ANNA AKHMATOVA (1889-1966) One of the major Russian poets of this century. Akhmatova's poetry achieved cult status soon after her first collection (Evening) was published in 1912. Her work was suppressed during the Stalinist terror; after Stalin's death her poems began to reappear in press. Her first husband, Nikolai Gumilyov, also a major Russian poet, was executed by the Bolsheviks in 1921. After her son Lev was arrested, Akhmatova wrote Requiem, a cycle of poems in which she beecame a voice for many whose loved ones had been taken away during the Stalinist regime. In the last thirty years her work has received international recognition.

MARIA NEMCOVA BANERJEE (born in Prague, 1937) Professor of Russian at Smith College. She is the author of Terminal Paradox: The Novels of Milan Kundera and of A Lime Tree in Prague. She serves on the Editorial Board of Metamorphoses.

RON D. K. 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.

STANISLAW BARANCZAK (1946- ) Poet, critic and translator, he is one of the most prominent members of the "New Wave" or "Generation of '68" in Polish poetry, and was a founding member of KOR (Committee for Workers' Defense) in the 1970's. He has taught Polish literature at Harvard University since 1981.

IVAN BLATNY (born in Brno, 1919, died 1990 in England) As a young poet, he captured Brno for Czech poetry, turning its humdrum streets into an enchanting setting for small epiphanies. Since Nezval, no one has widened the rhythm of intoning and repetition as well as Blatny, who took lessons from Eliot's The Wasteland. In the aftermath of the War, Blatny, emerging transformed from the matrix of Skupina 42, was seen as one of the most promising younger poets. The three poems translated by Deborah Garfinkle come from Hledání prítomného casu (In Search of Time Present, 1947), the last volume of poetry he published in Czechoslovakia. In 1948, Blatny left for England and instantly cut off his moorings by declaring himself an exile. For more than thirty years he vanished from Czech poetry, until rediscovered as an inmate of a mental institution in Ipswich, still writing. His two volumes of verse, Stará bydliste (Old Dwellings, 1979) and Obecná skola Bixley (Grade School Bixley, 1987), conferred a cultic status on the forgotten poet. The latter collection speaks in an alien, multilingual idiom of Blatny's invention expressing the terminal condition of his exile with the intelligence of a Surrealist voyant derailed from his life's history.

CLARE CAVANAGH (1956- ) is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages at Northwestern University. She has translated two volumes of Wislawa Szymborska's poetry with Stanislaw Baranczak. She has also translated adam Zagajewski's Mysticism for Beginners.

MATTHEW DAUBE (1971- ) born in Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts. Co-editor of Metamorphoses, currently an M.F.A. candidate in Playwriting at Smith College.

MINA DAUBE (1974- ) born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria, came to the States in 1992. Finished high school in Yucca Valley, California. Studied Comparative Literature (French and English) as an undergraduate at Smith College, graduating summa cum laude in 1997. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University, studying Slavic Literature.

BLAGA DIMITROVA (1922- ) has been in print ever since 1938. Arguably, she is the most significant living Bulgarian female poet. She has been extremely productive and versatile in the multiple mediums of poetry, prose, drama, and writing for the screen. She is often referred to as a poet-novelist -- a master of philosophical lyricism and lyrical prose. Throughout her life she has been active both culturally and politically. She occupied a paradoxical position during the socialist decades: some of her works belonged to the mainstreeam, while others were suppressed. She became especially involved in politics, on the side of the democratic forces, in the late 1980s. She was Vice-President of Bulgaria in 1992-3. Blaga Dimitrova has received many literary prizes, including the Lundquist Prize for her translations of Swedish poetry and the Herder Prize.

YANA DJIN (1967- ) Poet and essayist, lives in Washington, D.C. Djin came to the United States from Russia and writes poetry only in English. Her first book of poetry (Bits and Pieces of Conversation) was published in 1995. She has also been widely published in magazines and periodicals both in the U.S. and Russia. A collection of her poems (Inevitably) is being prepared for publication.

BORIS FILIPOFF (1905-1991) Russian emigré poet and literary critic. Filipoff published over thirty collections of poetry, short stories, and memoirs. He put together definitive editions of the works of Osip Mandelshtam, Anna Akhmatova, and many other Russian literary figures. Born in Stavropol, Filipoff arrived in the US in 1950, via Latvia and Germany. He was a friend to many younger emigré poets.

