D

Biographies of Contributors

D

MARTA DACOSTA (Vigo, 1966) has a BA in Galician Language and Literature. She has been published widely in journals and anthologies. The book Pel de ameixa is from 1996.

RITA DAHL (1971- ) is a Finnish writer and free-lance journalist. She holds Master’s degrees in political science and comparative literature from the University of Helsinki and served as vice-president and chair of the committee of women writers of Finnish PEN (2006-2008). Her debut poetry collection, Kun luulet olevasi yksin, was published in 2004 (Loki-Kirjat); Aforismen aika (Poesia 2007), Elämää Lagoksessa (ntamo 2008) and Topics from van Gogh’s Ear (Ankkuri 2009) followed. Her poems have appeared in anthologies and poetry reviews around the world, and have been translated into English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Icelandic, Arabic, Romanian, Estonian. She has served as editor-in-chief of a poetry magazine; as editor of a special issue on Portugal of a cultural magazine; as editor of an anthology of Central-Asian and international women writers, The Insatiable Furnace: Women Writers and Censorship—Kyltyrmätön unni. Naiskirjailijat ja sensuuri (Like 2007).

MARTA DAHLGREN (Vänersborg, Sweden, 1941) was a Professor at the University of Vigo until her retirement in 2009. She taught English on the Translation and Interpreting BA and a Seminar on Emily Dickinson. She translates professionally from Swedish and English into Castilian and Galician and is the Managing Editor of the Vigo International Journal of Applied Linguistics. Her research interests are Pragmatics and Translation and she has published widely on the translation of poetry.

BARBRO DAHLIN was a psychiatrist, a poet, and also a novelist. During the last years of her life she was almost blind, but continued to be very productive until her death last year. Her collections of poetry received excellent reviews. She lived in Stockholm. From the late fifties on she published ten collections of poetry and two novels. Eva Claeson’s translation of a chapter from Sundance, one of her novels, was published in the Scandinavian Review about fifteen years ago, and her poems have been published in other literary journals including Metamorphoses.

PIERRE DAIRON is a PhD candidate at the University of Virginia. He is a native of Poitou, where he grew up and studied History at the Université de Poitiers before going to the Université de Moncton as an exchange graduate student. He holds an M.A. in French Literature from Michigan State University.

MARY C. DALTON has had a lifelong interest in Italian literature. In addition to Elena Clementelli, she has translated works by the 16th Century poet Gaspara Stampa.

JENNIFER RENEE DANBY is a doctoral candidate in the PhD Program in Theatre, CUNY Graduate Center. She teaches in the Department of Theatre, Film and Dance at C.W. Post, Long Island University, and in the Department of Theatre Arts at SUNY, Stony Brook. Jennifer is also a director and an actor.

MARY LOU DANIEL is an Emerita Professor of Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Department of Languages. She founded the Portuguese program of the University of Iowa and taught there for twelve years. She is the co-editor of the Luso-Brazilian Review (U.W. Press). Her broad research and teaching interests include the language, literatures, and cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world (Portugal, Brazil, and Lusophone Africa). She taught courses in all literary periods and genres at the U.W. before retiring in 1998. She is a Fellow of the U.W.-Madison Teaching Academy, a continuing member of the Luso-Brazilian Review editorial board, and an Honorary Member of the Summer Institute of Linguistics/Brazil, for which she translates technical volumes into Portuguese on a full-time volunteer basis.

SAMUEL DANON has a PhD in Romance Languages from Johns Hopkins University and is Professor Emeritus of French language and literature at Reed College. He has published, in collaboration with S. N. Rosenberg, The Lyrics and Melodies of Gace Brula and Ami and Amile. His translation of Essay on Gardens by Claude-Henri Watelet (1718-1786) was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Danon’s translations of five ballades by François Villon appeared in issues of Metamorphoses. Some of his poems and translations were published in other journals.

RUBEN DARÍO (b. Nicaragua, 1867; d. 1916) was the creator of Modernism in its Latin American manifestation. He is most widely known for his volume Azul (1888) which was influenced by the French Parnassian school. He is credited with bringing innovations, vividness, and Exotismo into modern Spanish poetry.

