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Biographies of Contributors

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ABDELLATIF LAÂBI was born in Fez, Morocco, in 1942. In 1966 he co-founded Souffles, a journal of literature and politics that was to earn its editor an eight-year prison sentence (from 1972 to 1981) under the authoritarian reign of Hassan II. Once released from jail, Laâbi left Morocco in 1985 and has lived in Paris ever since. In France, Laâbi became a member of the Académie Mallarmé in 1988. A prolific novelist, poet and playwright, he is also the French translator of the Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, the Moroccan poet Abdallah Zrika, the Iraqi poet Abdelawahab Al Bayati and the Syrian novelist Hanna Minna. He has edited numerous anthologies, most notably one of twentieth-century Moroccan poetry. In 2009 he received the Prix Goncourt de la Poésie, and in 2011 the Académie française’s Grand prix de la Francophonie. A translation of his 2004 memoir, The Bottom of the Jar, was published by Archipelago Books in 2012, in a translation by André Naffis-Sahely.

MIKEL LABOA, born in 1934 in Donostia, Gipuzkoa, and by profession a medical doctor and psychiatrist, is nowadays considered, along with Benito Lertxundi, to be one of the most eminent singers of modern Basque music. He has had an enormous influence on contemporary youth. In the 1960s he was one of the founders of the legendary collective of Basque musicians, Ez Dok Amairu (We Are Not Thirteen).

JEAN DE LA CEPPÈDE (1550-1622), French poet and magistrate. In 1608 he was appointed president of the Court of the Exchequer of Provence. His Theoremes spirituels (c.1621) is a two-volume collection of sacred sonnets.

MARÍA LADO (Cee, A Coruña, 1979) started writing poetry as part of the group Batallón Literario da Costa da Morte (Literary Batallion of Finisterre). She is an actress, and frequently called upon to recite her own poetry and that of other poets in Galicia. Among her published poetry collections are casa atlántica, casa cabaré (2002), Nove (2008) and Amantes (2011). Hers is the female voice in the recording included in the present selection.

JEAN DE LA FONTAINE (1621-1695), who has been called “l’Homere des Francais,” died more than 300 years ago, yet his Fables, first published in 1668 and 1678, continue to be appreciated for their charm and worldly wisdom. Drawing first upon the classical models of Aesop and Phaedrus, he gradually expanded the range of his sources and also brought in topical allusions to both the domestic affairs of the court of Louis XIV and France’s role on the larger world stage. Indeed, the shrewdness of his insights makes them applicable even today. Though he was perceived by his contemporaries as absentminded and unable to manage his own affairs, he never lacked patrons who supported him. Fable XIX of Book VIII, “L’avantage de la science,” explicitly celebrates the superiority of his kind of intelligence and wit over that of men seemingly more important and successful.

OLOF LAGERCRANTZ (1911- ) is one of Sweden’s foremost writers, he is a poet, biographer, and critic as well as a political columnist and past editor of Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s largest daily paper. He has offered vivid, memorable treatments of Dante, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Proust, Strindberg as well as of his friend Gunnar Ekelöf, perhaps Sweden’s finest poet.

ISABELLE LAGNY was born in Paris in 1961. She studied Medicine, Neurosciences, as well as the History and Philosophy of Science. After a period of research in biology, she assumed responsibilities as a doctor in the workplace and also began studies in music, singing and the theatre. In addition, her interests were directed to writing poetry and narratives and producing a corpus of photographic works. In 1996 she met the Iraqi poet and actor, Salah Al Hamdani. She began a long collaboration translating his prose and poetic texts written in Arabic into French, an experience that would influence her own writing (Journal derrière le givre (Journal Behind the Frost), Harmattan, 2002 ; Rendez-vous dans quinze jours (Rendez-vous in Two Weeks), narratives submitted for publication; Thym brûlé (Burnt Thyme), poems submitted for publication, and other texts as yet unpublished.)