VLADIMIR GANDELSMAN (1948- ) Poet and translator. Born in Russia, currently lives in New York. The leading Russian publication Ogonyok named him the "King of the St. Petersburg school of poetry." Several books of his have been published in Russia, including: The Sound of the Earth, There Is a House on the Newa, By Evening Mail, The Length of the Day, and Oedipus. His poems in English translation are soon to be published in New York.

DEBORAH H. GARFINKLE a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas, Austin in Slavic Languages and Literatures. She holds a B.A. in Chinese from the University of Pennsylvania and a Master's degree in Creative Writing (poetry) from the University of New Hampshire. Currently, she is a Fulbright Fellow in Prague, working on her dissertation about Czech Surrealism.

FRANTISEK HALAS (1901-1949) A lyric poet rooted in the culture of the First Republic, he developed independently of Poetism and Surrealism, the two dominant avant-garde movements between the Wars. Kohout plasí smrt (The Cock Dispels Death, 1930) shows Halas at the peak of his melodic and metaphoric powers. Its lead poem, "Lítost," proposes Adam's expulsion as an etiological myth for that untranslatable Czech word, which Kundera glosses as a violent reflux of self-pity. "The Pied Piper" is from the cycle Ladení (Tuning, 1937-41) and is inscribed to the actress Marie Buresova. The other poems belong to A co? (And Now What?, 1949), a sequence of fourteen poems that shocked the public by their harshness. Here, Halas adopts lapidary ellipsis, rupturing syntax and displacing end rhymes. Despite his impeccable proletarian pedigree and loyalty during the years of struggle, the Party critics denounced Halas as out of step with the optimism of the victorious class.

VLADIMIR HOLAN (1905-1980) Jaroslav Seifert dubbed Holan the "black angel" of Czech poetry and considered him to be the best poet of the '40s and '50s. A poet-philosopher, Holan, like many Czech intellectuals, lived through the Nazi occupation as a vigil before the epiphany of a neew Communist inspried humanity. Zpev tríkrálovy (Song of the Magi, composed between December 1938 and January 1939), dedicated to the dead in Ethiopia, Spain and China, expresses that great hope. But in "Departure" (from Záhrmotí, Calm After the Storm, 1940), he marks the futile mobilization of October 1938 with the sign of lítost. "Slippery Ice" belongs to the same cycle. "Snow" and "Resurrection," from Bolest (Pain, 1965), reflect on the poet's withdrawal from history as he converses with an absentee God from his ground floor lair on the Kampa island in Prague.

MELINDA KENNEDY (1924-2002) was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, and spent much of her youth in Italy. Editor, translator, writer, she retired from teaching in 1989 and thereafter became co-editor of Metamorphoses. From the moment it was founded until her death, her tireless dedication, her broad culture, finely-tuned ear and keen editorial eye shaped the journal. Her poems have appeared in such journals as The Southern Review and The Massachusetts Review.

JIRÍ KOLÁR (born in 1914) A poet and graphic artist, he was a founder of Skupina 42 (Group 42), the most important artistic movement during the Protectorate after Nezval disbanded the Surrealists on the eve of the war. In response to Nazi occupation, it proposes to confront everday life and record its grotesque interpenetration of the banal and the monotonous. "Night," (from Ódy a variace, Odess and Variations, 1941-1944), with the catastrophic train ride, shows the power of the surrealistic vision, even in the newsreel. The diary format of the next two poems (Dny vroce, Days in a Year, 1946-1947), hones more closely to the esthetics of Group 42. Kolár's quest for a synthesis between lucid observation of appearances and his sense of their concealed oneiric possibilities found its ultimate expression in his collages. The most famous of these is the cycle Tydeník 1968 (Newsreel 1968), which remains the defining graphic image of the Prague Spring and its calamitous slide into the Fall. From 1980 Kolár has lived in Paris.

NINA KOROTKOVA is pursuing a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

NINA KOSSMAN the author of three books of poetry and prose in Russian and English. Her fiction won the 1995 UNESCO/PEN Short Story Award in London and was broadcast on the BBC World Service. The recipient of an NEA fellowship, she has translated two books of Marina Tsvetaeva's poetry, In the Inmost Hour of the Soul and Poem of the End. Her translations have appeared in several anthologies, including Norton's World Poetry, and her own work has been translated into Dutch, Greek and Japanese. Her poetry anthology is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2000. Two of her one-act plays have been produced in New York.

