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Biographies of Contributors

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NATHAN RABALAIS is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the College of William and Mary. He obtained his PhD in French Studies from Tulane University and also holds a doctorate in Languages and Literatures from the Universite de Poitiers. His research focuses primarily on literatures, cultures, and language varieties of Francophone North America (particularly Louisiana and Acadia), folklore, orality, dialect pedagogy, and community theatre.

GIOVANNI RABONI was born in Milan, Italy, in 1932. He has worked as an editor for Mondadori book publishers as well as a literary critic for Europeo magazine and drama critic for Corriere della Sera. He is the author of eleven volumes of poetry, which were collected in 1997 as Tutte le Poesie (Garzanti Publishers). The translations published in this issue are from Ogni Terzo Pensiero, which won the Viareggio-Repaci prize for poetry in 1994. He has translated French authors Baudelaire, Apollinaire, and Racine into Italian. During the 1990s, he published Alla Ricerca del Tempo Perduto, a complete translation into Italian of Proust’s A la Récherche du Temps Perdu. Raboni lives and works in Milan.

G.J. RACZ is Associate Professor of Foreign Languages and Literature at Long Island University– Brooklyn, review editor for Translation Review, and president of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). Three volumes of his translations of Eduardo Chirinos appeared in 2011: Reasons for Writing Poetry (Salt Publishing), Written in Missoula (University of Montana Press), and The Smoke of Distant Fires (Open Letter Books).

MIKLÓS RADNÓTI a Hungarian poet, was a victim of the Holocaust, killed during a forced march in 1944. His final poems were found in his vest-pocket when his body was exhumed from a mass grave. “Forced March” was among these, and “Postcards” was the last poem he wrote.

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).

TEGAN RALEIGH studied French at Reed College, and is pursuing an MFA in literary translation at the University of Iowa, where she also teaches rhetoric.

V. RAMASWAMY is a Calcutta-based business executive, grassroots organizer, social planner, teacher, writer and translator. He is currently translating the anti-stories of Bengali writer Subimal Misra.

PETER RAMEY (PhD, University of Missouri, Columbia) is Assistant Professor of English at Northern State University, where he teaches courses on medieval literature and linguistics. His research interests include medieval aesthetics, Old English riddles, and translation theory. He has published several articles on early English poetry, including “The Riddle of Beauty: The Aesthetics of Wratlic in Old English Verse,” in Modern Philology and “Writing Speaks: Oral Poetics and Writing Technology in the Exeter Book Riddles” in Philological Quarterly. Currently he is working on a book that focuses on aesthetics and materiality in Old English literature, as well as a translation project entitled The Wordhoard Beowulf.

MILA RAMOS studied History at the University of Córdoba, specializing in cooperation and development management. She was a freelance war correspondent in the former Yugoslavia. Her work for an NGO providing assistance to women in international conflict areas has led her to Bosnia, Kosovo, Morocco, Palestine, Colombia, and Mali. She has published three books of poetry, Tautologia (Tautology, 1995), 8.000 razones para la memoria (8,000 reasons for remembering, 2004), and La frontiera número 11 (Frontier number 11, 2008) as well as a wide range of articles on women and war. She was awarded a regional prize in Andalusia for her literary and activist work.

GERMAN E. VARGAS RAMOS is a doctoral student in the Math, Science, & Learning Technologies Program in the School of Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he also completed a Master’s degree in Learning Media and Technologies. His work translating in English and Spanish started while completing a BA in English Literature from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. He has since completed a large number of professional translations, including subtitling and dubbing projects

CHARLES FERDINAND RAMUZ (1878-1947) is undoubtedly Switzerland’s most famous francophone writer and yet only a select few of his writings have made their way into English. He is the author of 22 novels and several short story collections. In 2005, his novels were honored with the publication of a leather-bound Pléiade Edition in France and currently, Editions Slatkine in Geneva is collaborating with a team of distinguished scholars to produce a 30-volume, heavily annotated and referenced collection of The Complete Works of C.F. Ramuz.

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.

IRINA RATMIROVA has published three collections of poetry, of which the most recent appeared in 1995 in Moscow. Her earlier collections are entitled Religion of the Heart and The Winged Hour.