YANICK LAHENS was born in Haiti, and is an author and critic who studied at the Université de Paris and taught at the École Normale Supérieure of Haiti when she returned there. She has published essays: l’Exil. Entre l’ancrage et la fuite: l’ecrivain haïtien. Port-au-Prince: Éditions Henri Deschamps, 1990; short stories, Tante Résia et les dieux. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994 and La petite corruption, Port-au-Prince: Éditions Mémoire, 1999 and Paris: Le Serpent à Plumes, 2001, which also published Dans la maison du père in 2000. Her work has been awarded a prize in Germany, the Literatur Preis.

SUHEIL LAHER is a doctoral candidate in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. He holds a BS in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MS from Marshall University, and an MA in Islamic Studies from Boston University, where he has also worked as a lecturer of Modern Standard Arabic. Since 1998, he has served as Muslim Chaplain at MIT.

JOSEPH LAKE Professor of Russian at the University of Massachusetts. A Slavic linguist: his concerns have been primarily in the area of Russian intonation and grammatical features which it determines. He is also active in the arena of religious studies.

THACH LAM (1909-1942) was a member of the Self-Strength Literary Group (1932-1945), which promoted the New Poetry movement, individualism in literature, French-influenced romanticism, and modernism. The Self-Strength Literary Group condemned feudalism and Confucian values that suffocated personal pursuit of happiness. Thach Lam is most known for his clear narrative style and the subtlety of his characters’ emotions. His fiction differs from that of other members of the Self-Strength Literary Group because he prefers to focus on the life of the common, working-class people in the countryside, and he does not romanticize reality. Literature, to him, must condemn social ills and help people live morally. His childhood was lived in poverty, and he died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-three.

ESTELA LAMAT, a Chilean poet associated with the so-called “novisima” generation, is the author of Sangre Seca (Contrabando del bando en contra, 2005), Yo, La Peor de Todas (2006), and the forthcoming Colmillo molido, which will complete the trilogy.

INGRID LANSFORD is a professional translator with a PhD in English, who has published many short story and several book translations from German and Danish. She received the Leif and Inger Sjöberg Prize of the American-Scandinavian Foundation in 2004 and Danish government grants in 2007 and 2011.

CHRISTOPHER LARKOSH is an Associate Professor in the Department of Portuguese at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. He specializes in Lusophone and comparative literatures, literary and cultural theory, translation studies, and studies in ethnicity, migration, and citizenship. He also directs the UMass-Dartmouth Summer Program in Portuguese. A few of his published articles include “Translating Multilingual Life” (Flusser Studies 7, 2008), “Allophone Presences: In the ‘Here-and-Now’ of the Humanities” (UMass-Dartmouth, 2007), as well as other articles in TTR, TOPIA, Contemporary French & Francophone Studies/Sites, Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies, Social Dynamics, and The Translator. He recently published Re-Engendering Translation (Routledge, 2011).

CARROL LASKER holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and is an Assistant Professor of Speech and Theater at CUNY’s New York City Technical College. Born and raised in South Africa, she has published widely on African literature and has translated many works from Afrikaans and Kaaps. These include the poetry and drama of Adam Small as well as Arthur Nuthall Fula’s The Golden Magnet. Her current project is recording and translating Black South African women’s narratives.

ELSE LASKER-SCHÜLER Born in Elberfield, Germany in 1869. She was primarily a poet—Gottfried Benn, in 1952, called her the greatest lyric poet that Germany had ever had. She wrote fiction as well, and plays, and she illustrated much of her work herself. She received the Kleist prize in 1932, shortly before she was forced to emigrate, first to Zurich and then to Jerusalem where she died in 1945.

ROGER LASS was born in Brooklyn New York, and got a BA at The New School and PhD from Yale in 1964 in medieval English language and literature. He taught English at Indiana University, and then transferred to linguistics. In 1971 he took up a lectureship in linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, and in 1983 became Professor of Linguistics at the University of Cape Town. His primary interest is in the history of English and Germanic languages, and most of his publications have been in that area. Most recently he has been working in the history of Middle English, and was first author of the Corpus of Narrative Etymologies (http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/CoNE/), an elaborate website published by the University of Edinburgh, which was always his intellectual home. After retirement most of his work was textual and etymological studies in early Middle English, and he is now a fellow of the newly founded Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. Among his many publications, his favorites are On Explaining Language Change (Cambridge, 1980), and Historical Linguistics and Language Change (Cambridge 1997). He has also contributed to the Cambridge History of the English Language, and edited and contributed to Volume III of that series, English 1476-1776.

