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Biographies of Contributors

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MERIEM PAGÈS is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and Stanford University, where she obtained an M.A. in History. She received an MA and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, focusing on the image of the Assassins in medieval Europe. She currently teaches medieval English literature at Keene State College.

HALYNA PAHUTIAK was born in the Drohobych region of western Ukraine in 1958. She is the author of 13 books of prose, mostly in the genre of fantasy and critics often refer to her as the Ukrainian Stephen King. She won the Shevchenko Prize in 2010 for her 2006 novel The Minion of Dobromyl, which combines a fantasy plot interwoven with over 800 years of Ukrainian history. Her latest novel The Enchanted Musicians was published in 2010.

ROBERT PAINTER studied classical languages at Colby College (Maine) and the University of St. Andrews (Scotland), and Linguistics at the State University of New York, Buffalo. He has translated works from German and Old Icelandic into English for journals of literary translation and published a new English translation of Faroe-Islander Saga in 2015. He teaches Linguistics at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.

EPITÁCIO PAIS (1928–2009) was part of the last generation of Lusophone short story writers. He was a primary school teacher by profession and lived in the village of Batim, in the Tiswadi taluka of Goa.

ALDO PALAZZESCHI (1895-1974) Florentine wit, poet and novelist, he started out as a member of the Futurist Movement led by the poet Marinetti which embraced a fusion of sculpture, painting and literature with modern technology and the dynamics of the twentieth century machine age. Withdrawing when the Futurists became linked to the rise of Fascism, he devoted himself to the novel, shuttling between Paris and Rome. A major novel, The Sisters Materassi, has been superbly translated by Angus Davidson in 1953.

PILAR PALLARÉS (Culleredo, 1957) holds a BA in Galician and Portuguese Language and Literature. She writes essays and literary criticism and has published several books of poetry. Her work has been translated into French, English, Italian, Castellano and Catalan. Her book Leopardo son, published in 2011, starts with a quote from the scholar Carvalho Calero “Un leopardo son que lese a Biblia” [I must be a leopard to read the Bible]. The English translation of this book, by Carys Evans-Corrales, will appear in 2013.

THALIA PANDIRI is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Smith College. She holds a PhD from Columbia University and is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. She has been Editor-in Chief of Metamorphoses since 1999. Her current translation project is an anthology of selected of short stories and a novella by Greek author Christoforos Milionis.

LEIF PANDURO (1923-1977) began his professional life as a Danish dentist. After spending seven years in Sweden without being able to make a living, he returned to Denmark. Fortunately, when he tried to supplement his meager income from dentistry by writing, his success was almost instantaneous. Panduro became one of Denmark’s foremost twentieth-century authors, distinguishing himself primarily as an absurdist playwright, script writer, and novelist beloved for social satire and memorable characters. In addition to many other prizes and awards, he received the Golden Laurels for 1970 and the Danish Academy’s Literature Prize for 1971. The story “A Ride in the Night” was published in 1965, the year in which Panduro became a full-time writer.

ISABELLA PANFIDO was born in Venice. She hosts a nationwide radio program dedicated to poetry and writes a cultural coumn for the Corriere del Veneto-Corriere della Sera.

ATHINA PAPADAKI A leftist and a feminist, Papadaki writes in the tradition of Elytis and Ritsos; she uses a particularly Greek form of surrealism, centered on the concrete realities of daily life. Drawing on liturgical and mythological references, and on the many levels of spoken Greek, she evokes a rich literary and popular tradition while always staying close to the experience and speech of a wide audience.

TEJAS PARASHER was born in New Delhi, India and was raised there as well as in the United States and Canada. He is currently an English Literature student at the Univesity of Toronto.

PARASHURAM is the pen-name of Rajshekhar Bose (1880-1960). The sixth child of Chandrashekhar and Lakhimani Debi, he spent his early childhood in Darbhangha. Since childhood he showed a keen interest in science and grew up to pursue higher education in Chemistry. He also obtained a degree in Law but gave it up for good after three days of attending court. His passion became his profession as he joined an indigenous chemical company famously known as Bengal Chemicals & Pharmaceuticals started by Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray, as a chemist and soon rose to managerial position. It was only at an advanced age that he embarked on his literary career, writing comic and satirical stories that established him as one of the greatest humorists of twentieth-century Bengal. He has also composed essays and Chalantika, the first monolingual dictionary of Bengal. His literary merit has been recognized through different prizes and awards.