VICTOR KRIVULIN (1944- ) Born in Krasnodon, Ukraine. Studied at Leningrad University from 1961 to 1967, starting with Italian and English before specializing in Literature of Russian Modernism. Co-editor of journal 37 from December 1975-1981. Has published articles, stories, and poems in various Russian emigrant journals. Has published cultural and literary articles in the leading journals and magazines of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Author of 14 books of poems and essays, printed in Paris, St. Petersburg, London, Helsinki, Belgrade, and Frankfurt. His poems and articles have been translated into English, French, Danish, German, Swedish, Finnish, Italian, Spanish, Serbo-Croatian, Japanese, and other languages. Winner, Andrei Bély Prize (1978), Vers libre Festival in Kaluga's Prize (1989), Pushkin Prize (Hamburg, Topfer Foundation, 1990).

RYSZARD KRYNICKI (1943- ) is a poet, publisher and translator. Like Baranczak, he was a leading member of the "Generation of '68," and was blacklisted for his political activities in the 1970s. He has translated the poetry of Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs.

ALEKSANDR KUSHNER Called "one of the best Russian lyric poets of the twentieth century" by Joseph Brodsky, who continues: "Kushner's poetics is...a combination of the Harmonious School and Acmeism...[his] poems are remarkable for their tonal reserve, their absence of hysteria, their sharp horizons, and their nervous gestures; he is rather dry where somebody else would boil, ironic where another would despair. Kushner's poetics, to put it differently, is the poetics of stoicism...a consequence of extremely intense spiritual tension." His main books of poetry are: Nochnoj dozor (Nightwatch, 1966), Prjamaja rech (Direct Speech, 1975), Tavricheskij sad (Tavricheski Garden, 1984), Na sumrachnoj zvezde (On a Grim Star, 1994), Izbrannoe (Collected Poems, 1997).

EWA LIPSKA (1945- ) began her poetic career at the same time as the "Generation of '68." She was the director of the Austrian Polish Institute until recently, and divides her time between Krakow and Vienna. The poems translated here are from her most recent collection, 1999.

BRONISLAW MAJ (1953- ) is a poet, journalist, and actor. He teaches Polish literature at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, and edits the journal Na Glos. He is one of the finest Polish poets to emerge in the 1980's. The poems translated here are from his collection Swiatlo (A Light, 1994).

OSIP MANDELSHTAM (1891-1938) One of the major Russian poets of the 20th century. Mandelshtam's first collection (Stone) was published in 1913. Like Akhmatova, he was a member of the Acmeist movement. Mandelshtam's prose works include "The Noise of Time" and "The Egyptian Stamp." He was arrested during the Stalinist terror and died in a Soviet labor camp in 1938. His work, translated into many languages, had extraordinary impact on several generations of Russian readers.

KRYSTYNA MILOBEDZKA (1932- ) made her poetic debut in 1960 with her collection Anaglify (Anaglyphs), from which these poems are taken. In addition to her distinctive and original poetic work, she has also written plays and theaer criticism.

YUNNA MORITS (born in Kiev, 1937) one of Russian's leading contemporary poets. Although she achieved prominence during the Thaw, in the Soviet era her poems were published much more rarely than her readers wished. A book of her selected poems, V Logove Golose, was published in Moscow in 1990 to great acclaim. She lives in Moscow.

ANDY NEWCOMB often co-translates Russian poetry with Nina Kossman. He collaborated with Kossman on some of the Tsvetaeva translation in Poem of the End.

JAN ONDRUS (1932- ) is the author of six collections of poetry. He has been hailed by a prominent critic, Milan Hamada, as an "absolute poet," one whose concern with the fundamental problems of modern man make him a bearer of a universal message accessible world-wide.

DIMITRI ORAM has studied Russian in Scotland, the United States, and at the University of Yaroslavl in Russia. He is currently a student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

THALIA PANDIRI teaches Comparative Literature and Classics at Smith College.

PETER PETRO (1946- ) teaches Slavic Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, B.C. He is the author of Modern Satire: Four Studies (1982) and A History of Slovak Literature (1995), and has translated M. Simecka's The Year of the Frog (1993) and edited the Critical Essays on Milan Kundera (1999). He writes poetry irregularly and reluctantly.

