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Biographies of Contributors

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ANONYMOUS (HAN ERA) wrote “South of the Walls We Fought” sometime during the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.). The poem is a folk song written in the Han Dynasty Musical Bureau yuefu style.

MOHAMMAD ABDERRAZZAQ is the author of several encyclopedia articles on various topics, including “Sunnis” and “Khawarij-Ibadiyah” (in Encyclopedia of the Modern World, Oxford University Press, forthcoming); and “Native Americans,” “Dar al-Islam,” “Ansarullah Community,” “Elderly,” and “Muslim Peace Fellowship” (in Encyclopedia of Islam in America, Greenwood Press, forthcoming). His research interests include early and medieval Islamic history, jurisprudence of minorities in Islam, and Islamic ethics and spirituality. He is currently a PhD candidate in Islamic Studies at Boston University.

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.

TAMAS ACZEL is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Massachusetts; poet, novelist. He left his native Hungary in 1956 and after a stay of some ten years in Paris and London settled in Amherst. His latest novel, The Hunt (Faber and Faber, London, 1990) is preceded by several collections of poetry and four other novels, written in English and translated into Hungarian.

ENDRE ADY (1877-1919) was born in Hungary of the old Hapsburg Monarchy and died during its collapse in the wake of World War I. Disrupting his higher education in law he became a journalist and a poet. His third volume of poems (New Poems, 1906) revolutionized Hungarian poetry, both in style and content; he advocated progress and castigated jingoistic nationalism. He was critical of World War I from the beginning; the last poetry volume in his life was Leading the Dead (1918). While his symbolist style was unique to his own works, it did open the way to experimentation in Hungarian poetry.

MARIE-CÉLIE AGNANT was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and has lived in Montreal since 1970. She is the author of four novels (La Dot de Sara, 1995; Le Livre d’Emma, 2001; Un Alligator nommé Rosa, 2007; Femmes au temps des carnassiers, 2015), a collection of short stories (Le Silence comme le sang, 1997), and two collections of poetry (Balafres, 1994; Et puis parfois quelquefois…, 2009) as well as various books for young readers. The poem here is taken from Balafres (Gashes).

MARJORIE AGOSIN was 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 Circle of Madness, Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (1991), and Dear Anna Frank (1992) among others.

ALEJANDRO AGUILAR was born in Cuba and is the author of Tesituras (poetry), Paisaje de Arcilla and Figuras tendidas (short stories). A selection of his stories will be published shortly in English in the United States. En el mismo barco (novel) will appear this year in Puerto Rico. At present he is working on another novel, Sarduy’s doubt.

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.

AFTAB AHMAD is a Lecturer in Hindi-Urdu at Columbia University in New York. With Matt Reeck, he has published Bombay Stories and Mirages of the Mind. A winner of a PEN-Heim Translation Grant, he is working on a translation into Hindi of Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi’s Zarguzasht.

HENNING AHRENS is a writer and translator in Peine, Germany, and is the author of three volumes of poetry: Lieblied was kommt (1998), Stoppelbrand (2000), and Kein Schlaf in Sicht (2008); three novels, Lauf Jäger lauf (2002), Langsamer Walzer (2004), and Tiertage (2007); and other literary publications. He has won numerous prizes, including the Wolfgang Weyrauch Prize for Literary Achievement, the Pro-Litteris Prize, the Friedrich Hebbel Prize, and the Nicolas Born Prize. The poems translated here are from Lieblied was kommt.

MARTIN AITKEN lives and works in rural Denmark. He gave up university tenure to translate literature and listen to The Fall. His translations have appeared in numerous journals and periodicals, including AGNI, The Literary Review, PRISM International, The Boston Review, Calque and FENCE.

AMANDA AIZPURIETE was born in Jurmala in 1956 and studied philosophy and philology at the Latvian State University and at the M. Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow. Seven books of her poetry have been published, including Kapu iela (Ascension Street, 1986), Pedeja vasara, (The Last Summer, 1995), Babeles nomale (The Outskirts of Babel, 1999), Virsu debesis (In Skies of Heather, 2003), Vestulu vejs (Windfall of Poems, 2004), and a novel. She has been poetry editor for the magazine Avots (Wellspring) and co-editor of the newspaper Aspazija, the magazine Karogs (Flag), and Vides Vestis (The Herald). The American composer Eric Fank used Aizpuriete’s poetry for his symphony for contralto and full orchestra “This Evening Seems to Have Gone Bad” and the mono-opera “Anna Ahmatova.” Aizpuriete has received the Bavarian Art Academy’s Poetry Award (1999) and the Days of Poetry Award in Latvia (2000), as well as the Annual Award in Literature for the Best Translation (2003).