JULIO PAREDES was born in Bogota in 1957. He received his BA in Hispanic Literature from the University of the Andes, Bogota and his MA in Medieval Spanish Literature from Complutense University, Madrid. He was awarded two writing grants from Colcultura (Colombia’s N.E.A.) in 1992 and 1994. He published two collections of short stories, Salon de Jupiter y otros cuentos (1994) and Guia para extraviados (Norma Publishers, 1997). He is currently Editorial Director of Reference Books for Norma Publishers.

JASON PARK is a writer and translator. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and currently a PhD candidate in English at the University of Waterloo in Canada. His fiction has appeared in Prism International, Fiction, and elsewhere. He won a PEN Translation Fund grant and a KLTI translation grant for his translation of Song Yong’s story collection.

JOONSEONG PARK was born and raised in Seoul, Korea. He came to the United States in 1994, and is now attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His fiction has appeared in Fiction, Green Mountains Review, American Letters & Commentary, RE:AL, Hawaii Pacific Review.

VALERIA PARRELLA (1974- ) was born in Torre del Greco (province of Naples) and lives in Naples. Since the publication in 2003 of her debut short story collection, Mosca più balena (Mosquito and Whale), for which she won the Premio Campiello in 2004 for the best debut work, she has been widely regarded as one of Italy’s most exciting young authors. Parrella’s short stories have appeared in several anthologies and numerous journals; her second short story collection, Per grazia ricevuta (For Grace Received), was published in 2005. In 2007 she published Il verdetto (The Verdict), a novel, followed in 2008 by another novel, Lo spazio bianco (The White Space), and a theatre piece in 2009, Ciao maschio.

RENÉE VON PASCHEN. Born in Canada, she is a professional literary translator and poet, currently completing a doctoral dissertation at the University of Vienna, Austria. She has translated numerous Austrian writers from H.C. Artmann to Stefan Zweig, as well as Canadian poets, such as Herménégilde Chiasson and Carle Coppens. Her literary translations have been published in Europe, the USA, Canada and Australia. Renée’s own poetry has been published in the USA and Canada in journals such as Möbiusand Ellipse (with French translations).

GIOVANNI PASCOLI is still beloved in modern Italy for his pastoral poems which won him the accolade of “the last son of Virgil” by d’Annunzio. He was among the many of his generation guided by patriotic fervor, though a brief incarceration in his youth turned him from revolutionary zeal to the celebration of love and the peace of village life.

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI (Bologna 1922-Rome 1975), best known internationally as a pioneering cinema director, was also a novelist, poet, editor, translator, and prolific and scholary critic. His early (1942) Poesie a Casarsa and especially the massive anthology, Poesia dialettale del Novecento, (which he co-edited with Mario Dell’Arco and for which Pasolini did the lion’s share of the work, first published in 1952) constituted a turning point in the study, collection, and renascence of dialect poetry. For his poetry, he chose the dialect of his mother’s birthplace, Casarsa (Friuli).

BORIS PASTERNAK (1890-1960) Russian poet and novelist. Received Nobel Prize for his novel: Doktor Zhivago in 1957, but was forced by the Communist government to renounce it.

RAJEEV S. PATKE is Associate Professor of English at the National University of Singapore, where he teaches courses on postcolonial literature and coordinates the postgraduate program in literature. His books include The Long Poems of Wallace Stevens (Cambridge University Press, 1985), and the co-edited book Institutions in Cultures: Theory and Practice (Rodopi, 1996). He has also written several essays on Asian poetry, including “Indian Poetry since Independence” for the Oxford Illustrated History of Indian Writing (forthcoming).

CHUS PATO (Ourense, 1955) holds a BA in Geography and History from the University of Santiago and is a secondary school teacher. She has published several poetry books and essays in magazines and journals. She participates in live performances and video productions.

DAVID PATTERSON is the Emeritus President of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.

CESARE PAVESE (1908-1950) was one of a group of anti-Fascist Italian writers who congregated in the cities of the North and produced a flowering of Italian letters unprecedented since the Renaissance. Some, like Pavese, were exiled by Mussolini (in imitation of Augustus Caesar) to outlying provinces. All were denied permanent employment for refusing to sign oaths or to join the Fascio, and made shift with translating and editing. The effect on Pavese was devastating, though he continued until his suicide to write original and significant works.