JENNIFER RATHBUN is a Lecturer in Spanish at Mount Holyoke College. She specializes in US-Mexico Border literature, poetry translation, and contemporary Argentinean theatre. She received her PhD from the University of Arizona.

MATT REECK has published Bombay Stories (RH India 2012, Vintage 2014) and Mirages of the Mind (RH India 2014, New Directions 2015), the first from the Urdu of Saadat Hasan Manto, and the second from the Urdu of Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi. He has won NEA and PEN-Heim Translation Grants, as well as a Fulbright Fellowship to India.

JOSE RÉGIO (1901-1969) published equally in poetry, fiction, drama, the essay, and criticism. One of the founders of the famous literary magazine Presença in 1927, he was influenced by Dostoevsky and preoccupied with the problem of a self torn between good and evil. His work is religiously grounded and confessional in nature.

MARIO REGUEIRA (Ferrol, 1979) has a BA in Galician Philology and is working on a PhD in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature. He has written several novels and collections of poetry and works as a literary critic. His poems in Silencio (2012) cry out against war and violence.

COOPER RENNER is the translator of Mario Bellatin’s Chinese Checkers: Three Fictions (Ravenna, 2006) and the author of the upcoming Disbelief, a novella about Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Ravenna, 2012), as well as the novels Dr Jesus and Mr Dead, A Death by the Sea and A Spurious Death in a Foreign Country, all available as ebooks.

PRIMOZ REPAR‘s poetry collections include There is a Tiny Web Beyond the Word (1994), Book of Prayers (1995) and The Alchemy of a Heartbeat (1998). His book Essays about the Apocalypse was published in 2000. He is the chief editor of the cultural journal Apokalipsa and lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

BEATRIZ RESENDE is a Professor of Critical Theory in the Department of Literature at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, and a researcher for the Advanced Program of Contemporary Culture, where she directs the post-doctorate program. She was also a professor at the Department of Playwright Theory and the graduate program of scenic arts at the Theater School of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro from 2007 to 2011. She coordinated and directed the Forum of Science and Culture at the Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro. Among many publications, she authoredContemporaneos, Expressoes da literatura brasileira no seculo XXI (RJ, Casa da Palavra/Biblioteca Nacional, 2008) and Apontamentos de critica cultural (RJ, Aeroplano, 2000). She organized the anthology Cocaina, literatura e outros companheiros de viagem (RJ, Casa da Palavra, 2006; Rio Literario).

CLAY RESNICK lives in Boston.

KATHLEEN RETTIG is Assistant Professor at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska and has worked as Chief Editor of the Nebraska English Journal, The Midlands Conference Journal, and the Patrick Kavanagh Journal. She has published on Shakespeare and contemporary women authors. She is the interim director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Co-major at Creighton University.

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.

RAINER MARIA RILKE, often considered the best-loved and most widely read German poet after Goethe, was born in Prague in 1875 and died in Valmont, French-speaking Switzerland, in 1926. He lived in Paris for years, until the outbreak of World War I forced him to return to Germany. It was after the war that he came to live in Valmont. He considered himself European rather than German or Austrian, even though it was the German language he raised to new heights in his art, and felt that he could write best when in a non-German-speaking area.

LUIS PULIDO RITTER, a native of Panama City, Panama, has lived in France, Spain, England and currently lives in Berlin, Germany, where he received a PhD at the Free University in Berlin with Los dioses de Caribe abandonan el museo (1999). He has published three novels as well as a volume of poems, Matamoscas (1999). In 2008 he won the Premio Nacional de Literatura Ricardo Miró with Filosofía de la nación romantica. He has published numerous academic essays, articles and short stories and recently “Girl in the Dark” appeared in the Caribbean anthology Erotic. He currently teaches Latin American Literature and Culture at Viadrina University, in Frankfurt/Oder, and was academic attaché from the Panamanian Embassy in Germany.

