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Michael C Beard is professor of English at the University of North
Dakota and has a long-standing interest in modern Persian literature
and culture. He has collaborated with Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak on three book-length translations of the poetry of Esmail Khoi (Edges of Light: Selected Poems, 1995, Songs of Nowhereland, 1995 and Outlandia: Songs of Exile, 1999) and has written many articles on aspects of contemporary Iranian poetry and on the work of a number of individual Iranian poets.

Keith Bosley, poet and translator, was born in 1937. His major translations include The Kalevala (Oxford Classics) and the Penguin Mallarmé. His own poetry has been published by several publishers, latterly Anvil Press. He was a BBC World Service announcer for many years.

John Cayley, born in Ottawa, is a London-based poet, translator, sinologist and publisher. He is the founding editor of Wellsweep, a small press specialising in literary translation from Chinese. His latest book of poems, adaptions and translations is Ink Bamboo (London, 1997). He has lectured on the writing programme at the University of California, San Diego, where he was also an Associate of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA). He is now an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of English, Royal Holloway College, University of London, and an Honorary Fellow of Dartington College of Arts, in association with their degree-level course in Performance Writing.

Martin Chalmers was born in Glasgow, and has translated Ernst Weiss, Jelinek, Fried, Brecht and, most recently, the Diaries of Victor Klemperer.

Debjani Chatterjee, poet, translator, and author of books for children, was born in Delhi in 1952 and has lived in the UK since 1972. She studied at the American University in Cairo and at Canterbury, Lancaster and Sheffield in the UK. She has worked in education and in community relations, and she is also Literature Advisor to the Arts Council and Chair of its Translation Panel. Her poems have won many prizes, including the Peterloo Poets prize. She is the editor of The Redbeck Anthology of British South Asian Poetry (Redbeck Press, 2000), and has a collection of ghazal translations from the Urdu forthcoming.

Frederick G Cohn worked in education and the social services and was a professional adviser to the Home Office and the Department of Health. Since he retired in the 80s, he has told the story of his life as a young refugee from Nazi oppression and of his family’s wartime internment in the Isle of Man: Signals (1990) and A Lucid Interval (1999) will be followed by a third volume. His translations of poems by his brother, Hans Werner Cohn, have appeared in MPT 9 and 16.

Tim Collard was born in 1960 and studied German at Oxford where he met Erich Fried in 1982. They remained friends until the poet’s death six years later: during this period he began translating Fried’s poetry and was able to discuss his translations with the poet. Now a member of the Diplomatic Service, he spent much of the 1990s in Beijing (where he helped to organise trilingual performances of Fried’s poetry in German, English and Chinese). He now lives mainly in London.

Jane Duran was born in Cuba and brought up in the USA and Chile. She has lived in London since 1966. A selection of her poetry was published in Poetry Introduction 8 (Faber, 1993) and her first full collection, Breathe Now, Breathe (Enitharmon) won the 1995 Forward Prize for the Best First Collection and was widely well received. A second collection, Silences from the Spanish Civil War, is due to be published by Enitharmon in 2002.

Anthony Edkins lives in London, but makes frequent visits to Spain. His translations include novels by Javier Tomeo, and his versions of Spanish and Argentinian poetry appeared in MPT 3, 8, 9 and 11.

Jonathan Griffin (1906-1990) was a poet, translator and diplomat and Director of BBC European Intelligence during World War Two. Griffin translated Pessoa, Char, Kleist, Montherlant and many others. His own selected poems, In Earthlight, was published by Menard Press in 1995.

Michael Hamburger, born in Berlin in 1924, came to England as a child. He is well known as a poet and critic and as the doyen of translators from German: his Poems of Paul Celan received the European Translation Prize in 1990, and he was awarded the German government’s Goethe Medal in 1986. Another extract from Sebald’s long poem appeared in MPT 16 (2000), together with poems by Hans Magnus Enzensberger.

Iain Higgins is a Canadian poet and a translator of modern Polish
poetry. He teaches English Literature at the University of Victoria,
British Columbia.

Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak is professor of Persian language and literature and Iranian culture and civilisation at the University of Washington. He has translated three books of poetry by Esmail Khoi (including Edges of Light: Selected Poems, 1995 and Outlandia: Songs of Exile, 1999) and a volume by the poet Forugh Farrokhzad, Remembering the Flight(1997). He is also editor and translator of An Anthology of Modern Persian Poetry (Westview Press, 1978) and has published an in-depth study, Recasting
Persian Poetry: Scenarios of Poetic Modernity In Iran (Utah, 1995).