FRANCK PAVLOFF published his first book, Le Vent des fous, at age 53. Fourteen more have followed since then, including children’s stories and poetry. A specialist in child psychology and children’s rights, Mr. Pavloff spent considerable time in Asia, in Africa, and in the classrooms of rural France. In 2002, four years after its original publication, the specter of fascism evoked by Jean-Marie Le Pen’s surprising success in the first round of the presidential election helped to make Matin brun a best-seller. Its publisher, Le Cheyne, whose sales figures before then totalled some 200,000 books, mostly poetry, would eventually sell five times that many of Matin brun alone, priced at one euro.

KONSTANTIN PAVLOV was born in Popovo, later Vitoshko, now at the bottom of Studena Lake, Bulgaria in 1933. He studied law at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria. He was an editor of Radio Sofia, the Publishing House Balgarski Pisatel, and Literaturen Front. He also worked in Bulgarian cinematography. Poet, satirist, and screenplay writer, he wrote the screenplays of many Bulgarian movies, and published six books of poems: Satires (1960), Verses (1965), Old Things (1983), Appearance (1989), You, Sweet Agony (1991), and the anthology of his poetry Elegiac Optimism (1993). For about twenty years, he was banned from the public literary space in Bulgaria, persecuted, fired, and left in isolation. His works were frowned upon and, consequently, consciously overlooked and not published. He was a contemporary of the sixties but the rejection of his poems at that time dislocated him into the nineties when his poetry could finally be published and read.

IHOR PAVLYUK was born in the Volyn region of Ukraine in January 1967 and studied at the St. Petersburg Military University, which he left in order to pursue his career as a writer. He was, as a result, sentenced to a period of hard labor in the Taiga but continued to write as best he could, driven by a nostalgia for his Ukrainian homeland, until he was liberated by the fall of the Soviet Union. His work is marked by a simplicity of diction and emotional honesty.

OKOT P’BITEK (1931-1982) was one of Africa’s leading literary icons. He was born at Guru in Northern Uganda where he received his early education before joining the famous King’s College, Budo. He later trained as a teacher at Mbarara Teachers College. He studied Education and law at Bristol in the UK and later Literature and Anthropology at Oxford University. During his long and illustrous university career, he lectured at Makerere and Nairobi where he organized many theatre activities and arts festivals. His best known works include: Song of Lawino: A Lament and Song of Ocol; Song of Malaya, and Song of a Prisoner. He is also the author of African Religion in Western Scholarship, Horn of My Love, Africa’s Cultural Revolution and Artist the Ruler.

JOHN PEATE is a doctoral candidate in Translation Studies at the University of Salford, UK. He has BA degrees in both English and Arabic from the University of Leeds, UK and an MA in Translation Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. He has also studied Arabic in Fez, Cairo and Damascus.

EMMA PEDREIRA (A Coruña, 1978) holds a BA in Filoloxa Hispánica from the University of A Coruña. She is a poet and a novelist and has been awarded literary prices for her poems and her fiction.

XI PEILAN 席佩蘭 (1760-1820?) was a native of what is today Changshu with precocious poetic abilities who taught the art of poetry to her husband after marrying him. She was one of the most brilliant poets of the mid-Qing, and foremost among the women who became students of the poet-critic Yuan Mei.

ALDO PELLEGRINI (1903-1973) Recognized as one of the most important Spanish-language poet of the twentieth century, he was also a dramatist, essayist, and art critic, who in 1926 was one of the founders of the first surrealist group in Argentina. His critical work and translations influenced the development of Latin American literature.

TANIA PELLEGRINI is Professor of Brazilian Literature at Universidade Federal de Sao Carlos in Sao Carlos, Sao Paulo, Brazil. Her research interests include literary theory; Brazilian Literature; sociology; literature, history and society.

IRENE PERCIALI is a graduate student in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her translations of the poet Gabriel Stanescu, done with Adam J. Sorkin, have appeared in the cultural magazine Apostrof in Cluj, in the anthology of Romanian poets edited by Stanescu with Sorkin, Day After Night, and in the journal International Notebook of Poetry.