JIBANANANDA DAS (1899-1954) was a Bengali poet, novelist and essayist, considered the pre-eminent and most-loved Bengali poet after Rabindranath Tagore. Apart from poems, he wrote several novels and a large number of short stories. He was educated at Presidency College, Calcutta (with BA Honors) and obtained an MA degree in English from Calcutta University. He also studied law. He later taught English at various colleges. In 1934-35, Das published his now-legendary Banalata Sen. Today, this 18-line poem is among the most famous poems in the Bangla language. During his lifetime, only seven volumes of his poems appeared. His volume of poetry Sreshtho Kobita (Best Poems) (1954) won the Sahitya Akademi Puraskar (Award of the National Academy of Letters) in 1955. Das died on October 22, 1954, eight days after he was hit by a tramcar in Calcutta. Eyewitnesses said though the tramcar whistled, he did not stop, and was struck. Some have claimed that the accident occurred because of an attempt at suicide; it appears from circumstantial evidence that this was so.

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

MINA DAUBE (1974- ) Born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria, came to the United 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 PhD candidate at Yale University, studying Slavic Literature.

JEREMY DAUBER is Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University, specializing in Yiddish literature. He is currently working on a book on the usage of Biblical and Rabbinic texts in early modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature.

STEPHANIE DAVAL is currently writing a PhD dissertation at Princeton on translation which will include U Tam’Si’s short stories.

CHAD DAVIDSON is the author of Consolation Miracle (Southern Illinois UP, 2003). His poems, translations, and essays have appeared in Agni, DoubleTake, The Literary Review, The Paris Review, Two Lines, Virginia Quarterly Review, and others. He teaches at the University of West Georgia, near Atlanta.

CRAIG. R. DAVIS teaches Old and Middle English, Old Norse, Gothic, and medieval Celtic languages and literatures at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he has directed the Medieval Studies and Comparative Literature programs. He studied Welsh in Aberystwyth and Icelandic in Reykjavík before completing his doctorate in English at the University of Virginia. In 1996 he published Beowulf and the Demise of Germanic Legend in England; a more recent essay on that poem is available at Oxford Handbooks Online (2014). Professor Davis has also written on Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies, the Old English Battle of Maldon, Icelandic family sagas, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Malory’s Morte Darthur, the vernacular Christianity of the Goths, and theories of history in traditional narratives. He has recently translated the earliest tales of King Arthur from Brittonic Latin and Medieval Welsh, notably Culhwch and Olwen, in Medieval Arthurian Epic and Romance (2014). His current project explores the multiple cultural resources of Celtic European, Old European, Indo-European, Etruscan, Greek, and Roman as these are expressed in the ninth-century Old Irish epic saga, The Táin.

DAZAI OSAMU is one of Japan’s most well loved writers, but he is little known in the West. Only two of his novels No Longer Human (Ningen Shikkaku) and The Setting Sun (Shayo) have been translated into English. Dazai’s forte was the watakushi shosetsu (I-novels), or stories written in the first-person that reflect the author’s true thoughts and events from his or her life. Dazai often said that he did not understand the way women thought, but despite this his portrayals of female confessions seem very authentic and convincing.

CHRISTIANA DE CALDAS BRITO was born in 1939 in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) to a family of poets and narrators. She studied psychology in Rio de Janeiro and psychology in Rome where she works as a psychologist. In San Paulo (Brazil) she earned a diploma from the Drama Academy. In Italy, she has been the recipient of many important literary prizes. She made her literary debut with a collection of short stories, Amanda, Olinda, Azzurra e le altre (Amanda, Olinda, Azzurra and the Others) (Lilith, 1998); the second edition appeared in 2004 (Oèdipus). In 2003, she won the 1st Premio Narrativa “Il Paese delle Donne” prize. She also published a children’s book, La storia di Adelaide e Marco (The Story of Adelaide and Marco) (Il Grappolo, 2000). With Cosmo Iannone, included in Kumacreola, a series on migrant writing and intercultural studies edited by Armando Unisci, she published Qui e là (Here and There), a collection of stories. Some of her plays have been performed in Italy.