MÓNICA LAVÍN, born in México City in 1955, is the author of many short stories and story collections, including Pasarse de la raya, 2010, from which the story The Letter is taken. She has also published novels, including Yo, la peor, a fictionalized account of the life of Sor Juan Inés de la Cruz. She has won numerous awards, including the Gilberto Owen National Prize for Literature and the Colima Prize for Fiction.

REYES LÁZARO is an aspiring translator and guest-editor of Words and Worlds. Hitzak eta Biz(H)itzak. (Metamorphoses Fall 2004), devoted to poetry in European minoritized languages. She teaches Spanish language and contemporary cultures and literatures from the Iberian peninsula at Smith College.

JOHN B. LEE worked for the State of New Jersey as a legislative researcher before retiring in 1990. He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1953, earning a B.A. in Classical Studies. His senior thesis was on the love poetry of Catullus.

MICHAEL J. LEE has taught literature and composition at Hunterdon Central Region High School for the past 10 years. He has a B.A. in English from Rutgers University (1993) and an M.A.T. (with a concentration in high school English instruction) from the College of New Jersey (1996).

ELISABETH BOURQUIN LEETE Born in Geneva, she came to the U.S. in 1953 where she became the New York correspondent for France-Soir. Currently she is teaching French and volunteering for Hospice. She lives in Ashfield.

LEILA LEHNEN is an Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at New Mexico State University. She received her PhD in 2003 from Vanderbilt University and taught for two years as an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research focuses on contemporary Spanish American and Brazilian literatures and cultures. She has published essays in the Revista literatura e autoritarismo, Estudos de literatura brasileira contemporanea 3, and Contracorriente. She has recently published Citizenship and Crisis in Contemporary Brazilian Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), in which she analyzes the ways in which recent literary texts address the socio-economic and political transformations that Brazil has undergone since its 1985 transition to democracy.

SUN LEI, acclaimed Chinese poet, painter and art curator, has published numerous collections of poetry and has won many awards.

MARIA ALZIRA BRUM LEMOS was born in Sao Paulo. She is a writer and translator and writes in Portuguese and Spanish. She has a doctorate in Communication and Semiotics from the Pontificia Universidade Catolica de Sao Paulo. She has worked as a journalist, professor, researcher, and editor in many cultural institutions, such as Instituto Cervantes de Sao Paulo. Among other books, she has published Novela suvenir (2009 in Mexico, 2012 in Brazil); the novel La orden secreta de los ornitorrincos (2008 in Brazil, 2009 in Peru), the essay “O doutor e o Jagunco: ciencia, cultura e mesticagem em Os Sertoes” (2000); and a biography, Aleijadinho: homem barroco, artista brasileiro (2008). She lives in Mexico City, DF.

NIKOLAUS LENAU (1802-1850) wrote lyric poetry, and verse epics on historical themes, including Faust and Savonarola. Although his poetry does not always escape the shoals of sentimentality and precious rhetoric, he stands out among German Romantic poets of his time because of the musical quality of his verse, his evocations of the landscape of his native eastern Germany, his impressions of tropical settings, and images from a year spent in North America.

MICHAEL LEONG was educated at Dartmouth College (AB ’00), Sarah Lawrence College (MFA ’03), and Rutgers University (MA ’07) and is currently working on a dissertation about the contemporary long poem and the archive. His poetry and reviews have appeared in various journals including Atlanta Review, Bird Dog, Cranky, GutCult, jubilat, Pindeldyboz, Snow Monkey, and Tin House. His translations of Estela Lamat along with a critical introduction are forthcoming in Double Room. The two poems printed in this issue of Metamorphoses will be published in I, the Worst of All by BlazeVOX.