BERNARDO AJZENBERG has published a number of novels in addition to short stories in contemporary magazines: Carreiras cortadas (1989); Efeito suspensorio (1993); Goldstein & Camargo (1994); Variacoes Goldman (1998); A gaiola de Faraday (2002), which won the Brazilian Academy of Letters Prize in Fiction; Olhos secos (2009), which was a finalist for the Portugal Telecom Prize; Duas novelas (2011); and the short story collection Homens com mulheres (2005), which was a finalist for the Jabuti Prize. The last five of the above texts are from the Rocco Publishing House. Ajzenberg is also a translator of French, Spanish, and English. In 2010, he won the Jabuti prize for his translation of Tomas Eloy Martinez’s novel Purgatorio (Companhia das Letras) into Portuguese.

SONJA AKESSON (1926-1977) was, according to Heidi von Born, a very Swedish poet who gave us not only the very beautiful, grim, tender texts about the real Swedish landscape but also everyday reports about life in Sweden using everyday language in poetic form.

ANNA  AKHMATOVA (1889-1966) was 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 became a voice for many whose loved ones had been taken to the GULAG during the Stalinist regime. In the last thirty years her work has received international recognition.

NESREEN AKHTARKHAVARI is the Director of Arabic Studies at DePaul University where she teaches Arabic literature, culture, media, and translation. She is the Chief Editor of a new Arabic Series by Michigan State University Press, and a Board Member of Radius of Arab American Writers. She authored a book of short stories in Arabic, Between Presence and Absence (Dar Ward, 2012). She translated al-Sboul’s novel, You as of Today, published by the Jordanian Writers Society (2012), and his book of poetry, Desert Sorrows (Michigan State University Press, 2015). She also translated Mashi (Walk) by Saud Qubailat (Dar Ward, 2012), and completed with Anthony Lee, the translation of Rumi: Love is My Savior; The Arabic Poems (Michigan State University Press, 2016). Her translations and articles appeared in magazines and journals in the US and abroad.

NAVEED ALAM was born in Jhelum, Pakistan, and after high school left for the United States where he received his MFA in Creative Writing and taught English at various colleges. His first collection of poems, A Queen of No Ordinary Realms, won the Spokane Poetry Prize, and his works have been published in a number of literary journal and magazines including the Prairie Schooner, American Poetry Journal, Poetry International, International Poetry Review, Cimmaron Review, and the Canadian Dimension. He currently lives in Lahore, Pakistan.

ALCMAN was a Greek poet whose origins are disputed, but it appears that he composed his poetry in Sparta in either the middle or the latter half of the 7th century BCE. Of the six books of poetry attributed to him in antiquity, only about 200 lines are extant, half on papyrus, half in brief quotations.

MARILAR ALEIXANDRE (Madrid, 1947) has a BA in Biology and is a Professor of Education in Science at the University of Santiago. She has published poetry collection, novels, and short stories. She has won several prices both for her poetry and her prose, and has been highly acclaimed for her books for children.

NATO ALHAZISHVILI is Deputy Resident Representative of the United Nations’ Development Program in Azerbaijan. She studied at the State University of New York at Albany, lives in Baku, Azerbaijan and has been friends with Date Barbakadze since childhood.

AGHA SHAHID ALI (1949-2001) was a member of the poetry faculty of the MFA and PhD Program in Creative Writing at the University of Utah and also taught at Hamilton College and the University of Massachusetts. He held visiting appointments at Princeton, SUNY-Binghamton, and Jammu (India). His seven collections of poetry include The Half-Inch Himalayas (Wesleyan University Press), A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (SUN/gemini Press), A Nostalgist’s Map of America (W. W. Norton), The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (Viking Penguin), and The Country Without a Post Office (W. W. Norton), a collection that focuses on the current turmoil in his native Kashmir. He is also translator of The Rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz(University of Massachusetts Press, revised edition) as well as the author of T. S. Eliot as Editor (UMI Research Press). His poems appear regularly in Antioch Review, Chelsea, Denver Quarterly, Field, Grand Street, London Magazine, The Nation, Paris Review, Poetry, Tri-Quarterly, and Yale Review. He also edited Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English. A recipient of Guggenheim and Ingram-Merrill fellowships, he also won fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as a Pushcart Prize.

UBAX CRISTINA ALI FARAH was born in Verona, Italy, in 1973, to a Somali father and an Italian mother. In 1976, she moved with her family to Mogadishu, Somalia, where she lived until 1991, when she fled the country because of civil war. After some time in Pécs, Hungary, she moved to Verona. She has been living in Rome since 1997, where she graduated in Letters at La Sapienza University. She is on the editorial staff of Migranews and of the journals El Ghibli and Caffé, both specialized in migrant literature. Her short stories and poems have been published in a number of anthologies, including Italiani per vocazione (Fiesole: Cadmo, 2005) and Ai confini del verso (Florence: La Lettere, 2006), and in literary journals, such as Nuovi Argomenti, Quaderni del ‘900, Pagine, Sagarana, Crocevia, El Ghibli, and Caffé. Her latest short story, Madre Piccola, was awarded the first Lingua Madre Prize at the 2006 Torino Book Fair. Her much-awaited first novel was published in spring 2007.