MANUEL RIVAS (A Coruña, 1957) is a journalist, poet and novelist. He writes articles for many newspapers, among them El País. His novels, written in Galician and translated into many languages, have won the most prestigious prizes for literary creation in Spain (Premio de la Crítica 1994, Premio Torrente Ballester and Premio Nacional de Literatura 1996). He lives on the Costa da Morte, the Finis Terrae of the Galician Atlantic coast.

GIORGIO ROBERTI is a poet, essayist, translator, editor, founder, and president for thirty years of the Centro Romanesco Trilussa. He energetically promoted Romanesco language, culture and poetry. Among many awards, his ‘na zeppa a l’occhio‘ (A Stick in the Eye) won the Premio Internazionale per la Satira, and his Antiche farmacie romane won the Premio Internazionale di saggistica. His 1974 translation into Romanesco of Er Vangelo secondo S. Marco (The Gospel According to Mark) has been much praised and often reprinted. After his death in November, 2002, a speecial issue of the magazine Romanità was dedicated to him.

TOM ROBERTS is Assistant Professor of Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies at Smith College, where he teaches courses on Russian literature, film, and culture, as well as curriculum in Comparative Literature and Film Studies. Tom has published articles on Russian literature, Soviet cinema, and post-Soviet Russian culture, and he is currently completing his first book, which explores discourses on materialism and transcendence in nineteenth-century Russian fiction and culture of the Realist epoch.

ADELA ROBLES-SÁEZ, born in Alcoi, is a native speaker of Catalan. She studied “filologia anglesa i italiana” at the University of Valencia, and in 1995 obtained her MA in Comparative Literature at West Virginia University. She is currently working towards her PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of California at Berkeley, where she is researching the application of cognitive linguistics to literature. She is especially interested in translation, and has published translations of several twentieth century Catalan writers in Iowa Review, vol. 23, no. 2 (1993), 3-19.

MARIA ELSA da ROCHA (1924-2005) was one of the last Portuguese-language Goan writers. A primary school teacher by profession, her short stories appeared in the local press—particularly the newspaper A Vida—in the years following the integration of Goa into India, and were often broadcast on the last radio program in Portuguese, All-India Radio’s somewhat ironically entitled “Renascença.” In 2006, from the some 25 short stories she produced, a selection were published in Goa in under the title Vivências Partilhadas (Shared Lives).

LOUIS J. RODRIGUES was educated at the Universities of Madras, London (King’s), Cambridge (Trinity Hall), and Barcelona; he holds a doctorate in Anglo-Saxon. He has published two books of verse and a series of parallel-text verse translations from Anglo-Saxon. Jointly with his wife Josefina Bernet, he has published Short Story Translation – from theory to practice besides four bilingual Spanish-English titles. He was one of the chief collaborators in the Third Version of the Collins Spanish Dictionary. He contributed translations of eight of J.V. Foix’s sonnets and the article by Joaquim Molas, “J.V. Foix or Total Investigation,” in Catalan Review, vol. I, no. 1 (1986). In 1993 his manuscript A Choice of Salvador Espriu’s Verse, was awarded the Translation Prize for Poetry in the Primers Jocs Florals de la Diàspora Catalana (Center for Catalan Studies and Fundacio Pauli Bellet). His translation of Salvador Espriu: Selected Poems is scheduled for publication by Carcanet (Manchester, England).

CLAUDIO RODRIGUEZ (1934-1999, Spain) Frequent winner of literary prizes, university professor translator of T.S. Eliot, and member of the Royal Spanish Academy, Claudio Rodriguez evolved as a poet into the tradition of the Spanish mystic, of ecstatic poets such as San Juan de la Cruz. The last of his five books, Casí una leyenda (Tusquets, Barcelona, 1991), is one of the publisher’s series, “Nuevos Textos Sagrados.” The poet’s wonder and perplexity in face of the relentless process of change fuel his journey into the physicality of moment and matter. His long lines and transparent language suit his meditations upon death, nature, and the possibility of transcendency.

MARIA JOSE MARTINEZ RODRIGUEZ is Professor of Translation Studies, and supervised the translation of Tinta Negra into Modern Greek by a select group of her students in the Curso de Literatura Española e Hispanoamericana del Instituto Cervantes in Athens, Greece.