DEBORAH ANN PERCY earned the MFA in Creative Writing at Western Michigan University. Her plays, and those written in collaboration with her husband, Arnold Johnston, have won awards, publication, and production nationwide. Their books include the plays, Rasputin in New York and Beyond Sex, and (with Dona Rosu) translations of Romanian playwright Hristache Popescu’s Night of the Passions and Sons of Cain and the Epilogue. They have edited a collection entitled The Art of the One Act (New Issues Press); and a collection of their own one-acts, Duets: Love Is Strange (March Street Press), appeared in 2008. Ms. Percy is a member of the Dramatists Guild and the American Literary Translators Association.

LOIS PEREIRO (Monforte de Lemos, 1958- Vigo 1996) is one of the few poets with post-modern leanings in Galician poetry. He was an excellent translator, wrote lyrics for punk bands but published little of his own poetry during his life. One of the many victims of the adulterated grapeseed oil, which took many lives in Spain in the 1970s and left many more crippled, he died in 1996.

CAMILO PESSANHA (1867-1926) published only one book in his lifetime, Clepsidra, but he is an important symbolist and transitional figure heralding modernism. He spent much of his adult life in Macau, to which he returned before his death. His poetry fluctuates between concrete reality and symbolic forms of a personal nature.

FERNANDO PESSOA (1888-1935), the greatest Portuguese poet of modern times, wrote both poetry and prose under dozens of names. His three most famous “heteronyms” are Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos, alter egos whom Pessoa describes as full-fledged individuals, each with his own style, who wrote things he himself was unwilling or unable to write. It has been said that “the four greatest Portuguese poets of modern times are Fernando Pessoa.”

PAMELA PETRO, author of Sitting Up With the Dead: A Storied Journeythrough the American South, lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she works as a full-time writer. She has contributed to the New York Times travel section, Atlantic Monthly, Islands, and Forbes publications.

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

ELIZABETH PETROFF Is the editor of Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature(1986). Her latest book is Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism. She teachees Comparative Literature at the U. of Massachusetts.

MIKHAIL PETROV (1935- ) Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Ioffe Physical Technical Institute in Russia. A friend of Brodsky for more than thirty years, a specialist on Brodsky’s poetry. He has been conducting research at Princeton University.

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

LUDMILA PETRUSHEVSKAYA (1938- ) has been called “one of Russia’s finest living writers,” and her work has been widely translated. The Time: Night was short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize and translated into over twenty languages. In 2002 she received Russia’s prestigious Triumph Prize for lifetime achievement. Other works include Immortal Love; On the Way to Eros; The Mystery of the House; Real-Life Tales; Find Me, Sleep.

ALFONSO PEXEGUEIRO (Ponteareas, 1948) is one of the founders of the group “Rompente.” He lived in Barcelona between 1985 and 2000, and was a participant in the international festival at the Teatre Grec, with the anthology “Blasfemias de silencio” (Blaspemies of Silence).

SERGE PEY was born in Toulouse in 1950. He writes his texts on sticks and he realizes ritual installations of poems. Writer, teacher, oral improviser, he divides his time between Toulouse and Mexico. Serge Pey is also the founder of the Direct Poetry Festival, and of the reviews Tribu and Emeute. He has published over a dozen books, notably La definition de l’aigle, Notre Dame la noire ou l’Evangile du Serpent, La mere du cercle. http://www.wizya.net/pey.htm

INA PFITZNER received a PhD in French Literature from Louisiana State University. She continued work in Paris this summer, with a scholarship from the Institut de Washington, on the subject of exile and translation in works by Panaït Istrati, Samuel Beckett, and Paul Celan. Her literary translations have appeared in Chelsea and Exquisite Corpse.

VU TRONG PHUNG (1912-1939) is a major voice in modern Viernamese literature of the early twentieth century. His writings often expose and criticize the ludicrous, corrupt and decadent lifestyles and behavior of the Vietnamese people who attempted to adopt and practice Europeanization in their own lives. Recurring issues addressed in his fiction are concepts of progress, civilization, social reform and modernity, which were introduced into colonized Vietnam by the French colonists. Vu Trong Phung is considered the Balzac of early twentieth-century Vietnam under the French colonial occupation, and his works are best categorized under satire or parody. His most famous novel, Dumb Luck (1936), has been translated into English by Peter Zinoman and Nguyen Nguyet Cam (U of Michigan P, 2002).