FRANCISCO DE CASTRO was an 18th century Spanish playwright and actor who usually wrote or appeared in short, humorous dramatic pieces. His collection of single act plays, known as entremeses (interludes), were published in various volumes: Alegría cómica: Explicada en diferentes asuntos jocosos (1702) and Libro nuevo de entremeses intitulado: Cómico festejo (1742).

MIQUÈL DECÒR is a modern Occitan (Oc) poet. The poems in this issue are the balance of his poetry series that was published in the Spring 2008 issue of Metamorphoses. In 2009 the series was published in a trilingual Oc/French/English edition that will feature English translations by Jeannette Rogers and pen-and-ink drawings of Christine Noad. Since 1968 Miquèl Decòr has published ten books of verse in modern Occitan, often in bilingual Oc/French. He has also published a history of the Resistance movement in the Minervois region during World War II, a CD of his poetry, and written songs for the Oc group Montanha Negra.

RAIMON DE CORNET (f. ca. 1324-40) Priest and sometime monk, can be considered the last real troubadour; wrote varied poems and a grammatical treatise in the Occitan language of what is now southwestern France.

GARCILASO DE LA VEGA (ca. 1503-1536, b. Toledo) is the quintessence of the soldier-poet found with such frequency in Spanish letters. His biography is emblematic of the ambivalent symbiosis between Hapsburg imperialism and the Spanish crusade. A member of the royal guard in 1520 and a Knight of Santiago in 1523, he was an important participant in the failed expedition against the Turks at Rhodes 1522 and in the defense of Navarre against the French in 1523. In 1532 he was banished to an island on the Danube for witnessing Charles’ nephew’s secret wedding, though he later regained favor long enough to participate in the Tunis campaign of 1535 and the invasion of France in 1536. He was killed leading an attack on the fort of Le Muy near Fréjus.

ERRI DE LUCA (born in Naples, 1950) is an Italian novelist, translator and poet. He published his first book in 1989, Non ora, non qui (Not now, not here). More books followed, many of them becoming bestsellers in Italy, France and Israel. His works have been translated and published in Spain, Portugal, Germany, Sweden, Holland, USA, Brazil, Poland, Norway, Denmark, Romania, Greece, Lithuania, and more. He has also translated several books of the Bible into Italian, and is self-taught in several languages including Ancient Hebrew and Yiddish. In addition to his literary career he worked as a blue-collar employee at the Fiat factory in Torino and at the Catania airport, and later as a truck driver and a mason in Italy, France and Africa. He rode relief convoys in Yugoslavia during the war between 1993 and 1999. In the Fall of 2011 he was a special guest at UMass Amherst where he spoke on the topic of writing, memory and resistance.

RAYMOND DE LUCA is a PhD student at Harvard University, where he studies Russian language, literature, and film.

ARNOLD DE VOS was born in Holland, lived for many years in Tunisia and now lives in Italy. He has written poetry in Dutch, English, and French, but now writes in Italian.

STAVROS DELIGIORGIS is Professor Emeritus at the University of Iowa and now teaches in the Graduate Program of Translation Studies at the University of Athens, Greece. His most recent work was published by the Northwestern University Press (1997 and 2000) and the American College of Greece (2001 and 2002).

JAMES DENBOER lives in Sacramento, California. His writing has won grants and awards from the International Poetry Forum, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Council on the Arts, the Carnegie Fund for Authors, the Authors League, PEN/New York, and other institutions. His Selected Poems will appear in the fall of 2007.

RENÉ DEPESTRE was born in Jacmel, Haiti, in 1926; the poet, activist, journalist, teacher, novelist, and scholar has spent most of his life as an exile, first in France, then—invited by Che Guevara—in Cuba for many years, then again in France. Active in Casa de las Americas, an important center for Caribbean literature and culture, he broke definitively with Castro in 1978, and worked for UNESCO in Paris for the next ten years. Although no longer a Communist, he is known as a poet (and novelist) engagé. He has written many books of poetry, translated into half a dozen languages and often anthologized in French and Spanish. His Anthologie personnelle won the Prix Apollinaire in 1993 and his novel Hadriana dans tous mes rêves (1988) the Prix Renaudot, both in France.