DANTE ALIGHIERI (1265-1321) was the Florentine poet of the Divina Commedia, who made the vernacular of Tuscany the literary language of Italy, and the basis for what became Standard Italian.

KAREN ALKALAY-GUT was born in London, England, during the last night of the Blitz, and grew up in Rochester, New York. In 1972 she moved to Israel. She has published many books of poetry in English. Four books of her poems have also appeared in Hebrew translation. She has also translated poems from Hebrew, Yiddish and Arabic.

SONIA ALLAND divides her time between New York City and her home in a village in the south of France. For some years she has been translating the prose and poetry of the French writer, Marie Bronsard, with the collaboration of the author. The English texts have appeared in book form and in literary reviews since 1994. Ms. Alland has also translated the work in French by the Iraqi poet, Salah al Hamdani. Curbstone Press published selections of his poetry in 2004, under the title, Baghdad Mon Amour; in 2018, Seagull Books produced the anthology, Baghdad, Adieu.

OVE ALLANSSON (1932- ) worked for two decades as industrial worker, seaman, mechanic, before his debut in 1967. He has published thirty books of fiction, travelogues, and documentaries. He has received many awards and citations. His 1971 novel Ombordarna (The Passengers) deals with the gullibility that paved the way for Nazism.

JOHN ALLASTER is a PhD candidate in English Literature at McGill University. He earned his B.A. from the University of Toronto and his M.A. from Western University. His current research focuses on the aesthetic and philosophy of dynamic emptiness in modernist poetry, the relationship between modernist writers and Chinese aesthetics, as well as concepts of the improvisatory in literature.

ARTUR ALLIKSAAR (1923-1966) studied law, but his career was cut short when Estonia was occupied by Germany and then the Soviet Union. He began writing when he was young and a few of his poems appeared in newspapers. In 1949 he was imprisoned by the Russians on questionable charges. After his release in 1957 he became an irreverent, bohemian habitual of the cafes in Tartu, Estonia’s university town. Despite repression by the Soviet authorities he saw the publication of a few more of his poems, and his writing took a turn away from the classical forms of his youth to free verse of limitless fantasy. Towards the end of his life, and while suffering from tuberculosis, he wrote one play, Island Without a Name, which he lived to see produced by a student group just before he died. After his death, more poems were published and his passion and recklessness inspired a new generation of poets. In 1997, in a free Estonia, Lavishing Sunlight, a complete collection of his poems, appeared and became a best seller.

JOAO ALMINO is a writer and a Brazilian diplomat. He is the author of several novels, collections of literary essays, and books on political philosophy. The national and international prizes he has received for his work include the 2003 Casa de las Americas prize for Cinco estacoes de amor and the 2011 Zaffari & Bourbon prize for Cidade livre. Cidade livre was translated into English, and was a finalist for the Portugal-Telecom Prize and the Jabuti Prize. A number of his novels have been translated into English, French, Spanish, and Italian. O livro das emocoes was nominated for the Portugal-Telecom Prize and the Zaffari & Bourbon Prize. His first novel, Ideias para onde passar o fim do mundo (1987), received the Instituto Nacional do Livro Prize and the Premio Candango de Literatura. He did his doctoral work in Paris with the philosopher Claude Lefort as his advisor. He has taught at universities in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States.

OSAMA ALOMAR is a Syrian poet and short story writer. He has published three collections of short stories (Ayuha al-insaan (O Man), Rabtat Lisaan (Tongue Tie), Jami’ al-huquq ghayr mah-fuza (All Rights Not Reserved) and one volume of poetry (qaala insaan al ‘asir al hadith (Man Said the Modern World). He is a regular contributor to various newspapers and journals in Syria and the Arab World, among them Tishrin, an-Nur, Spot Light, al-Halil, Adab wa Naqd, and al-Ghad. A prominent practitioner of the Arabic “very short story” (al-qisa al-qasira jiddan), he is a past winner of the Najlaa Muharam Short Story Contest in Egypt (2007). His work is regularly heard on the BBC Arabic Service. Born in Damascus, Osama currently lives in Chicago.

FRAN ALONSO (Vigo, 1963) is a novelist, poet and essayist. He is a publisher and works for Edicións Xerais as an editor. He has also written children’s books. His latest book Transición (2011) contains a CD where he and María Lado recite his poems. Fran Alonso and María Lado are the authors of the recording of the Galician poems in the present selection.

ROSA ALONSO taught at the Vigo University School of Health and Caring Sciences until her early retirement in 2009. She is currently studying Spanish Literature at the University. Among her interests are film, art and photography.