ADEODATO PIAZZA NICOLAI, teacher, poet, essayist, and translator, was born in Vigo de Cadore, provincia de Belluno, in 1944 and emigrated to Chicago with his family in 1959. He holds a BA from Wabash College and an M.A. from the University of Chicago. In 1996 he retired from Inland Steel after thirty years with the company, and has since devoted himself full-time to writing and translating. He has published poetry, translations and essays in Italian and American journals. Among the numerous books he has authored: La visita di Rebecca (1979), I due volti di Janus (1980), and La doppia finzione (Insula editore, 198). In addition to original poetry in Ladino, Italian, and English, his published and forthcoming translations of a wide range of poets into English are from the Ladino dialect of Cadore, from Venetian, from the dialect of Friuli, and from standard Italian. He has also translated poems by Adrienne Rich into Italian, and is preparing an anthology (in Italian) of African-American women poets, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan, Maya Angelou, Rita Dove, and others; for this project he has received a Sonia Raiziss Giop Foundation Grant in Translating, sponsored by the National Italian-American Foundation. Currently he lives in Italy, and is active as a lecturer, instructor, translator. He is a member of the Comitato Scientifico dell’Istituto Culturale delle Comunità dei Ladini Storici delle Dolomiti Bellunesi and also conducts workshops on the Ladino dialect of Cadore.

NINA PICK is the author of a chapbook, Ã€ Luz. She is a founding editor of Mount Vision Press and an editor of the Inverness Almanac. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as The Bombay Gin, Tule Review, Arion, Stone Canoe, and ISLE, online as part of the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project, and in various anthologies. She holds a masters in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley and a masters in Counseling Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute.

MARCIN PIEKOSZEWSKI holds an MA in English literature from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and has worked on translations of American playwright John Stepping’s works for the Polish theatre.

PINDAR (ca. 522-442 B.C.) Greek lyric poet, employed by many winners at the Olympic Games to celebrate their victories, exercised a great influence on subsequent Latin poets. The English ode form is based on his odes.

GISÈLE PINEAU Born in Paris (1956); a truly transatlantic writer. As in her own childhood, her fictional characters go back and forth between France and the Caribbean, French, and Creole, hope and disillusionment. Her novels include La Grande Drive des esprits (1993), L’Espérance-macadam (1995), L’Exil selon Julia (1996), L’Âme prêtée aux oiseaux (1998); she has published an essay, Femmes des Antilles (1998), and two children’s books.

RICHARD J. PIOLI Has translated modern Italian writers for various publications and has translated and edited the collection entitled Stung by Salt and War: Creative Texts of the Italian Avant-Gardist F.T. Marinetti (1987). He is currently working on a translation of the poetry of D’Annunzio.

LUIGI PIRANDELLO (1867-1936) is a pivotal figure in twentieth-century literature. His prolific work includes plays, novels, literary theory, hundreds of short stories, and poetry. He is best known to the general public as the author of avant-garde plays including Six Characters in Search of an Author, Right You Are (If You Think So), and Henry IV, which question the distinction between reality and fiction, and examine the difficulty of arriving at an objective truth.

BARBARA POGACNIK is a Slovenian poet and translator whose poems have been published or are forthcoming in Literatura, Nova Revija, Apokalipsa, Sodobnost in Slovenia, VERSUs/m (Romania) and Profemina (Belgrade). Her poetry collection Inundations is just out from Mladinska knjiga in Slovenia. She lives in Ljubjlana, Slovenia.

SYLVIA PLATH American poet, author of The Bell Jar and two books of poetry, The Colossus and Ariel, which have continued to attract critical acclaim. Her troubled life and suicide in 1963 at the age of thirty-one not only cut short a brilliant career, but have also colored subsequent criticism. Her marriage to Britain’s poet laureate, Ted Hughes, has recently been celebrated by him in Birthday Letters.

VICTORIA OFFREDI POLETTO was born and raised in England to Italian parents. After teaching and working as a translator in Europe, the Middle East, and America, she now focuses on translating the works of emerging women writers in Italy. Together with Giovanna Bellesia Contuzzi she has co-translated works by Dacia Maraini, Igiaba Scego, Gabriella Ghermandi, and Cristina Ali Farah among others.