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

PUROSHOTTAM LAXMAN DESHPANDE (1919-2000), writer, performer, and the “conscience” of Maharashtra, his state in India. A beloved figure, he was the winner of most of the prestigious state and national awards in his home country.

LEONE DE’SOMMI PORTALEONE (1527-1592), a Mantuan Jew who wrote in Italian and Hebrew. (See Erith Jaffe-Berg’s introductory essay to her translation of his bilingual verse treatise, In Defense of Women.)

BERNART DE VENTADORN (?1130-?1195), one of the best known Provençal troubadours, was born in Aquitaine. Forty-five of his lyrics have survived, and nineteen of the melodies he composed.

VIMALA DEVI was born in 1932 in Britona, Goa and currently resides in Barcelona, Spain. Her published works include the short story collections Monção (1963) and A Cidade e Os Dias (2009), several volumes of poetry and the two volume Literatura Indo-Portuguesa (co-authored with Manuel de Seabra), which won the prestigious Prémio Abílio Lopes do Rego of the Academia das Ciências de Lisboa.

NUALA NÍ DHOMHNAILL was born in 1952 and grew up in the Irish-speaking areas of Kerry and Tipperary. She has published three collections of poems in Irish, An Deaolg Droighin (1981), Féar Suaithinseach (1984), and Feis (1991). She has published two bilingual collections with Wake Forest University Press: Pharoah’s Daughter, with translations by thirteen of Ireland’s leading writers, and The Astrakhan Cloak, translated by Paul Muldoon. She was the 2002-2003 Neilson Professor at Smith College as well as a fellow at Louise W. and Edmund J. Kahn Liberal Arts Institute.

ALINA DIACONÚ was born in Bucharest, Romania, but left the country for Argentina with her parents in 1959. She is an Argentine citizen and writes principally in Spanish. In addition to poetry, she has published essays, short stories, and seven novels (all in Spanish). Her novels and essays have been translated into French and Romanian, and a few of her short stories have been translated into English. These poems, from her 2005 collection discovered Intimidades del Ser have not previously been translated.

FIROUZEH DIANAT is a PhD candidate and lecturer at Morgan State University. Her interests include nineteenth and twentieth century American, African American, and Persian literatures.

ALEXANDER DICKOW is a translator, poet and scholar of 20th- and 21st-Century French and Francophone literature, originally from Moscow, Idaho. He teaches French culture, language and literature at Virginia Tech, and has published a book of poetry in French and English, Caramboles (Paris: Argol Editions, 2008) and a scholarly volume, Le Poète innombrable: Blaise Cendrars, Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob (Paris: Hermann Editions, 2015). Forthcoming works include full-length translations of Sylvie Kandé, Gustave Roud, and Alain Damasio; a long poem or treatise entitled Rhapsodie curieuse (diospyros kaki), and more. You can learn more about Dickow or get in touch with him through his website, http://www.alexdickow.net.

ALESSANDRA DI MAIO teaches at the University of Palermo, Italy, and is currently Visiting Professor at UCLA, where she is also an Andrew W. Mellon Post-doctoral Fellow in the program “Cultures in Transnational Perspective.” She earned a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and an Italian doctorate in Literary Sciences from the University of Bari, Italy. Her area of specialization includes migratory, post-colonial, diasporic and black studies, with particular attention to the formation of national and transnational cultural identities. Among her publications are Tutuola at The University: The Italian Voice of a Yoruba Ancestor (Rome: Bulzoni, 2000); the translation and introduction to Nuruddin Farah’s Rifugiati (Rome: Meltemi, 2003); and the collection An African Renaissance (Palermo: Kalós, 2006). She is currently working on a book-length project on the narration of immigration to Italy, for which she has been the recipient of a MacArthur Research and Writing grant.