REINA ROFFÉ was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1951. In 1973 she published her first novel, Llamando al Puf (Call to Order), for which she won the Pondal Ríos prize for the best novel by a young author. Her next book, Monte de Venus (Venus’ Mound) (1976), was published in the same year as the most recent military dictatorship took over in Argentina. As the military junta launched what they called “The Process of National Reorganization” (El Proceso), Monte de Venus was immediately banned for ‘immoral content’, as the novel depicts lesbian sexuality and offers a harsh critique of Argentina’s educational system. Roffé then ceased to write fiction for over ten years. During the military dictatorship, Roffé entered into a long period of exile, beginning in 1981 when she received a Fulbright scholarship and traveled to the United States. As a participant in the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa, she lectured and spoke on panels about Latin American authors and literature. Roffé also worked as an editor for Ediciones del Norte in New Hampshire, and also compiled Espejo de escritores (The Writer’s Mirror), a collection of interviews with Latin American authors. Roffé lives in Spain, where she has published the novel El cielo dividido (The Divided Sky) (1996), along with a compilation of her own interviews with writers, Conversaciones americanas (American Conversations) (2001), and the biography Juan Rulfo: Las mañas de Zorro (Juan Rulfo: The Tricks of Zorro) (2001). She published Aves exóticas: cinco cuentos con mujeres raras/Rare Birds: Five Stories with Unusual Women in 2004.

JEANNETTE S. ROGERS is a writer, translator, and editor from Raleigh, North Carolina. She is currently translating Miquèl Decòr’s most recent book, Eiretièrs de la luna (Heirs of the Moon), a series of 101 poems written since the turn of the millennium. In addition, Rogers translates troubadour lyrics written in ancient Occitan, which is how she met Miquèl Decòr. She is also a nontraditional student of English, French, and Medieval Studies at Meredith College in Raleigh, NC.

ZACK ROGOW received the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Award for his co-translation of Earthlight by André Breton, and a Bay Area Book Reviewers Award (BABRA) for his translation of George Sand’s novel Horace. His English version of Colette’s novel Green Wheat was nominated for the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Award and for the Northern California Book Award in translation. He teaches in the MFA in writing programs at University of Alaska and the California College of the Arts.

MONSERRAT ROIG was born in Barcelona in 1946. She studied Theater and then Spanish philology at the University of Barcelona, where she later became a professor of Catalán. A journalist as well as an academic, she has written for El País, La Calle, and other major newspapers and also conducted interviews on her own television show. She won various awards for both fiction and non-fiction: her first novel Molta roba i poc sabó… i tan neta que la volen (1971) won the Premio Victor Catalá, and her extensive research on Catalans in concentration camps earned her the Premio de la Crítica Serra d’Or. Roig died in Barcelona in 1991.

JUAN ARMANDO ROJAS, Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at Amherst College, has published Lluvia de lunas (Mexico City, 1999) and Río vertebral (Chihuahua, 2002). His work has also been included in several anthologies. Rojas received a BA and MA in Spanish from the University of Texas at El Paso, and a PhD from the University of Arizona.

THOMAS H. ROHLICH is Professor of Japanese Language and Literature at Smith College, where he has recently developed a seminar on Kyoto for first-year students. His most recent publication is an essay called “Kyoto Then and Now” in the catalogue of the Smith College Museum of Art’s special exhibition entitled “Confronting Tradition: Contemporary Art from Kyoto.”

BARBARA ROMAINE has been teaching and translating Arabic for about twenty years. Her translation of Radwa Ashour’s semi-autobiographical novel Specters placed second in the 2011 competition for the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. She currently teaches at Villanova University, outside Philadelphia.

ANA ROMANÍ (Noia, 1962) works for the Radio Galega and has taken part in a number of projects involving music and poetry.

CLARA EUGENIA RONDEROS is a Colombian poet whose short stories and poems have been published in literary and academic journals. She is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Foreign Language Coordinator at Lesley University in Cambridge Massachusetts, specializing in Hispanic poetry.