SIEGFRIED LENZ, one of Europe’s important contemporary writers, has been called a voice of conscience in post-war Germany. Only nineteen when the war ended, he translated for the Allies while studying German and English-language literature in Hamburg. A few years later, he accepted an editor’s position with the large Allies-run newspaper Die Welt and completed his first novel, which launched his full-time writing career. Since then he has published many short stories, radio plays, and over fifteen novels, his latest, written when he was over eighty, a bestseller. Lenz has received many German awards and achieved worldwide fame through his book The German Lesson (originally, Die Deutschstunde, 1969).

GIACOMO LEOPARDI (1798-1837) Italian lyric poet, child prodigy, passionate philologist, and translator from many languages, he is regarded by Italian critics as second only to Dante. The Canti (1817-37) represent his major work. Pastoral and melancholy, they concern themselves with destruction and regeneration.

MIKHAIL YURYEVICH LERMONTOV (1814-1841), Romantic novelist, writer, painter whose influence on later writers (like Boris Pasternak) was significant and who was seen as the most important living poet after Pushkin’s death in 1837, was born in Moscow to a noble family with a military tradition. Having offended Tsar Nicholas I by suggesting, in an impassioned poem, that the imperial court played a role in Pushkin’s death, he was banished to the Caucasus as an officer in the dragoons. Lermontov had spent some of his childhood years in the Caucasus, where his grandmother had taken him for his health, and his love of the Caucasus is evident in some of the descriptive passages of his long romantic poems Demon, as well as in his 1839 novel A Hero of Our Time. Like the hero of his novel, he was killed in a duel at the age of twenty-seven.

HEZY LESKLY (1952-1994) was born in Rehovot, Israel to Czech parents. After dropping out of high school, he devoted himself to an extensive study of dance and choreography. He lived for several years in Holland where he studied multimedia arts. Upon his return to Israel, he began a brief but productive career as a dance critic, playwright, and choreographer. His first collection of poems, The Finger, appeared in 1986, and by the time of his death from AIDS, he was regarded as one of the major literary voices of his generation. His last book, Dear Perverts, was published posthumously in 1994.

RIKA LESSER (1953- ) is a poet and translator of Swedish and German literature and has taught literary translation at Columbia University and Yale University. She is the author of three collections of poetry and is celebrated for her translations of poetry. She has won many prizes and awards.

LANCE LEVENS is a writer/Latin teacher (St. Andrews on the Marsh, Savannnah, GA). His short stories, poems and essays have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Chimera, Raintown Review, and others. Jubilate, a chapbook (Pudding House Press) was published in 2007, the year he was nominated by Storyglossia for a Pushcart Prize in fiction. He received honorable mention in the 2010 New England Shakespeare Sonnet contest and was received his second Pushcart Nomination (poetry) in 2010.

CARLO LEVI (1902-1975) Italian writer, began his career as a painter, exiled for anti-Fascist activities to the hill-town of Lucania, he is known primarily for his Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945) which has been widely translated. Le parole sono pietre was published in 1955.

DAN LEVIN A writer, author of several books, and professor Emeritus and former writer-in-residence at Long Island University.

LYNN LEVIN‘s poems and translations have appeared in Ploughshares, Boulevard, Southwest Review, Parthenon West Review, Poetry Miscellany, and many other places. She has recently translated Odi Gonzales’s poetry collection La Escuela de Cusco (The School of Cuzco). Lynn Levin is the author of three collections of poems, Fair Creatures of an Hour (2009), Imaginarium (2005), and A Few Questions about Paradise (2000), all published by Loonfeather Press. She teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University.