KADHIM AL-ALI is a lecturer in the Department of Translation at the University of Basra in Iraq.

‘ALI JA’FAR AL-‘ALLAQ is a modern Arabic poet and Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at United Arab Emirates University, al-‘Ain. He studied Arabic language and literature in his native Iraq and earned a doctorate in Modern Literature and Criticism from the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. He has taught at Baghdad University and San’a University (Yemen). He has also served as chief editor of two Iraqi magazines, al-Aqlam (Pens) and Al-Thaqafa al-Ajnabiyya (Foreign Culture). He is a prolific poet and experienced critic who has authored six anthologies and edited five books of critical studies and has participated in numerous cultural and poetry festivals throughout the Arab world. The Iraqi cultural magazine Al-Adib featured his work and discussed his influence in a special issue in 2005. The poem “al-Nahr” (The River) appears in his anthology Mamalik Da’i’ah (Lost Kingdoms).

SALAH AL-HAMDANI was born in Baghdad in 1951 into a modest family of peasant origins. After a time in the Iraqi Army when he was still in his teens, he was incarcerated and tortured for his opposition to the Baathist Party of Saddam Hussein. It was in prison that he discovered literature and writing in his association with other political prisoners. Escaping an attempt on his life after he was released from prison, he found exile in France, “the country of Albert Camus,” and of the Rights of Man. Before long, he became an actor in the theatre and cinema where, in 1979, he took on the role of Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh. About the same period, his first collection of poetry was translated into French and published by Éditions du Cherche-Midi. An active supporter of the Palestinian cause as well as the struggle against Saddam Hussein, he nevertheless continued producing works in Arabic, which generally were denied publication because of his political stands and his criticism of religion and obscurantism. For some time, his political commitments to the left and against Saddam Hussein prevented him from concentrating on the promotion of his literary works. It was only after the downfall of the Iraqi tyrant that he could devote all his energy and time to his writing, which remains engaged in Arabic as well as in French. Today, he is the author of more than fifteen books in French, half of which have been translated from the Arabic, and of a dozen books in Arabic. Numerous narratives and poems in Arabic, as yet not published, await translation and publication.

KADHIM AL-HIJAJ was born in Basra in 1942 and received his BA from the College of Islamic Law at the University of Baghdad in 1967. Since then, he has published four collections of poetry (Finally Talked Shahrayar in 1973, Basri Melodies in 1987, Youth’s Gazelle in 1999, Unlike Things in 2005). In 2002, he also published a monograph entitled Women and Sex in Myths and Religions. He frequently recites poetry at Arab and international festivals and currently publishes the widely read and popular column “Spices” in the weekly newspaper of Basra, Al-Akhbar.

KHALED AL-MASRI holds a BA and an MA in Arabic Literature from Yarmouk University in Jordan. A PhD candidate in Arabic Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, he is working on a dissertation entitled “Representations of Violence, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Arabic Fiction.” He is currently Preceptor of Arabic at Harvard University and has been Director ‘in residence’ of the University of Virginia/Yarmouk University Summer Arabic Program for the past seven years. Previous publications include Gha’ib Tu’mah Faraman: Societal Development and Textual Change (Damascus: Al-Mada, 1997).

BASSEM AL-MERAIBY, one of Iraq’s most important poets of the 1980s, was born in 1960. His first poems were published in the mid 1970s, and he has published seven poetry collections to date. He began to write plays in the early 1980s and was awarded the important Arabic Yousef AlKhals prize in 1988. Poetry, for him, is a way to exist. He believes that “poetry is important enough to dedicate your whole life to it.”

ABDEL RAHMAN MAJEED AL-RUBEI’E was born in Nasiriyah in southern Iraq. Fiction writer, poet, columnist and editor, he has published more than a dozen collections of short stories, six novels, six volumes of poetry, and books of literary criticism. His novel Al-Washm (The Tattoo) has been reprinted six times in Morocco but was never published in Saddam’s Iraq.

TAYSEER AL-SBOUL (1939-1973) is a renowned Jordanian poet. The Jordanian Writers Association recognized al-Sboul as one of Jordan’s most prominent writers and dedicated a literature award in his honor. His work received numerous awards, especially for his collection of poetry, Desert Sorrows published in Beirut in 1967, and his novel, You As of Today published in 1968. The complete collection of his poems, prose, plays, and essays was published posthumously in 2005. A number of his poems have been set to music and performed by the singer Ghazi Al-Shargawi.

ABU ABDULLA MUHAMMAD IBN IDRIS AL-SHAFICI is known as the founder of Islamic jurisprudence, al-Imam al-Shafici (Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafici, 767-820) and was also an eloquent speaker, writer, and poet. Common themes in his poetry are the temporal nature of earthly existence, and the ways in which people relate to spirituality, to knowledge, and to one another. He was born in Gaza, but is buried in Egypt, where he spent the last years of his life.