Lotfali Khonji was born in Iran in 1938 and is a former producer at the BBC World Service Persian Section where he worked for thirty years. He has translated into Farsi The English Among The Persians by Denis Wright and Closed Circuit, a selection of the poetry of Shadab Vajdi, and is the author of A Grammar Of The Larestani Language, a minority language spoken in southern Iran (Fars Encyclopedia Foundation, Shiraz, 2000). He is married to the poet Shadab Vajdi and lives in London.

Dinah Livingstone is a poet, editor and translator living in Camden
Town, London. Among her own books of poetry are Second Sight (1993), May Day (1997) and Time on Earth: Selected & New Poems (1999). She has translated many modern Nicaraguan poets, including Ernesto Cardenal, Daisy Zamora and Carlos and Luis Enrique Mejía Godoy, all published by Katabasis who also published her Poets of the Nicaraguan Revolution, which is the most extensive anthology of Nicaraguan poetry in English translation. She has also translated many works of Latin American and Liberation theology. Recently she edited an anthology of writings on ‘Work’ and in 2000 published a six-chapter essay on ‘The Poetry Of Earth’ (taking as a prompt Keats’s words “the poetry of Earth is never dead”) that explores the abundance, diversity and particularity of what in poetry and the world is all-pervasive but under threat.

Suzette Macedo was born in Mozambique in 1931 and studied in
Johannesburg, where she taught English Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand. She lives in London with her husband, Helder
Macedo, and has worked as a broadcaster, translator and international civil servant. She has translated poems by some eighteen modern Portuguese poets; many have appeared in anthologies in the UK and the USA.

Christopher Mattison received an MFA in Translation from the
University of Iowa. He currently resides in Boston where he is managing editor of Zephyr Books.

Richard McKane lives in London and is a poet and a translator of
Russian and Turkish poetry. He was a contributor to MPT 10 (Russian issue, 1996), and co-editor with Stephen Watts and Hume Cronyn of Voices of Conscience: Poetry from Oppression (1995).

Aydin Mehmet Ali was born in Cyprus and lives in London. She is an international education consultant specialising in multiculturalism and bilingualism. She is the Chair of Hackney Action for Racial Equality in London and has been involved in anti-racist work across Europe. She has set up numerous projects promoting equality of opportunity, especially for women and young people, and has recently completed a book on the severe educational underachievement of Turkish-speaking young people in the UK. She is also well known for her conflict resolution work amongst the Cypriot-Greek and Cypriot-Turkish communities. She set up FATAL (For the Advancement of Turkishspeakers Arts and Literature) which includes Cypriot, Turkish and Kurdish artists. She has organised numerous arts and literature festivals and events in London, including bilingual poetry readings and creative writing workshops, and is the translator/editor of Turkish Cypriot Identity
in Literature, published by FATAL. She translates contemporary Cypriot and Turkish poets into English. She began writing short stories at the age of thirteen. Her work has been included in a number of collections and publications including Weeping Island, a recent collection of writings by Cypriot writers living in Cyprus and in the Diaspora. She is working on an anthology of Turkish-speaking women’s writing in the UK.

Amin Mughal is a scholar and critic with a particular interest in Punjabi and Urdu literatures. He has translated poetry by Amarjit Chandan, Mazhar Tirmazi and other Punjabi poets into English and is a former political activist with human rights concerns and a journalist and former academic in Pakistan. Born in 1935, he gained an MA in English literature from Panjab University and taught for a number of years in its affiliated colleges. In 1976 he joined the weekly Viewpoint, a journal of the democratic left, and was a leader of the National Awami Party, but came to Britain in 1984 where he has lived in political exile ever since. He has worked on the Urdu-English language daily Jang and at present lives in London.

Ibrahim Muhawi teaches at the University of Edinburgh. His translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s long prose-poem text Memory For Forgetfullness: August, Beirut 1982 was published by the University of California Press in 1995.

Edwin Muir (1887-1959), Scottish poet, novelist and critic, was born in the Orkneys. He was a co-translator (with his wife) of some early editions of Kafka.