PIERRE DE RONSARD (1524-1585) was courtier-poet who began his career as a page and then a squire at the French court, but became leader of the Pléiade at the Collège de Coqueret. As poet royal, he wrote odes in the Pindaric and Horatian tradition, Petrarchan sonnets, elegies, eclogues, songs, love lyrics, patriotic poems, and even attempted an epic (La Franciade) which remained unfinished. The most famous of his love poems appear in Sonnets pour Hélène (1578).

CLAUDIA ROQUETTE-PINTO is a native of Rio de Janeiro and the author of five books of poetry, Os Dias Gagos (1991), Saxífraga (Editora Salamandra 1993), Zona de Sombra (7Letras 1997), Corola (Ateliê Editorial 2001) and Margem de Manobra (Editora Aeroplano 2005). In 2002, she won Brazil’s Jabuti Prize for Corola. Selections from her work have appeared in English translation in Shadow Zone (Seeing Eye Books 1999) and The PIP Anthology of World Poetry of the 20th Century (Sun & Moon Press/Green Integer 1997/2003). From 1986-1991, Roquette-Pinto managed the cultural journal Verve. With Régis Bonvicino, she co-translated Douglas Messerli’s Primeiras Palavras (Ateliê Editorial 1999) into Portuguese.

PETER ROSEI (1946 – ) is an Austrian writer who completed a law degree and worked at two other jobs before turning to literature full-time in 1972. He has won numerous literary prizes for his long row of titles including poetry, plays, short stories and novels, essays and travelogues, as well as children’s books. Rosei has traveled widely and has taught at several universities in the U.S. He now lives and works in Vienna.

AARON ROSENBERG is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University. His research is on African dance and music.

SAMUEL N. ROSENBERG, Professor Emeritus of French and Italian at Indiana University, is a medievalist chiefly interested in textual edition and translation of lyric poetry. His collaborative edition of Robert de Reims is due out in 2019. His English verse rendering of a 13th-century romance, Robert the Devil, appeared in 2018 (Penn State UP), and the 13th-c. Tales of a Minstrel of Reims is on its way. Recently branching into 19th-c. French, he published, with Katherine Kolb, writings by Hector Berlioz: Berlioz on Music (Oxford UP, 2015) and, edited by Nicolas Valazza, his Verlaine: A Bilingual Selection of His Verse is due to appear this year (Penn State UP.). The present group of four poems by Baudelaire, which happily joins several earlier contributions to Metamorphoses, marks the beginning of a new book project.

M.L. ROSENTHAL (1917-96), was among this country’s leading men of letters. He taught at New York University from 1945 on, and was a visiting scholar and lecturer throughout the world. He was author of a number of widely acclaimed books of criticism, most recently The Poet’s Art, Our Life in Poetry: Selected Essays, and Running to Paradise: Yeats’ Poetic Art. His many volumes of poetry include Blue Boy on Skates: Poems, Beyond Power: New Poems, The View from the Peacock’s Tail, She: A Sequence of Poems, and Poems, 1964-80. For a recent appreciation, see Barry Wallenstein, “Free of Cant: M. L. Rosenthal, 1917-1996,” in American Poet, winter 1996-97, 6-11.

DANIELA ROSSELL was born in Mexico in 1973. Since 1993, her photographs have been shown in group and solo exhibitions all over the world. Her most famous collection of photographs to date is Ricas y famosas, shot between 1998 and 2002.

BARTOLOMEU ROSSELLÓ-PÒRCEL Born Mallorca 1913, studied in Barcelona and published two brief collections of poetry before dying of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four.

DONA ROSU, a Romanian-born poet, essayist, journalist, and translator, lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her work has appeared internationally in such journals as The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Salmagundi, Transilvania, Romania Literara, San Miguel Writer, and The Oxford Poetry Review. Her some ten books of poetry, translations, and non-fiction include Manastirea Gura Motrolui (Meridiane, 1969), an art history monograph written in collaboration with her late husband, Lucian Rosu, with photographs by Andrei Panoiu; Cineva ne priveste (Albatros, 1982), interviews with Romanian biologists, illustrated by Luciana Costea; and Clipe de viata pe alt continent (Albatros, 1985), profiles of American scientists and cultural figures. She is a member of the Writers Union of Romania and the Academy of American Poets.