AHMED ZAGHLOOL AL-SHEETY (1961-) is a contemporary Egyptian writer who revolutionized Egyptian and Arabic cultural life in the nineties through his highly important novel Poisonous Roses for Sakr, 1993. The novel’s post-modern narrative records the sharp political, cultural and social changes that took place in the seventies and eighties in Egypt. It was nominated as one of the best novels in the 1990s. For the more contemporary generation of writers, this work has become the icon of the nineties and the herald of new narrative techniques. Al-Sheety has two other novels, Paper Toys (1991) and Internal Winter (1994.) His important fourth book, which contains post-modernist texts that have been published in many Arabic and Egyptian periodicals in the last ten years, is forthcoming.

ADIL AL-THAMIRY is a lecturer in the Department of Translation at the University of Basra in Iraq.

ALAN ALTIMONT teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at Saint Edward’s University in Austin, Texas. His interest in Marbod’s poetry began in 2011 when he was preparing to teach a course in Angers on writers who had lived and worked in that part of France.

FRANCISCO ALVIM was a poet and diplomat, and was born in Minas Gerais in 1938. His first book of poems, Sol dos cegos was published in 1968. He has twice been awarded Brazil’s most prestigious literary prize, the Jabuti, and his complete works were collected in Poesia (1968-2000), published in 2004. In Elefante, whose predominantly prosaic style is punctuated only infrequently by moments of a thus powerfully heightened lyricism, Alvim seeks out the poetic where it seems least likely to be found, in the colloquial, found-object fragments of dialogue.

AMIRA AL-ZIQRID was born in 1974 in El Mansoura (Egypt), graduated from the Faculty of Arts at Mansoura University in 1995. She received an M.A. degree (2005) and a Ph.D. degree (2008) from Women’s College Ain Shams University. She is currently a Lecturer at MSA University in Egypt. Her focus is on Comparative Literature and Translation Studies.

MOHAMMED MAHMOUD AL-ZUBAIRI lived most of his life in Yemen, where he became one of the key leaders of the 26 September Rebellion in 1962. He received his education at the House of Sciences in Egypt, but returned to Yemen in 1941 before finishing his degree. He became a voice for the Yemeni People in opposition to Imam Yahya, who was one of the most brutal dictators that Yemen ever experienced. His poem, “Record Your Place in History”, was composed sometime between 1950-51. Imam Yahya imprisoned al-Zubairi several times for his public speeches and poetry reciting in support of rebellion.

ABU ISHAQ ISMA’IL IBN AL-QASIM (748-825), nicknamed Abu’l-‘Atahiya (“father of craziness”), was a prominent poet of the Abbasid era. He was born to a lowly Kufan family and sold earthenware jars for a living. Possessing a natural gift for poetry, he devoted himself to the art until he became renowned for it. His work includes early wine songs and love odes (most prominently featuring ‘Atba, a slave-girl of the Caliph al-Saffah’s daughter) as well as panegyrics. He later devoted himself to ascetic poetry (zuhdiyyat), in which he warned against worldliness and spoke of death, resurrection, heaven, and hell. Although he remains famous for his prolific output in this genre, it led him to be accused of heresy during his lifetime, perhaps as a result of his lack of theological training or perhaps because of political intrigues. As a result of his penchant for experimentation, Abu’l-‘Atahiya sometimes departed from the fixed set of meters (‘arud) of classical Arabic poetry.

VICENTE AMEZTOY (1946-2001) is considered to be the most outstanding exponent of Basque surrealism.

ANACREON (c. 575 BCE — c. 490 BCE) was born in the Ionian city of Teos in Asia Minor. He became a court poet to Polycrates on Samos and to the tyrants Hipparchus and Critias in Athens. Considered the last writer of solo song, he composed panegyrics as well as the personal lyric poetry for which he is best known in later eras.

BARRY JEAN ANCELET is professor of Modern Languages at the U. of Southwestern Louisiana. He is well known for his work in Cajun music and in preserving the oral tradition of Cajuns and Creoles in Louisiana. The tales in issue 3.2 were excerpted from his recent Cajun and Creole Folktales. 

ZORAN ANCHEVSKI is currently Professor of literature in the English Department of the University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius in Skopje, Macedonia, where he received his PhD. He lives in Macedonia and has studied and worked in Australia, and in Chico, California. A respected poet in his home country, he is also a prolific translator from English to Macedonian.

MELIH CEVDET ANDAY (1915-2002), one of the luminaries of Turkish literature, was born in Istanbul in 1915. He pioneered a new school of poetry. Writer of eleven collections of poems, eight plays, eight novels, fifteen collections of essays, and a book of memoirs, Anday won many prizes for his work, which was translated into Russian, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Greek, Serbian, Polish, and English.