ALEXIS LEVITIN’s translations, mostly of poetry from Portugal, Brazil, and Ecuador, have resulted in 41 books to date. These translations include Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm and Eugenio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words, both from New Directions. Other books from Brazil include Astrid Cabral’s Cage (Host Publications, 2008), and Salgado Maranhão’s Blood of the Sun (Milkweed Editions, 2012) and Tiger Fur (White Pine Press, 2015). Work from Portugal is represented by 11 volumes of poetry by Eugenio de Andrade, as well as Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen’s Exemplary Tales (Tagus Press, 2015) and Rosa Alice Branco’s Cattle of the Lord (Milkweed Editions, 2016). His work with Ecuadorian poetry during the last decade has resulted in four books. The first was a co-translation with Fernando Iturburu of Tapestry of the Sun: An Anthology of Ecuadorian Poetry (Coimbra Editions, 2009), a compilation highlighting the work of 18 20th-century poets, many from Guayaquil. This was followed by the publication of Ana Minga’s Tobacco Dogs (Bitter Oleander Press, 2013) and Santiago Vizcaino’s Destruction in the Afternoon (Dialogos Books, 2015). This past spring, his translation of Carmen Vascones’ collection Outrage was published by White Dwarf Editions in Montreal. Levitin has been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowships and is currently on the roster for the Fulbright International Specialist Program, under which he lectured at the Universidad Catolica in Guayaquil in 2015 and the Federal University of Santa Catarina, in Brazil, Spring, 2018. He was a Senior Fulbright Lecturer in Oporto and Coimbra, Portugal in 1980. In addition, he has held translation residencies at Banff, Canada, Straelen, Germany (twice), and the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center in Bellagio, Italy. As part of his work as a translator, Levitin has toured the country with poets such as Eugénio de Andrade, Astrid Cabral, Santiago Vizcaino and Salgado Maranhão. These tours have led him to well over 200 venues. With Salgado Maranhão alone he has read at 80 institutions, including Harvard, Yale, Brown, Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell, Smith, and Bard in New England; Northwestern, University of Chicago, University of Missouri in the Midwest; University of Washington, University of Oregon, Mills College, San Jose State, and Evergreen State on the West Coast; University of Arkansas, University of Texas at Austin, University of Texas at Dallas, Birmingham University, Georgia University, and various branches of the North Carolina State University system, during a tour of the South. In April, 2018, with Portuguese poet Rosa Alice Branco and her book Cattle of the Lord, he visited The New York State Writers Institute in Albany, New Jersey City University, University of Massachusetts/Lowell, Smith, Dartmouth, Bard, Hollins, Radford, and Penn State. In May he participated in a reading tour in Ecuador with Ecuadorian poet Carmen Váscones and her newly published book Outrage.

DONGQIAO LI (1973-) grew up in a small Siberian town in China. After earning a B.S. in Nuclear Physics at Peking University, he went on to obtain a M.A. in Physics, where he obtained a M.A. in Physics and a M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Since 1999 he has been working as a software engineer around Cambridge/Boston while taking extensive courses in art, literature, and creative writing at Harvard, Massachusetts College of Art, School of the Museum of Fine Art and other institutions.

DONG LI was born and raised in P.R. China. He is Literature Fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude 2015-2017 as well as German Chancellor Fellow with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation 2015-2016. He was Colgate University’s Olive B. O’Connor Poet-in-Residence 2013-2014. His honors include fellowships from Yaddo, Vermont Studio Center, Millay Colony, PEN/Heim Translation Fund and elsewhere. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Barrow Street, Cincinnati Review, manuskripte (Austria, in German translation), and others. His translation has appeared or is forthcoming in World Literature Today, Circumference, PEN, Guernica, and others.

CHEN LI 陳黎 (1954-) was born and raised in Hualien, Taiwan. He is one of the representatives of contemporary Taiwanese poetry. He began writing poetry in the 1970s with modernist influences and turned to more social and political themes in the 1980s. His poetry combines formal and linguistic experiments with diverse themes such as the concerns of indigenous cultures, the formations of the Taiwanese identity, as well as tributes to his favorite artists, writers, and musicians. Chen is also a prolific prose writer and translator. Along with his wife, Chen has translated a number of Latin American, East European, and English poets, including Neruda, Paz, Szymborska and Heaney.