LAURA DI POFI was born in Pontecorvo (Frosinone) in 1975. She holds a Laurea in English and Russian from the Università degli Studi di Cassino. She teaches courses in Italian language and culture for Smith College and Middlebury College programs in Florence, Italy. She has published articles on Russian immigrants (“Stili e temi della terza emigrazione russa in Zinovy Zinik. La lingua come umiliazione e come riscatto” in Trame in letteratura comparata III, 2003, Università di Cassino) and on teaching Italian language to advanced-level American students in Italy.

PAOLO DI STEFANO, born in Avola (Syracuse, Sicily) in 1956, is a correspondent for the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, for which he was chief editor of the cultural section. After receiving his degree with Cesare Segre at the University of Pavia, he began his career in journalism as managing editor of the Corriere del Ticino in Lugano. He has worked for the publisher Einaudi, and for the daily La Repubblica.

EMILY DICKINSON (1830-1886), the reclusive Amherst poet underestimated during her lifetime, is now considered one of the greatest poets in American literature and perhaps the most original.

CLAIRE DIENES is a graduate of Smith College with an MA from Columbia and a maitrise from the Sorbonne, both in art history. This is her first attempt at translation.

SUSAN M. DIGIACOMO is a cultural anthropologist who received her PhD in anthropology in 1985 from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She translates Catalan anthropology into English and American anthropology into Catalan, and is currently at work on an edited volume that approaches translation as an ethnographic practice. Having taught at several colleges and universities in the US, she now works in Barcelona at the Fundació Sant Joan de Déu as a medical editor/translator, and is an occasional visiting professor in the medical anthropology doctoral program at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona.

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 mainstream, 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.

POLINA DIMCHEVA DIMOVA was born in Varna, Bulgaria in 1977 and began her undergraduate study at the English and American Studies Department at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria. She then transferred to Smith College where she graduated with a BA in Comparative Literature in 2001. While at Smith, she devoted a considerable amount of time to music, taking classes in violin performance and composition. In her senior year, she studied the literature of exile as a Kahn Institute Student Fellow. She will be attending the doctoral program in Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley this fall. There she will work in English, German, and Slavic literatures, concentrating on poetry and searching for the sources of human creativity.

SOTIRIS DIMITRIOU (1955- ) was born in Thesprotia, Greece. He has published a collection of poems, Feeling the Way (1985); a novella, May Your Name Ever Be Heard (1993); and four collections of short stories, Christaki, My Child (1987), The Kid from Thessaloniki (1989), The Vein in Her Neck (1998), which won the Diavazo Magazine Book Critics Award for best short story collection in 1999, and The Slow March of the Good. His work has been translated into many languages and has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in Greece and abroad.

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

TOVE IRMA MARGIT DITLEVSEN (1917 – 1976) is one of the most important Danish writers of the 20th century. Born in the working-class Vesterbro neighborhood of Copenhagen, she has written over 30 books of poetry, novels, short stories, and memoirs, many of which deal with autobiographical material—her childhood in Vesterbro, her struggles with substance abuse, her failed marriages, and her time in psychiatric institutions. While Ditlevsen is taught in schools across Denmark, until very recently, her work has often been dismissed by the academic community as “bekendelseslitteratur” (confessional writing). In the past few years, however, Ditlevsen has been revived as an important figure for 20-century Danish literature and feminism. Many of her works have recently been reprinted and the contemporary poet, Olga Ravn, has assembled a collection of her “forgotten works.” Despite Ditlevsen’s prevalence in the Danish literary canon, only two of her novels (The Faces, Early Spring) have been translated into English and both are currently out-of-print.

JOHN S. DIXON is a Research Fellow and Professor at the Center of British Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick, England.

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.

DJURA was born in the Kabyle region of northern Algeria and moved to France at the age of five. She began her career as a filmmaker in 1974. She soon went on to found an all-female musical group, Djurdjura, whose original songs were inspired by the folkloric oral tradition of the Berber people. After the success of her first book Le Voile du silence (1990), Djura wrote her autobiographical La Saison des narcisses (Michel Lafon 1993). Engaging and compelling, the narratives that constitute this autobiography provide an inside look into the lives of North African Muslim women. Through her writing and the songs she continues to perform today, Djura transmits an important message to her female compatriots, emphasizing that the members of her group sing out loud what their mothers hummed quietly to themselves.