SIMONA POPESCU teaches French at the University of Bucharest and has published three collections of poetry: The Xylophone and Other Poems (Editions Litera, 1990), Juventus (Editions Cartea Romneascu, 1994); Night or Day (Editions Paralela ’45, 1998) and Operations in Green (Editions Cartea Romneascu, 2006).

AARON POOCHIGIAN’s translations, with introduction and notes, of Sappho’s poems and fragments are due out from Penguin Classics in 2009. His translations of Aeschylus, Aratus, and Apollonius of Rhodes will appear in the forthcoming Norton Anthology of Greek Literature in Translation, edited by Rachel Hadas. His original poems and translations have appeared in numerous journals, including Chronogram: A Journal of Arts and Culture, Classical Journal, The Dark Horse, Smartish Pace, and Unsplendid. He holds a PhD in Classics from the University of Minnesota and is currently D.L. Jordon Fellow at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia.

RITVA POOM has translated widely from Finnish and Estonian, especially the Kalevala Mythologyich which she also edited (U. of Indiana, 1989). Her translation of Eeva-Liisa Manner’s Fog Horses earned a Translation Award from the Columbia U. Translation Center, and she is the recipient of the 1993 Translation Award of the American Scandinavian Foundation.

IOAN ES. POP, born in 1958 in northern Romania, received his degree from Baia Mare University in 1983. He taught Romanian language and literature for six years in the small town of Ieud, the starting point for his first volume of poems, Ieudul fara iesire (“Ieud, No Way Out,” Bucharest: Cartea Romaneasca, 1994,), which includes the series “15 oltetului st., room 305” and “the banquet.” That volume won numerous prizes and awards, as did Porcec (a fictitious proper name), from which the “House” series is taken (Bucharest: Carta Romanesca, 1996). In September 1989, Pop moved to Bucharest as a worker in the construction of the infamous Casa Popurului (the People’s House, as the one-time dictator Ceausescu’s palace was known), an experience that inspired a series of poems about “dormitory” conditions for the unmarried workers. In April 1990, he joined the literary magazine Luceafarul and is now senior editor for culture at Ziarul Financiar (“The Financial Journal”). His latest collection, Pantelimon 113 bis (Bucharest: Cartea Romanesca, 1999), won the Poetry Prize of the Union of Romanian Writers, the country’s highest literary award.

ANTONIO PORCHIA (1886-1968) Born in Italy, Porchia lived from 1911 in Buenos Aires, writing in Spanish and working as a potter or carpenter. Voces, from which these aphorisms were taken, appeared in several editions since 1943.

ANTONIO PORPETTA Spanish writer, has published eight books of poetry since 1978 and an anthology. He has won several prizes for poetry. His work has been translated into several languages, the latest a book-length translation of Ardieron ya los sándalos into German.

PHOEBE PORTER received her BA in Spanish from Bryn Mawr College in 1975, her MA (1980) and her PhD (1985) in Hispanic Studies from Brown University. She has taught Spanish at a number of institutions including Wellesley Senior High School, Smith College, Colgate University, and the University of New Hampshire. Her area of specialization is the Modern Spanish Novel with an emphasis on women writers from Spain. Her publications include articles on Emilia Pardo Bazán, Rosalía de Castro, and Benito Perez Galdós. She has also co-authored an anthology of Latin American short stories, Exploraciones imaginativas: Quince cuentos hispanoamericanos (MacMillan), and has translated a Spanish novel into English, Fiesta al noroeste by Ana María Matute (Celebration in the Northwest, Nebraska Press).

POTATO BROTHER is the pseudonym of Yu Kuichao. Born in Donghai (Jiangsu Province) in 1962, he completed his degree in Literature at the China Eastern Normal University (Shanghai) and undertook further studies at Peking University and Nanjing University. He is an editor at Nanjing University Press, and has published poetry since the 1980s, including Quiet Like White Light and Some Ballads.