SARA LIDMAN (1923- ) is a novelist and essayist whose fame rests primarily on a series of five novels dealing with the bringing of the railroad to Lappland, written between 1977 and 1985 and generally referred to as Jernbane serien (Cranewater Chronicle) which is presently being revised by the translators. During the 1990s she added two further novels to the series. She has received numerous important prizes and was given the title of Honorary Professor in 1999.

ERIK LIDDELL holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto and teaches Early Modern Studies at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He has written on Statius, Vergil, Rousseau and Melville and has been a contributor to the Collaborative Translation Project for the Encyclopedie of Diderot and d’Alembert.

WEI-HSIN LIN obtained her PhD degree from SOAS, the University of London, where she completed a thesis on Eileen Chang’s short stories. She then taught modern Chinese literature and culture at the University of Manchester for five years. Currently she works as a freelance translator for Tsinghua Tongfang Knowledge Technology Co., Ltd., translating Chinese academic essays into English.

LOTTE LINCK Danish writer, has published a children’s book, numerous novels, the last one, Who Plays the Best (Hvem Leger Bedst) in March 1993. Her poems have appeared since 1985 in major magazines.

JOAN LINDGREN is a teacher, freelance writer/translator, and Fulbright Border Scholar in the San Diego-Tijuana region, who has published widely in magazines such as the American Poetry Review, DoubleTake, and Modern Poetry In Translation. Among her published books is the University of California Press Unthinkable Tenderness, Selected Poems of Juan Gelman. (1997) A manuscript in process, Relinquishing Permanence, includes translations of three Spanish poets: Claudio Rodriguez, Angel Ruperez, and Jose Angle Valente.

TORGNY LINDGREN (1938- ) had his first book published in 1965, became a full-time writer in 1974 and has been a member of the Swedish Academy since 1991. His work includes two volumes of poetry, four volumes of short stories (one collection published in English under the title Merab’s Beauty), and nine novels, four of which have been translated into English: The Way of the Serpent, Bathsheba, Light, and In Praise of Truth.

NHAT LINH was a Vietnamese writer, editor and publisher in colonial Hanoi. In 1932 he founded the literary group and publishing house Tu Luc Van Doàn (“Self-Strengthening Literary Group”) with the literary magazines Phong Hóa (“Customs”, or “Mores”) and Ngày Nay (“Today”), and serialized, then published, many of the influential realism-influenced novels of the 1930s. His involvement in politics in the 1940s let to persecution, arrest and imprisonment in China. In 1945, he returned to Viet Nam and became Foreign Minister in the first coalition government of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam. He was chief negotiator with the French in Dalat in April 1946 and was to have led the delegation to France. However fearing Viet Minh assassination he fled to Hong Kong where he lived from 1946 to1950. On his return to Vietnam, to the South, he avoided politics and concentrated on literary activities. This did not prevent the accusation of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime of involvement in the 1960 attempted coup. There was no evidence of his involvement, but he was eventually arrested in 1963. He committed suicide by cyanide. The note he left read: “I also will kill myself as a warning to those people who are trampling on all freedom,” the “also” probably referring to Thich Quang Duc, the monk who had self-immolated in protest against Diem’s persecution of Buddhism a month earlier.

AMELIA LINSKY was born in Hawaii and has a BA in Italian and History from Middlebury College, Vermont. Since graduating in 2013 she has worked in Italy and in Boston. She looks forward to starting her PhD in Italian Studies at Harvard University in fall 2015.

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

ADRIANA LISBOA was born in Rio de Janeiro. She has published six books, including Crow Blue (Bloomsbury), a collection of flash fiction, and four books for children. Her books have been translated in twelve countries. Among her honors are the Jose Saramago Award for her novel Symphony in White, a Japan Foundation Fellowship, and the Newcomer of the Year Award from the Brazilian section of IBBY (the International Board on Books for Young People). In 2007, Hay Festival selected her as one of the thirty-nine highest profile Latin American writers under the age of thirty-nine. She has degrees in music and literature. Adriana Lisboa has lived in France where she performed as a Brazilian jazz singer—and currently resides in the United States.