BENNY ANDERSEN is the foremost living poet and lyricist in Denmark. His works are renowned for their humor, expressionistic wordplay and colloquial depth. He has won many literary honors including the Danish National Arts award for lifelong achievement. Now 83, he continues to write and to perform to sold-out audiences in Denmark.

VITA ANDERSEN was born in Copenhagen in 1944. Though a short story collection Vær smuk og hold kæft (Be Beautiful and Keep Your Mouth Shut) propelled her to success in her mid-thirties and won her the prestigious Golden Laurel, she is now best known for her novels, which have been translated into several European languages.

KIRK ANDERSON is Associate Professor of French and Hannah Goldberg Chair for Innovative Teaching at Wheaton College (Massachusetts), where he teaches translation, 20th-century French Studies, and a seminar on the United States through French eyes. He has published articles on Louis-Ferdinand Céline and is currently preparing a study of American pop music in France during the 1960s.

WARREN D. ANDERSON (1920-2001) studied Classics as an undergraduate at Haverford College. In 1942 he began graduate school at Harvard University, but interrupted his education to fight in World War II. He returned to get an MA at Harvard and, after spending two years reading classical greats at Oxford, chose to study as a doctoral student at Harvard under Werner Jaeger. A professor of Classics until 1967, he then went to the University of Iowa as a Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and from 1970 until he retired, he taught Comparative Literature and Classics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Critic, translator, a leading expert on ancient Greek music, he has translated Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, and the Character Sketches of Theophrastus (Kent State, 1970). His books include Matthew Arnold and the Classical Tradition (Michigan U.P.); Victorian Essays (a volume which he co-edited and to which he contributed); Ethos and Education in Greek Music: The Evidence of Poetry and Philosophy (Harvard U.P. 1966); and Music and Musicians in Ancient Greece (Cornell U.P. 1994).

VENKO ANDONOVSKI (b. 1964 in Kumanovo, Macedonia) is a poet, critic, fiction-writer, dramatist, and essayist who also teaches modern Croatian Literature at the Philological Faculty in Skopje. The selection included here is from his collection Frescoes and Grotesques (1983). His most recent play, The Slavic Chest (1998), has been translated into English.

CARLOS DRUMMOND DE ANDRADE (1902-1987) a Brazilian poet, is generally considered the finest and most accessible twentieth-century poet writing in Portuguese.

EUGENIO DE ANDRADE is a noted Portuguese poet and translator; his work has appeared extensively in both Europe and the U.S. He has won most of Portugal’s literary awards.

ELENA ANDREEVA holds BA and MA degrees in Middle Eastern Studies from Moscow State University and a PhD from New York University. She is Associate Professor of History at Virginia Military Institute. Her research focuses on the interaction between East and West, Iranian history and culture in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and aspects of colonialism and imperialism in the Middle East and Asia. She has published articles on Persian and Dari literature, on Russian Orientalism, and on Russian travelers to Iran. She is the author of Russia and Iran in the Great Game: Travelogues and Orientalism (2007). Her current projects examine the “Orient” in Russian arts, including music, painting and literature, and Iranian travelogues about Russia in the 19th century.

PETRE M. ANDREEVSKI (b. 1934 in Sloestica, the Demir Hisar region of southwestern Macedonia) is a poet, dramatist, novelist, and writer of short stories. Widely anthologized in Macedonia and abroad, his works have been translated into numerous languages. His most recent novel, The Last Peasants (1997), depicts the decline of village life and customs in the face of outside influences.

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 U.S., 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 2, 2004. Both Portugal’s Prime Minister and President attended her funeral.

RADU ANDRIESCU is the author of four books of poetry: Mirror Against the Wall (1992), which won a Poesis first-book award; The Back Door (1994); The End of the Road, the Beginning of the Journey (1998), which won the Iasi Writers’ Association Award for Poetry; and Some Friends and Me (2000). He is working with Adam J. Sorkin on a dual-language volume of more than fifty of his poems, entitled No-Man’s Land. Andriescu lives in Iasi where he teaches British and American literature at the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Cider Press Review, Exquisite Corpse/Cyber Corpse, Hunger Magazine, Quarter After Eight, Compost, and Watchword, as well as in Sorkin’s books, City of Dreams and Whispers (1998), an anthology of poets associated with the northeastern Romanian region called Moldavia, of which Iasi is the cultural capital; Speaking the Silence, a book of Romanian prose poems (Bucharest, 2001); and Club 8: Poems, an anthology of the work of a group of young, maverick poets of Iasi, edited and translated by Andriescu (2001).

CECCO ANGIOLIERI (1258-1320), a Sienese poet best known for his sonnet “S’i’ fosse fuoco” [If I were fire, I’d torch the whole world] and his tenzone, or poets’ battle, with Dante. Decidedly different in spirit and style from the dolce stil nuovo poets, he is more representative of the poeti burleschi or giocosi who look backward to the Goliardic poets. His use of colloquial and regional language, his real-world similes, as well as his gift for mockery, self-irony, and comic deflation, attest to that affinity.