ALFRED DÖBLIN (1878-1957) Practising neurologist as well as prolific writer, he emigrated from Berlin to Zurich in 1933, then to Paris and in 1940 to the US. Returned to Germany in 1945. Best known for his monumental proletarian novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, the basis for H.W. Fassbinder’s impressive sixteen-hour TV series of the same name.

MARÍA DO CEBREIRO (Santiago de Compostela, 1976). She is perhaps the contemporary Galician poet who is best known outside Galicia, as much of her work has been translated into English and published in the UK by Shearsman Books. Hers is the Introduction to the P.E.N Clube edition of Galician Poetry in 2001.

ALCINA LUBICH DOMENCQ (1953- ) Guatemalan writer, author of the novel El espejo en el espejo: La noble sonrisa del petro and the collection of short stories Intoxicada.

HILDE DOMIN was born in 1909, left Germany for graduate studies in Italy in 1932 and eventually sought refuge in the Dominican Republic, where she lived with her husband until her return to Germany in 1954. During the following five decades until her death in 2006, she became one of the celebrated voices among German writers.

PATRICK DONNELLY‘s collection of poems is The Charge (Ausable Press, 2003). He is an Associate Editor at Four Way Books, and a faculty fellow in Poetry at Colby College in 2007-2008. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Massachusetts Review. With Stephen Miller he has translated the sixteenth century Japanese Nô play Shunzei Tadanori.

GUSTAV DORÉ (1832-1883) French illustrator and engraver, “le gamin de génie,” his gallery in London was a sustained success. He is responsible for several series of remarkable, somewhat mystica etchings for famous literary works, especially Coleridge’s “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” and Dante’s Divine Comedy.

ARIEL DORFMAN Born in Argentina in 1942, Chilean citizen and supporter of Salvator Allende, he came to live in the U.S. in 1973 after his exile. He now teaches at Duke University and is the author of world-renowned novels and plays, including The Widows and Death and the Maiden. His works have appeared in translation in many languages.

MARCELLO D’ORTA (1953-2013) was born in Naples and taught elementary school in and around Naples for fifteen years before devoting himself exclusively to writing. Among his many books are collections of compositions written by some of his pupils. The first and best-known of these is Io speriamo che me la cavo (Me, Let’s Hope I’ll Manage), which became a bestseller when it was published in 1990. It was made into a movie in 1992 with the same Italian title in 1992 (released in the US in 1994 under the title Ciao, Professore).

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

JOACHIM DU BELLAY (c. 1522-1560) French poet and critic, member of te Pleiade and friend of Ronsard. He was involved in furious polemics during his lifetime. At one time a canon of Notre Dame in Paris, where he is buried.

PATRICIA DUBRAVA is a writer and translator whose translations from Spanish have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, most recently Sudden Fiction Latino, Norton, 2010. Her website is www.patriciadubrava.com.

FERIDA DURAKOVIC is a Bosnian poet who has published five collections of poems and two children’s books in her native Serbo-Croatian, and her work has been translated into Greek, Slovenian, Turkish, German, and Finnish. In 1998 White Pine Press brought out Heart of Darkness, her first collection to appear in English, translated by Amela Simic and Zoran Mutic.

JOHN DUVAL has received two translation awards from the Academy of American Poets, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a grant from the Washington, D.C., Council of the Arts for Banishèd Productions to stage readings from his From Adam to Adam: Seven Old French Plays. Most recently, Kathleen DuVal and he have published the anthology, Voices of a Continent: A Colonial America Reader, with Rowman and Littlefield. In 2010-2011 he will be at Wolfson College in Cambridge, England in to complete a translation of The Song of Roland for Hackett Publishers.

STANISLAV DYGAT (1914-1978), a Polish writer of short stories, novels, and screenplays, wrote and published through the Communist publishing apparatus. Nevertheless, he was very critical of the Communist system, not from the capitalist point of view but from the point of view of Poland’s ancient traditions of democracy and intellectual freedom. At times his work disappeared from bookstores and libraries. These pieces, from Rainy Evenings, were written in the 1950s and ’60s.