VALERI PETROV (1920- ) Born in Sofia. A Bulgarian of Jewish background, his real name is Valeri Nisim Mevorakh. He graduated from the Italian school in Sofia (1939), and then from the University of Sofia with a degree in medicine (1944). Participated in the last phase of WWII as a military correspondent. One of the founders and later editor of the most famous and prestigious satiric newspaper, Sturshel (The Gadfly), 1945-62. Press attache in Rome, 1947-50. Author of numerous collections of poems, plays, screenplays, fairy tales, essays, etc. His translations of Shakespeare's plays into Bulgarian are authoritative.

BOHUSLAV REYNEK (1892-1971) An underestimated poet of great authenticity, Reynek exemplifies the undercurrent of mystical Catholicism in Czech culture. His roots are in Skupina Floriána (Florian's Group), dominated by the Catholic rebel Jakub Deml (19878-1961), whose visionary prose won the admiration of Roman Jakobson. Unlike Deml, Reynek was not an anarchist; his faith leaned to the anguished Catholicism of the French masters he admired: Bloy, Claudel and Bernanos. As a nature poet, Reynek adds a mystical dimension to the Czech landscape, as shown by "frost" (from Mráz v okne, Frost in the Window, 1950-55). All three poems translated by Alfred Thomas are from the postwar decade.

MILAN RICHTER (1948- ) a specialist in German and English, and a Slovak diplomat in Norway, made his name as a translator (Dickinson, Hemingway, Lundkvist, Neruda, Cardenal, Transtromer), and an author of some half a dozen collections of poetry. Translations of his poetry have appeared in Austria and Norway.

MILAN RUFUS (1928- ) lectured on literature at the Comenius University in Bratislava. He is considered Slovakia's leading poet, with some two dozen collections of poetry and essays. A relgious poet, Rufus believes that no matter how tragic the position of man, his faith gives him hope to love and improve his world. Widely translated into some thirty languages, Rufus's collections sometimes sell over a hundred thousand copies in Slovakia, a nation with a population of less than six million.

DIANA SENECHAL began translating Tomas Venclova's poetry in 1989. She is currently completing her dissertation at Yale University on Nikolai Gogol, and lives in San Francisco, where she works in legal CD-ROM publishing and engages in writing, music, and computer programming.

JAN SKÁCEL (1922-1989) In his landscapes, Skácel is no less mystical than his fellow Moravian Reynek, even if he apprehends the natural world with a pagan sense of its awesome strangeness. Despite the years spent as editor of the literary journal Host do Domu, in Brno, Skácel was a loner, impervious to the dictates of artistic trends. Surrounded by silence, his poems burrow under history to reach arcane territories inhabited by myth. His strategy of radical subtraction aims at creating a form of absolute transparency to let through being with the immediacy of a physical sighting. In the last year of his life, Skácel received the Petrarca Prize for Poetry and the Prize for Central European Literature. He died ten days before the Velvet Revolution. We are indebted to Promeny (27/1/1990) for the Czech text of the Lethean quatrain, the poet's epitaph, and for the Teiresias poem. The other poems come from Noc s Vestonickou Venusi (A Night With the Venus of Vestonice, 1990).

MILADA SOUCKOVÁ (born Prague, 1899, died Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1983) Novelist, short story writer, poet and literary scholar, Soucková was the most complete and cosmopolitan Czech woman of letters in her time. Her literary career runs the span of years represented by the nine poets in her section. In 1934, her novella, První Písmena (First Letters), immediately admitted her into the Prague Linguistic Circle. Her experiments with the novelistic form anticipate the postmodernist assault on the narrative line. The poems presented here come from her last volume of verse, Sesity Josefiny Rykrové (The Notebooks of Josephine Rykrová, 1981). In a prose coda to another poem in the collection she writes (in English, next to her Czech poem): "Since I was a teenager I wanted to be a writer. I preferred prose and I never though I could write poetry. I preferred prose because it spoke of people other than myself." Yet she did write poetry, publishing five volumes during her years in Cambridge. The Notebooks, the most original of them, cast autobiography into a form that mixes poetry with prose comment, in a mutual exchange of attributes. The speaker, moving in and out of her chosen persona, notes the patina on lived-in things and places, searching for the elusive present through layers of memory.

KRISTIÁN SUDA (born 1946) He lives in Prague, where he teaches literature at the Film Institute (FAMU). Apart from poetry, Suda has published essays, short stories and a novella (Roch, 1994). He is currently engaged on a critical edition in twelve volumes of the Collected Works of Milada Soucková. The two poems from his latest volume Závorky (Parentheses, 1998) display a rich subjectivity reined in by verbal discipline wielding the delicate scalpel of irony.