JOHN ANSON was born in San Francisco in 1936. He attended UC Berkeley where he earned his B.A in English and Classics, his M.A. in Classics and his Ph.D. in English. Subsequently, he taught there in the English department from 1965 to 1991. He practiced thereafter as a psychologist until his recent retirement. In the seventies and eighties, he regularly published in a number of literary magazines including Poetry (Chicago), The Threepenny Review and Arizona Quarterly, and Robert Barth issued a chapbook of his sonnets, A Family Album. In 2013 Dos Madres Press published his translation of Les Trophées by José-Maria de Heredia, and in 2014, Time Pieces, a collection of his own poems along with a translation of Henri de Régnier’s La Cité des Eaux. In Translation issued his version of André Chenier’s “La Jeune Tarentine,” and Atavic, his rendering of Leconte de Lisle’s “La Vérandah” in 2014.

GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE (1880-1918) was a key figure of the avant-garde in France that included Picasso and Braque. His best-known lyric poems are collected in Alcools (1913) and Calligrammes (1918). His only play, Les Mamelles de Tirsias (1918) is one of the earliest examples of surrealism.

APOLLONIUS OF RHODES (fl. 265 BC) was the head librarian of the Library at Alexandria in Egypt and tutor of the future king Ptolemy III. His romance epic Argonautika, written in the language of the Homeric epics but in accordance with Hellenistic aesthetic criteria, tells the story of how Jason came to Medea’s land and with her help obtained the golden fleece.

ANNE MILANO APPEL, a former library director and language teacher, has been translating professionally for ten years. Several of her book-length translations have been published, and shorter works that she has authored or translated have appeared in other professional and literary venues. Her translation of Stefano Bortolussi’s novel Head Above Water was the winner of the 2004 Northern California Book Award for Translation.

RONNIE APTER (1943- ), Professor Emerita of English at Central Michigan University, is the author of Digging for the Treasure: Translation After Pound (1984, reprint ed. 1987); A Bilingual Edition of the Love Songs of Bernart de Ventadorn in Occitan and English: Sugar and Salt (1999), a book and CD including literal, poetic, and singable translations of the works of the 12th-century troubadour; and the chapter on “Ezra Pound” in Translation — Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader (2006). Her collaborations with Mark Herman include 22 translations of operas, operettas, and choral works performed throughout the United States, Canada, England, and Scotland; poetry translations appearing in journals and anthologies such as The Literary Review, The New Orleans Review, Metamorphoses, Corno Inglese: An Anthology of Eugenio Montale’s Poetry in English Translation (2009), and In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era (1999); and numerous articles on translation and on opera.

MARCAL AQUINO was born in Amparo, Sao Paulo, in 1958. He is a journalist, a writer, and a scriptwriter. He has published over a dozen books of prose, poetry, and children’s literature. Among them are O Invasor (2001, 2011), O amor e outros objetos pontiagudos (Jabuti Prize 2000), As formes de setembro (Premio V Benial Nestle de Literatura), Cabeca a premio (2003), Familias terrivelmente felizes (2003), and Eu receberia as piores noticias dos seus lindos labios (2005); his screenplays include Os matadores, Acao entre amigos, O invasor, Nina, Ocheiro do ralo, and Eu receberia as piores noticias dos seues lindos labios.

LUCÍA ARANDA is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Hawai’i where she teaches Spanish, translation, and U.S. Latino literature. She is the author of Handbook of Spanish-English Translation (University Press of America, 2007).

ARCHIAS OF BYZANTIUM Nothing certain is known of the biography or date of Archias of Byzanitum, one of the poets in the Antholgoia Palantina, a massive anthology of Greek epigrams (roughly 4,000 in all) by various authors, compiled in the tenth century CE but containing poems that range in date from the third century BCE to the sixth centuy CE.

XELA ARIAS (Lugo 1962 – Vigo 2003) holds a BA in Romance Philology and translated widely from Spanish and English into Galician. She published many poetry collections, among them the aesthetically very appealing “Tigres coma cabalos” (1990). Her last publication was “Interpériome”. She died from a heart attack in November 2003.

XIANA ARIAS (A Fonsagrada, Lugo, 1983) is a journalist and works for Radio Galega. Her collection Acusación (Accusation), published in 2009, expresses the sound and the fury of the female condition.

AURELIA ARKOTXA is a Basque-French poet and member of the poetry collective Geopolitics and of IKER UMR 5478 of the Centre National de Recherches Scientifiques (CNRS) in Bayonne, an association for research on Basque culture, language, and heritage. Currently she is researching the lives and manuscripts of Basque sailors in the sixteenth century.

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.