IRENE LISBOA (1892-1977) solitary woman-of-letters who published in various genres. Though well-educated, her status as an illegitimate daughter to a wealthy man left her in relative isolation in Portuguese society and publication under the male pseudonym, João Falco. Her musings on the inner life are spiced with irony and fly in the face of traditional barriers between prose and verse.

CLARICE LISPECTOR (1924-1977) Though she was born in the Ukraine, her family emigrated two months later to Brazil. Widely regarded as the principal woman writer of Brazil’s twentieth century; her books have been translated into several languages.

VICTORIA LIVINGSTONE has been working as a (Spanish to English) translator for the past three years and is a graduate student in Hispanic Literatures and Cultures at Boston College.

MAYA J. LOBELLO became captivated with Hungarian literature while spending a year abroad in 1993. After attaining a degree in Central European Studies from the University of Michigan, she became a permanent resident of Hungary in 1999. In 2007 she received a grant to study literary translation at the Balassi Institute and has published many translations and literary reviews for the website, Hungarian Literature Online. She is currently completing a degree at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest.

ERIK R. LOFGREN is Associate Professor in the East Asian Studies Department at Bucknell University where he teaches Japanese language, literature, and film. His research interests have evolved from the literature of defeat coming out of World War II to sexual desire in Japanese film, although the broader issues of representation and identity construction connect the dots in this trajectory. He is also interested in translation.

NANCY R. LOGLISCI is a teacher and translator in the Chicago area.

FRANCO LOI (1930- ), recognized as one of the greatest contemporary poets in Italy, prolific as a critic, scholar, and especially a poet. Born in Genoa of a Sardinian father and a mother from Emilia Romagna, he moved with his family to Milan when he was only seven years old. From 1965, he published his poems in a Milanese dialect he himself has shaped to reflect his unique voice, along with his own Italian translations.

MIKHAIL VASILEVICH LOMONOSOV (1711-1765) was a renowned scientist and man of letters after whom Moscow State University is named. He was a chemist, physicist, mathematician, and mineralogist. After studying in Germany under the famous Christian Wolff, he returned to Russia, first serving in a junior capacity before heading up the Russian Academy of Science until his death. In letters, Lomonosov made lasting contributions as well. He wrote the first Russian grammar. His first published poem “has since become our [Russia’s] classical prosody” (Mirsky, 1958). Lomonosov’s “importance as the legislator and actual founder of the literary language of modern Russia cannot be exaggerated” (Mirsky, 1958).

JOHN LONDON holds MA and PhD degrees in Modern Languages from Oxford University. Having previously been Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Free University, Berlin, he is currently working in the School of European Languages, University of Wales, Swansea. With David George he has edited Contemporary Catalan Theatre: An Introduction (Sheffield: The Anglo-Catalan Society, 1996). He has also written books and several articles on Spanish theater, Romanian literature, and other subjects. He has translated into English texts by Sergei Belbel, Salvador Dalí, Federico García Lorca, Ramon Llull, Rodolf Sirera, and others.

ALBERT LONDRES (1884-1932) was a French investigative journalist and writer. He traveled the world for the newspapers he worked for, bringing back home stories that were collected in some twenty books, most of them translated into English. Through his lively, often sarcastic style he exposed the abuses of the time. His reporting on the penal colony of Cayenne (Au bagne, 1923), for instance, was instrumental in moving the authorities to close that forced labor camp. Terre d’Ebene (1929) is a violent denunciation of colonialism (“the slave trade in Africa has been abolished in name only”) and Le Juif errant est arrive (1930) is a passionate plea for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine motivated by his travels through several ghettos of Western Europe. He died in the fire that sunk the boat taking him back to France from China where he had gone to investigate a major political scandal. The coveted Albert Londres Prize (the French equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize) is awarded annually to two francophone journalists: one for a piece published in the written press, the other for an audiovisual report.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1807-1882) classmate of Hawthorne and Franklin Pierce at Bowdoin, professor of modern languages at Harvard. The foremost American poet of his day, he was known especially for his adaptations from exotic languages and his translation of Dante’s Divina Comedia.