MARINA TEMKINA (1948- ) Born in Leningrad, emigrated in 1978, currently lives in New York. Main books of poetry include A Part of a Part (1985), Backwards (1989), Watchtower (1995).

ALFRED THOMAS John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He teaches Czech literature and culture and is the author of The Czech Chivalric Romances: Vévoda Arnost and Lavryn in Their Context; The Labyrinth of the World: Truth and Representation in Czech Literature and of Anne's Bohemia (Czech Literature and Society, 1310-1420). His translation of the medieval Czech masterpiece, Life of St. Catherine, will appear in print this fall.

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, his last book is Gogol's Art: A Search for Identity (Bati Publishers, 1997). His translations of Arndt Mehring's Friedrich Kuhlau: In the Mirror of his Fluteworks will be published by Harmonie Park Press in December 1999.

MARINA I. TSVETAEVA (1892-1941) Foremost female Russian poet of the 20th century. Her staccato style and innovations pushed language to its logical limits. Her many references to Russian, German, French, Classical Literature, and History made her less widely known than her contemporary Anna Akhmatova. She lived most of her adult life as an émigré with an undisguised aniosity towards her former home, the Soviet Union. This kept her out of reach for most Russian readers. She returned to the Soviet Union in 1939, following her husband, Sergei Efron. In 1941 she was evacuated from Moscow to a Tartar village (Yeelabuga). Penniless and in total isolation, she hanged herself. Since the fall of Communism, her work has returned to Russia.

TOMAS VENCLOVA (1937- ) Born in Klaipeda, Lithuania. Studied Philology at the University of Vilnius, then Semiotics and Russian Literature with Yury Lotman at Tartu University. A prominent dissident poet and intellectual, he was forced to leave his country and come to the West in 1977. He received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1985 and has taught at many distinguished universities, including the University of Vilnius, UC Berkeley, Ohio University, UCLA, Harvard University, and, for the past 19 years, Yale. He has written dozens of articles, three scholarly books, and contributes to the New York Review of Books and The New Republic. Venclova's several books of poetry have been published in his native Lithuanian and also translated into several other languages, including English, Polish, Hungarian, and Slovenian. Stanislaw Baranczak calls him "not only the best living poet of the Lithuanian language, but also the best poet that Lithuania has ever had." He received international literary prize Vilenica in 1990 and an honorary Ph.D. from the University of Lublin in 1991. His most recent book of poetry, Winter Dialogue, was published in English in 1997 and includes a forward by the late Joseph Brodsky and an epistolary dialogue between Venclova and Czeslaw Milosz about their shared connection with Vilnius.

BRONISLAVA VOLKOVÁ (born 1946, Decín, Czechoslovakia) Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Indiana, Bloomington, she directs the Czech Studies Program. Between 1984 and 1993, she published four volumes of poetry in PmD Publications, Munich, revealing a voice that modulates the emotional inflections of Czech speech with delicacy and deftness. The poet Miroslav Holub has likened her to free verse to "the threads of a spider web stretched in an open space." A selection of her poems in her own translation appeared in 1993. (The Courage of the Rainbow, The Sheep Meadow Press, New York). The poem included here is from the forthcoming bilingual volume Vstup do svetla/Entering Light.

RICHARD WILBUR (born in New York City, 1921) former Poet Laureate of the United States, his books of poetry include New and Collected Poems (1988), which won the Pulitzer Prize, and Things of This World (1956), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. His honors also include the Bollingen Prize, two PEN Translation Awards, and the Prix de Rome Fellowship. He lives in Cummington, Massachusetts.

ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI (1945- ) is a poet and essayist. With Baranczak and Krynicki, he is one of the best-known members of the "Generation of '68." He divides his time between Paris, Krakow and Houston, where he teaches creative writing. This poem is taken from his early collection Sklepy miesne (Butcher Shops, 1975).

RUMANIA ZAKHARIEVA has lived in Germany since 1970 and has studied Slavic and English philology at the University of Bonn in Germany. She writes poetry in both Bulgarian and German and has published a large number of books, both poetry and prose. She has also done journalistic work for varioius German and Austrian radio stations. Zakharieva is an example of an artist who lives abroad and yet remains actively involved in Bulgarian literature and culture.