓNIO NOGUEIRA PESSOA (1888-1935) is widely held to be the greatest Portuguese poet of the 20th century. In fact, he is rivaled only by the near-mythic Luís de Camões (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 14th 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”).

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 at Smith College. In recent years she has offered a course on the theory and practice of translation in addition to courses on language and literature. Currently she is preparing an anthology of the works of immigrant women in Italy translated into English together with Giovanna Bellesia and Alessandra Di Maio.

FRANCISCO DE QUEVEDO Y VILLEGAS (1580-1645) was the leading satirist of Spain’s Golden Age.

SAMUEL N. ROSENBERG, Professor Emeritus of French and Italian at Indiana University, is principally interested in medieval lyric poetry and Arthurian narrative. His books and shorter publications include critical editions of trouvère songs (prepared in col326 Metamorphoses laboration with musicologists), translations of these and of large parts of the Lancelot-Grail cycle of prose romances, and a soonto- be-published retelling — written together with Patricia Terry — of the story of Lancelot’s two loves, Guenevere and Galehaut. With Eglal Doss-Quinby, he has just completed an edition, with scholarly translations, of the Old French ballettes.

IGIABA SCEGO was born in Rome in 1974. Her parents sought asylum in Italy after Siad Barre’s coup d’état in 1969 put an end to a brief spell of democracy in Somalia. She holds a degree in language and literature from Rome’s La Sapienza University and has worked with various magazines including Latinoamerica, Carta and Migra. In 2003 she won the Eks&tra literary prize for best immigrant writer. Her novels include La nomade che amava Alfred Hitchcock and Rhoda. She is pursuing graduate study in the fiels of Peacekeeping and Security Studies and Intercultural Education at Università Roma Tre.

MURANO SHIRO (1901-1975) is regarded in Japan as a Modernist poet, whose poetry is often characterized by a satirical stance rare in Japanese poetry. in a celebrated volume on sports, the poet sees athletes as trapped in a mechanistic world. Throughout his life the poet attempted to insulate himself from the sentimental tendency in much Japanese poetry. As an undergraduate student, he opted for a major in Economics and German; afterwards he pursued a satisfying career in business.

ADAM SMALL, a prolific South African writer, has to his credit several plays, collections of poetry, and philosophical treatises. His works have been translated into French, Dutch, and German, and his plays have been performed in South Africa and the USA. Born in 1936, he retired recently from his position as Senior Professor and Head of the Department of Social Work at the University of the Western Cape. In the early 1990’s, Small was awarded the Order of Excellent Service (Gold) by then President de Klerk and was selected for membership in the South African Academy of Science and Art. His publications include: Krismis van Map Jacobs (1983); Heidesee (1978); The Orange Earth (Drama, 1978); Joanie Galant-hulle (1978); Oh Wide and Sad Land (Poetry, 1973); Oos Wes Tuis Bes Distrik Ses (1967); Se Sjibbolet (1965); Kitaar My Kruis (1963); Die Eerste Steen (1961); Klein Simbool (Poetry, 1958); Verse van die Liefde (1957).

DONNY SMITH’s poems and translations have appeared in Calapooya, Coe Review, Connecticut Review, Lilliput Review, Natural Bridge, Poet Lore, Sinister Wisdom, and elsewhere. Section 7 of “Gorgon” was previously published in 580 Split. His academic articles have appeared in Art Documentation, Alternative Library Literature, and Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery & Information Supply. He is a librarian at Indiana State University.

STEVEN K. SMITH is Associate Director of Global Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A former contract interpreter for the US State Department, Smith has worked on a wide variety of translations and interpretations. He is also currently completing his dissertation in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Madison, on contemporary activist theater in the city of São Paulo, Brazil.

JAN SONNERGAARD was born in a northwestern suburb of Copenhagen in 1963 and completed a Master’s degree in literary studies and philosophy at Copenhagen University. He has published three volumes of short stories, all with Gyldendal: Radiator (1997), Sidste søndag i oktober (2000), and Jeg er stadig bange for Caspar Michael Petersen (2003); an edition combining the three volumes appeared as Trilogien in 2004. In addition to grants nearly every year since 1997, he received the prestigious LO Kulturpris in 2000.

ADAM J. SORKIN’s recent volumes of translation include The Bridge by Marin Sorescu, poems written over the last weeks of the poet’s life (Bloodaxe Books), The Past Perfect of Flight: Selected Poems by Marin Sorescu (Romanian Cultural Institute Publishing House), and Lunacies by Ruxandra Cesereanu (Spuyten Duyvil / Meeting Eyes Bindery)—all published in 2004. Daniela Crasnaru’s The Grand Prize and Other Stories (Northwestern UP), appeared in early 2005. Sorkin is the recipient of an NEA Poetry Fellowship in Translation for 2005-06.