CLAUDIA ROUTON received an MA in English and a PhD in Modern Languages and Literatures from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of North Dakota. She works with the contemporary literature of Spain and most recently is promoting young Spanish writers though translation.

IXIAR ROZAS began his writing life studying journalism in Iruea (Pamplona). After moving to Barcelona, he wrote his first novel, Edo zu edo ni (Either You or I; 2000), and later the poetry collection Patio bat bi itsasoen artean (A Courtyard Between the Two Seas; 2001, Ernestina Champourcin Prize). After returning to the Basque country, he wrote several young adult books, scripts for television and radio, and a book of short stories.

NANCY ROZENCHAN has a doctorate in the Study of Hebrew from the Universidade de Sao Paulo, a master’s degree in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the Universidade de Sao Paulo, and two post-doctorates, one from the Universidade de Sao Paulo, and one from The University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on Hebrew literature, Israeli literature, literature written by women, and Hendel Yehudit.

LUIZ RUFFATO was born in Cataguases, Minas Gerais, in 1961. His first book, Historias de remorsos e rancores, came out in 1998. Eles eram muitos cavalos, his third book, was published in 2001 and won the APCA Prize, the Premio Machado de Assis in narrative from the Fundacao Biblioteca Nacional, and was nominated for the Jabuti Prize. The novel was adapted for the stage in 2003 and was translated in Italy (Milano, Bevivino Editore, 2003), France (Paris, Metailie, 2005), Portugal (Espinho, Quadrante, 2006), and Argentina (Buenos Aires, Eterna Cadencia, 2010). In 2005, he began his Inferno provisorio project, which consists of five volumes: Mamma, son tanto Felice and O mundo inimigo, both won the Premio APCA and were published in France (Paris, Metailie, 2007 and 2010, respectively). The other volumes are Vista parcial da noite (2006, Jabuti Prize), O livro das impossibilidades (2008, finalist for the Premio Zaffari-Bourbon) and Domingos sem Deus (2011). He has also published De mim ja nem se lembra in 2007 and Estive em Lisboa e lembrei de vocein 2009. The latter was a finalist for the Portugal Telecom Prize and the Premio Sao Paulo de Literatura; it has also been published in Portugal (Lisbon, Quetzal, 2010) and Italy (Rome, La Nuova Fronteira, 2010).

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 religious 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.

DORIS RUNEY is a bilingual (Romanian and English) writer and poet with a background in the fine and performing arts, pursuing graduate work in Translation Studies at Wayne State University while also working as a freelance writer and creative artist, and teaching. Her dissertation is a praxis in translation and adaptation of Ionel Teodoreanu’s novel, Lorelei, which she also hopes to produce as an independent film.

RUTEBEUF was born in Champagne some time before 1249, lived in Paris, and died some time after 1277. He wrote fifty-six works which survive in fourteen manuscripts. The works are lyric, dramatic, polemical, and religious, many of them complaintes. Scholars have characterized Rutebeuf as the first “personal” poet of the French language. His style is remarkable for its intricate word play, and his voice, marked by a strong persona, prefigures that of Villon.

JOHN RUTHERFORD (StAlbans, 1941) is Professor of Spanish and Fellow of The Queen’s College, Oxford, UK. He is Director of the Centre for Galician Studies. His research interests are literary translation, literary humor and all aspects of Galician studies. His translations of Don Quixote and the novel La Regents have appeared in new editions in Penguin Classics in 2003 and 2005, respectively. He has translated Galician poetry from the Cantigas to contemporary poetry.

VIKTOR RYDBERG (1826-1895) poet, novelist of ideas, biblical historian, political and drama critic, journalist, lecturer was the central literary figure of his age. His story is a rather sad one; he was orphaned very young; he was a homosexual in a time when homosexual activity was considered criminal; he longed all his life to be a child again in his mother’s embrace. These feelings affected all his work profoundly; The Wood Siren, for example, dramatizes the dire consequences of being possessed by an unnatural love, as does his most popular novel Singoalla. Prolific and enormously influential in his own time he was a member of the Swedish Academy.