WALTER ARNDT (1916-2011) was born in Constantinople in 1916 as a citizen of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg. After studying at Breslau (Silesia) and Oxford, he attended graduate school in Warsaw. He holds a doctorate in Comparative Linguistics and Classics from the University of North Carolina. In 1939 he resigned his German citizenship and volunteered for the Polish army. After escaping from a German POW camp, he spent a year in the Polish underground. Between 1942 and 1945, Mr. Arndt was active in political, military, and war-economic intelligence with the U.S. Office of Strategic Services and later with the O.W.I. He taught at Robert College (Istanbul) and worked in the U.N. refugee resettlement between 1944 and 1949, when he emigrated to the United States. He has taught at Guilford College, Chapel Hill, and Dartmouth. His verse translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1963) was awarded a Bollingen Prize. His verse translation of Goethe’s Faust in the metric forms of the original was first published in 1972 (2nd edition, 2000). He has also published books on linguistic theory and glottochronology.

ZEINAB ASSAF was born in Baalbek, in the Lebanese Bekaa Valley, in 1981. Her first collection of poetry, Salaat al-Gha’ib (Funeral Prayer in Absentia), was published in 2005. She currently works as a journalist for the daily newspaperAn-Nahar and is editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Naqd (Critic), a journal that focuses on contemporary Arabic poetry.

JANE ASSIMAKOPOULOS is an American writer and translator with an academic backgound in Romance languages and literatures. Her literary translations from Greek and French into English include work by award-winning writers Thanassis Valtinos, Ersi Sotiropoulou, Michel Fais and Sotiris Dimitriou, and poets Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, and Yiannis Kontos, among others. Her translations have been published in England and in America in journals such as London Magazine, The Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, and Mondo Greco. She lives in Ioannina, Greece.

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, novelist, poet, and playwright, writes both in Basque and Spanish and was born in Asteasu (Guipzcoa). He published his first book of poem Ziutateak (Las ciudades) in 1976, and two years later published Etiopa, for which he won the Critics Prize. Over twenty years, he has written literature for children and yound adults, plays, radio plays, and song lyrics. In 1985 he won the Critics Prize with his novel Bi anai (Dos hermanos), and then again in 1988 with the novel Obabakoak (Los de Obaba), for which he also won both the Euskadi and National Literature Prizes. His latest novel Soinujolearen Semea (The Son of the Accordionist) was published in Basque (2003) and in Spanish (2004).

WYSTAN H. AUDEN (1907-1973) British poet who became an American citizen in 1939, received many prizes during his lifetime, and became Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1956.

DAVID AVIDAN (1934-1995), poet, painter, filmmaker, playwright and publisher, was born in Te Aviv, where he lived and worked. A major force in contemporary Hebrew poetry and a leading innovator and artist, Avidan published nineteen books of poetry, as well as plays and children’s books. His work has been translated into twenty languages, and collections of his poems have been published in French, Russian and Arabic. His Collected Poems, in four volumes, appeared in Israel in 2009 and 2010. Among his awards: the Abraham Woursell Award from the University of Vienna, the Bialik Award, and the Prime Minister award. Most recently, his work, translated by Tsipi Keller, has appeared in Drunken Boat, in The Kenyon Review and in Poets on the Edge: An Anthology of Contemporary Hebrew Poetry (SUNY Press).

NAOKO AWA (1943-1993) was an award-winning writer of modern fairy tales. As a child, she read fairy tales by Grimm, Andersen, and Hauff, as well as The Arabian Nights. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Japanese literature from Japan Women’s University. English translations of her stories have recently appeared in Crow Toes Quarterly (Canada) and Kyoto Journal (Japan).

MICHELE MCKAY AYNESWORTH 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’ 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.

DHU AL-NUN AYYUB (1908-1988) was an early modern Iraqi writer and translator born in Mosul in 1908. He studied at the Baghdad Higher College for Teachers’ Training and worked as a teacher of mathematics after graduating. In the 1930s he became the head of the Fine Arts Institute in Baghdad, and served as editor of the al-Majallah magazine between 1938 and 1944. During this period, he also joined Iraq’s communist party and left it over a dispute with its secretary general, only to establish his own moderate left-wing party, al-Mu’tamariyyun. In 1948, Ayyub was elected deputy of Mosul, but returned to training soon after, having been court-martialed. In 1954 he left Iraq for Vienna, and with the exception of a brief period working in Iraq for the Iraqi Broadcasting Corporation after the 1958 Iraqi revolution, Ayyub stayed in Austria until his death in 1988. Many of Ayyub’s short stories, which he originally published in the al-Majallah literary journal, were later collected in eleven anthologies. Al-Duktur Ibrahim was his first novel.

NASSIRA BELLOULA AZZOUZ (1961- ) is a prominent Arab writer born in 1961 in Algeria, where she works as a journalist. A writer of both poetry and novels, she expresses not only the Arab situation, but the conditions for women in modern Algeria.