FELIX LOPE DE VEGA Y CARPIO (1562-1635) was born in Madrid. Considered the greatest of all Spanish playwrights, he wrote over 2200 plays, of which 500 survive. Endowed with a prodigious intellect—by the age of five he could read Latin and Spanish and wrote poetry—he had the physical energy to match it, and an enthusiasm for taking risks that led him into numerous amorous adventures (he was imprisoned at a very young age and exiled for his affair with a married woman and his quarrel with her father, but never lost his enthusiasm for relationships with women, many of which resulted in offspring). He took part in more than one military expedition, including the Spanish Armada’s unfortunate engagement with the English fleet.

ADÍLIA LOPES (1960- ) was born in Lisbon and since 1985 she is perhaps Portugal’s most iconoclastic poet.

JOHNNY LORENZ was born in 1972, son of Brazilian immigrants to the United States. He is a professor in the English Department at Montclair State University. His poems, articles, and translations have appeared in a variety of journals.

N.P. VAN WYK LOUW was born in Sutherland, South Africa in 1906. He was the major Afrikaans poet and public intellectual of his generation, and he and his brother, W.E.G. Louw, were leading figures in the Afrikaans literary movement of the 1930s. In his collection of essays, Lojale verset (1939), Louw argued for the importance of criticism within Afrikaner nationalism. An educationalist by training, Louw taught at the University of Cape Town for nearly two decades before taking up a position as Extraordinary Professor in South African Language, Literature, Culture and History at the University of Amsterdam. During his time abroad, he wrote many of his most important poems, published in Nuwe verse (1954) and Tristia (1962). He also wrote a series of magazine articles defending apartheid “separate development” as a multinationalism consistent with liberal principles. These were published in the collection Liberale Nasionalisme (1958). Returning to South Africa in 1958, he spoke out against some policies of the National Party government, and his play, Die pluimsaad waai ver (1966) was publicly attacked by prime minister H.F. Verwoerd. Chairing the Department of Afrikaans and Nederlands at the University of Witwatersrand, he died in Johannesburg in 1970.

YANN LOVELOCK lives and works in Birmingham, England. In addition to numerous collections of his own poetry and scholarly work, he has published translations from French, Dutch, Walloon, Flemish, Urdu, Spanish, and Danish and held guest editorships, notably for Modern Poetry in Translation(University of London) Dutch & Flemish issue 1997. As a Buddhist, he has been widely involved in educational work and inter-faith dialogue.

ELIZABETH LOWE is Professor and Director of the Center for Translation Studies at the University of Illinois. She has affiliate appointments in the Program in Comparative and World Literature and the Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese Departments. She is also an affiliate of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the European Union Center. She has a master’s degree in Romance Languages from Queens College of New York, and a PhD in Comparative Literature with a concentration in Translation from the City University of New York. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Colombia and has taught and lectured extensively at universities in Latin America and Europe. ATA certified for Portuguese to English translation, she is a member of the ATA Committee on Standards, and an active member of PEN and the American Literary Translators Association.

SAU LUGANO, a PhD student and Instructor in Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University, is Lecturer in the Department of Kiswahili and Other African Languages at Kenyatta University, Kenya. Lugano is also a short story writer. Among her published translations in Kiswahili is the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

ADRIANA LUNARDI is an award-winning contemporary fiction writer from southern Brazil who currently resides in Rio de Janeiro. She has written two collections of short stories, As Meninas da Torre Helsinque (1996) and Vésperas (2002), as well as a novel entitled Corpo Estranho (2006). In addition to her career as a fiction writer, Lunardi is a screenwriter who works primarily on documentaries for television

HENRY LYMAN His translations of the poetry of Aleksis Rannit have appeared in Poetry and New Directions and in two sections published by the Elizabeth Press. He is presently completing a larger, more comprehensive volume.