FERNANDO SORRENTINO is an active and well known Argentine writer, contributing to journals, newspapers, and e-zines as well as publishing books. His novel Sanitary Centennial, is available in English, as are numerous short stories that have appeared in anthologies or on various websites. He has also published two books of interviews: Siete conversaciones con Jorge Luis Borges (1974) and Siete conversaciones con Adolfo Bioy Casares (1992). He contributes essays on a regular basis to the Buenos Aires daily La Nación and to Trujamán, a Spanish online journal specializing in issues related to literary translation. A new collection of his short stories is coming out soon in Spain.

ELENA STEFOI is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Starting Line (1996), from which these poems are taken. Other titles include Daily Rehearsal (1986), Sketches and Stories (1989), and A Few Details (1990). Her work has been honored by the Romanian Writers’ Union and she was one of the four Romanian poets who appeared in Michael March’s groundbreaking Penguin Anthology, Child of Europe. She has been an editor of the important political-cultural journal Dilema and a correspondent for Radio France (with daily reports from Bucharest) and the French language L’Invitation in Bucharest. Until early 2000, she was General Consul at the Romanian Consulate in Montréal, Québec. Her poetry has previously appeared in English in Adam J. Sorkin’s collaborative versions in Dominion Review, Frigate, Pif Magazine, Pennsylvania English, Apostrof and Romanian Civilization.

HERMAN TEIRLINCK, born in 1879, is one of the foremost writers of Flemish prose and drama. Early in his career, he became a contributor to Van Nu en Straks, a Flemish journal with international aspirations. Between the two World Wars, Teirlinck devoted himself exclusively to theatre, producing a number of innovative, expressionistic plays and renovating theatrical education in Flanders with the theories of Richard Wagner, Adolphe Appia, Edward Gordon Craig, and Konstantin Stanislavsky. Today an important Flemish actors’ training studio is named after him. His most important prose works are Mijnheer J. B. Serjanszoon (1908), Het ivoren aapje (1909; The Ivory Monkey), Maria Speermalie and Rolande met de bles (both vitalistic works, written during WWII), and Zelfportret of het Galgemaal (1955, translated as The Man in the Mirror). Although heavily influenced by French Symbolism and the Belgian fin-de-siècle, he was constantly reinventing himself in an astonishing number of literary styles. He died in 1967, having been the recipient of major Belgian and international awards. In the 1960s and 70s, nine volumes of his collected works were published, edited by Willem Pée.

CHRISTINA DE LA TORRE was born in Cuba, and has lived in Atlanta and taught at Emory University most of her adult life. She has translated four novels and many pieces of short fiction from Spanish into English from authors such as Carme Riera, Rosa Montero, Angeles Mastretta, Jorge Volpi, Alejandro Aguilar and Nancy Alonso. She has been the recipient of various academic distinctions, including a Howard Foundation Fellowship for translation.

JOHN UPTON earned an M.A. in Spanish Language and Literature at the University of Madrid in 1966. By the end of the 1970s he had published translations of poetry by Neruda and numerous Latin American poets; Góngora’s narrative poem Polifemo; Juan José Arreola’s novel The Fair; essays by Unamuno, a novel (Cumboto) by Ramón Díaz Sánchez that was nominated for the National Book Award in Translation in 1970; Ramón Beteta’s memoirs, Jarano; two anthropological studies, San José de Gracia: Mexican Village in Transition by Luis González and In the Magic Land of Peyote by Fernando Benítez. He also published a linguistic study of the Mayan language Yucateco in Yucatán. In the early 1990s he worked as staff translator for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and for Latin American Art Magazine. In 2004 he was a finalist in the Barnstone Translators’ Competition.

STOYAN VALEV is a Bulgarian novelist (When God Was On Leave; Time To Be Unfaithful; The Bulgarian Decameron), short-story writer and playwright.

LIANA VRAJITORU graduated with a Ph.D. in English at the State University of New York in Binghamton and now teaches in the English Department at South Texas College, McAllen, Texas. Her translations of Traian T. Cosovei, Aurel Dumitrascu, Mariana Marin, and Elena Stefoi (all with Adam J. Sorkin) have appeared in Poetry New York, Faultline, Pif Magazine, Kalliope, The Kit-Cat Review, Smartish Pace, Runes and Frigate.

NEVENA ZHELYAZKOVA is a native of Bulgaria, where she was educated until coming to the United States to study at Smith College; she earned a B.A. in 2005. She intends to continue her studies in Europe.