OLIVER PÖTZSCH was born in 1970 in Munich. After journalism school he worked for the Bavarian State Radio first as a writer and later as a producer of quer, a weekly TV magazine on political and social issues in Bavaria and Germany. His first novel, Die Henkerstochter (The Hangman’s Daughter) was published in 2008, followed rapidly by two more historical thrillers in what promises to be an ongoing saga: Die Henkerstochter und der schwarze Mönch(The Hangman’s Daughter and the Black Monk) in 2009 and Die Henkerstochter und der König der Bettler (The Hangman’s Daughter and the King of the Beggars) in 2010. Pötzsch himself is a member of a “Hangman’s Dynasty,” a family in which this gruesome profession was passed down from father to son from the 16th to the 19th centuries; his webpage has links to the history of executioners, including a family album. His forthcoming historical mystery, Die Ludwig-Verschwörung (The Ludwig Conspiracy) deals with King Ludwig II.

LUZ POZO GARZA (Ribadeo, 1922) has a BA in Romance Philology and taught Spanish Language and Literature in Secondary Schools in Spain. She is the author of a vast number of poetry collections, from O paxaro na boca published in 1952 to Deter o d­a cunha flor in 2009, and an equally large number of literary essays. She founded the poetry journal Nordés in 1975. Since 1996 she has been a member of the Real Academia Galega, and her name has been put forward to the Nobel committee as a candidate for the Literature prize.

ADÉLIA PRADO One of Brazil’s best-known contemporary poets, with six books of poetry to her name, including O Coracao Disparado which won the presitigious Jabuti Prize in 1978. Several of her books, including the chapbook The Headlong Heart have appeared in English translated by Ellen Watson.

MUNSHI PREMCHAND (pen name of Dhanpat Rai Srivastav, 1880-1936) is considered one of the founders of modern Hindi and Urdu prose. He was born to struggling middle-class parents near the city of Benares. After he was orphaned at the age of fourteen and forced into an unhappy marriage at fifteen, he spent much of his life in financial and emotional hardship. His first published work, Soz-e-Watan (Passion for a Homeland), a collection of patriotic Urdu stories, earned him the displeasure of the British government. His later writings favored a psychological realism and an acute, almost satirical awareness new to Indian literature. He often criticized the oppression and hypocrisy inherent in India’s social systems, of which he himself had been a victim. Starting in the 1920s he became a staunch supporter of Ghandianism. Premchand’s almost 300 stories are collected in Manasarovar, The Shroud, and Hidden Wealth. His novels include Sevasadan (The House of Service) and the groundbreaking Godaan (The Gift of a Cow).

AISHA PRIGANN is a translator of German and Spanish into English. She currently lives in Barcelona, Spain. She has worked in several translation projects in the areas of art, design, literature, film, and photography, as well as the translation of screenplays. She has written articles for both print and online media.

LYNN PRINCE Co-editor of Metamorphoses. She iss currently working towards a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts.

TAMAE K. PRINDLE holds a PhD in East Asian Literature from Cornell University. She is Oak Professor of East Asian Studies at Colby College in Maine. Her translations include Made in Japan and Other Japanese “Business Novels,” (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1989); Labor Relations: Japanese Business Novels(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994); The Dark side of Japanese Business: Three “Industry Novels” (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1995); On Knowing Oneself Too Well: Selected Poems of Takuboku Ishikawa (Townson, MD. Syllabic Press, 2010).

IAN PROBSTEIN, educated in Russia and in the US, is Assistant Professor of English at Touro College, New York. He holds a PhD in Comparative literature (2000) and an MA in English and Comparative Literature, both from CUNY Graduate Center, New York City, 1995). He has published 7 books of poetry in Russian, 1 in English, and many translations, as well as editing over twenty poetry anthologies He is the first translator into Russian of Thomas Traherne’s poems, and has also translated Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Germany” as well as Complete Poems and Selected Cantos of Ezra Pound in Russian Translation. A Bilingual Edition (St. Petersburg: Vladimir Dahl, 2003), which he edited, with commentary, and of which he is one of the major translators, was named best book of 2003 in Translation and Poetry in Russia. His translations into English of poems by Osip Mandelshtam and Roald Mandelshtam have appeared in numerous journals as has his own poetry.

ALFONSO PROCACCINI, a native of Italy, earned his PhD in Italian Literature in 1975 at Johns Hopkins University, which included two years of study at the University of Florence, Italy. After six years of teaching at Yale University he joined the Smith College faculty in 1981. Among the many courses he has taught in the Italian Department and in the Medieval Studies Program at Smith, he has particularly cherished teaching his full year course in Italian on Dante’s Divina Commedia, and a course in the Comparative Literature Program, “Consuming Passions: Eating/Reading,” focusing on the complex symbolic use and meaning of food in the western literary tradition. He has also directed the Smith Junior Year Abroad in Florence, Italy on numerous occasions. Professor Procaccini’s research and publications include studies on Dante, Boccccio, Alberti, Machiavelli, Galileo, Manzoni, Pirandello, Pavese and Pasolini. He is currently working on a book concerned with the theme of wonder and the poet’s peculiar vision in various Italian authors from Dante to Galileo.

SEXTUS PROPERTIUS (ca. 55 – ca. 15 BCE) looked to Callimachus as a stylistic model and a justification for love elegy as his genre of choice. Most of what we know or believe about Propertius’ life is derived from his poems: he was born into an important provincial family in the hill town of Assisi in Umbria, near Etruscan Perusia (modern Perugia). His father died when he was young, perhaps during the siege of Perugia in 42-40, and his family’s fortune dwindled when their land was confiscated during the proscriptions; yet they remained affluent enough to provide Propertius with a first-rate education at Rome. His first book, variously referred to as the Monobiblos or Cynthia, probably appeared early in 28 BCE; it is addressed to C. Volcacius Tullus, his patron and possible kinsman (Tullus’ family was from Perugia). The book produced a sensation, and Propertius was recruited into the circle of Maecenas and given an abode on the Esquiline; however, he seems not to have fully ‘bought in’ to the Augustan program, and may not have gotten along with Maecenas’ other poets, especially Horace. His second book appeared in or after 26 BCE, Book 3 sometime after 23, and Book 4, which may have been published posthumously, around 16 BCE.

HEIDELINDE PRÜGER was born in Vienna in 1973, earned the degree of Mag. phil. from the University of Klagenfurt with first-class honors in 1998, and is a doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh. Her fields of specialization are Scottish and Austrian literature, and she has received scholarships, prizes and honors for her work. Her first collection of poems, Bilder einer Stimme, was published in 1999 by Bibliothek der Provinz. Her study of William Soutar, The Righteousness of Life, was nominated for the Saltire Scottish First Book of the Year Award. She has published critical articles on a range of authors and subjects, and edited Alex Galloway, At the Year’s Fa : Selected Poems in Scots and English (2000).

DONNA PUCCIANI is the author of three books of poetry: Jumping Off the Train (Orchard House Press), The Other Side of Thunder (Flarestack, UK), and Chasing the Saints (Virtual Artists Collective); a fourth collection is forthcoming. Her work has been published on four continents, in such diverse journals as International Poetry, Poetry Review, Italian-Americana, The Pedestal, Spoon River Poetry, Acumen, Iota, Nebulab, Fifth Wednesday, JAMA, Christianity and Literature; her poems have been translated into Chinese and appeared in various journals in China and Taiwan. She has won awards from the Illinois Arts Council and the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, among others, and has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize.

RONALD PUPPO, born in San Francisco, received his BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his PhD from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 1995. He has published articles in several newspapers and magazines, including Avui, La Vanguardia, and El Diari de Barcelona. His translations from English to Catalan include texts by Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Crevecoeur, and Irving in Independència i unió dels Estats Units d’Amèrica (Barcelona: Llibres de l’Index, 1993) and Karl Popper’s Lògica de la investigació cientifica (Barcelona: Laia, 1985). From Catalan to Castilian to English, he has translated catalogs, songbooks, and a contribution in El Dublin de James Joyce (Barcelona: Destino, 1995). He is Professor of Anglo-Saxon Civilization and Culture at the Faculty of Translation and Interpretation of Osona, part of University Studies of Vic (imminently Universitat de Vic). He is currently working on a full-length English translation of Jacint Verdaguer’s epic Canigó.

ALEXANDER PUSHKIN (1799-1837), whom most Russian readers regard as their greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian poetry, was a French poet before he was a Russian one, and was much influenced by eighteenth-century French poets such as Chénier. Later he was very taken with Byron, but, as his poem on Chénier suggests, his esteem for Chénier seemed to grow as his enthusiasm for Byron waned. The epigraph is from “La Jeune Captive.”