Martin Orwin was born in 1963, studied Arabic and Amharic, and has a PhD in the phonology of Somali. Since 1992 he has been a lecturer in Somali and Amharic at SOAS, London. He has published articles on Somali language and poetry and Colloquial Somali (Routledge, 1995), a language learners’ textbook. He has done research in the Horn of Africa, with ongoing research interests in the metrics of Somali poetry, and is currently working on Somali religious poetry. He has also translated a number of Somali poets living in London, working closely with the poets. He has organised a seminar series on translation issues at SOAS and will be taking part in the forthcoming Translation Workshops in the Arts and Humanities Research Board’s ‘Centre For Asian & African
Literatures’, jointly established by SOAS and University College London.

Frances W Pritchett is a scholar, critic and translator. She is Professor of Modern Indic Languages at Columbia University. Her books include Nets of Awareness (OUP, 1995), a well-received examination of classical Urdu poetry and its critics. In 1987 Lokamaya Press (London) published A Listening Game, a book of her translations of the poetry of Saqi Farooqi, and in 1999 Oxford University Press (Pakistan) published An Evening of Caged Beasts, a collection of seven Postmodernist Urdu poets in translations by Pritchett and Asif Farrukhi. She has also translated fiction and in particular Intizar Hussain’s Urdu novel Basti (Indus/ HarperCollins, 1995).

Ajmer Rode, born in 1940, is a Punjabi poet and playwright who has lived in Canada for many years. Much of his poetry is formally
experimental and many of his plays have been staged in Vancouver
under his production and direction. He has also translated a number of contemporary Punjabi poets and writes articles on modern poetry.

Lucy Rosenstein is a Lecturer in Hindi at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She has a BA in Indology and Bulgarian Philology from Sofia University, and an MA and a PhD in Hindi from SOAS. She is the author of The Devotional Poetry of Svami Haridas: a study of early Braj Bhasha verse, and is currently working on an anthology of contemporary Hindi poetry. Her translations of Hindi poetry have been published in various journals.

Anthony Rudolf, an advisory editor of MPT and the publisher of the Menard Press, is well known as a translator, especially from French, and as a poet and critic. His translation of Yves Bonnefoy’s Hier régnant désert was published by MPT Books (Yesterday’s Wilderness Kingdom, 2000) .

Michael Scammell, born in England, is the biographer of Solzhenitsyn, among others. He has translated from Russian (Nabokov) and from other languages. He was Chair of Russian at Cornell University and now lives in New York where he teaches at Columbia University. He has also served as President of the American PEN Center.

Matthew Sweney is a writer and translator lecturing on English and
American literature at Palacky University in Olomouc in the Czech
Republic, where he has lived for the past six years. With Petr Mikes he has edited bilingual editions of James Joyce’s Chamber Music, Jack Kerouac’s poetry and most recently Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts. He also translates modern Czech poetry into English and has a particular interest in the work of the poet Ivan Blatny´. We are very grateful to him for providing MPT with translations of Blatny´’s work and background knowledge concerning the poet’s life and work for this present issue of the journal.

George Szirtes was born in Hungary and came to Britain as a child after the 1956 revolution. He writes poetry in English and has published widely, achieving a strong and deserved reputation. Among his works are a Selected Poems (Oxford University Press) and most recently The Budapest File (Bloodaxe, 2000). His translations are also very highly regarded and he has published individual collections by Zsuzsa Rakovsky and Ottó Orbán and contributed to volumes by Sándor Csoóri and István Vas among others. He co-edited and provided translations for The Colonnade of Teeth: Modern Hungarian Poetry (Bloodaxe, 1996) and has
contributed as editor and/or translator to a number of other anthologies, in particular The Lost Rider (Corvina, 1997).

JD Taylor is an English poet who has travelled extensively and is at
present living in Italy. He has translated Diego de Jesús’s poetry with the poet, contributing to the bilingual volume Alud de la sal (Monterrey, 1998), and has published a volume of his own poetry, A Passing Through Place: Selected Poems (King’s England Press, Rotherham, 1998).

Abdullah al-Udhari is a literary historian and poet and one of the
foremost translators of both contemporary and classical Arab poetry
into English. He has published Victims of a Map (Saqi Books, 1984, with translations of Mahmoud Darwish, Adonis and Samih al-Qasim), Modern Poetry of the Arab World (Penguin, 1986), Birds Through a Ceiling of Alabaster (Penguin, 1975) and Classical Poems by Arab Women (Saqi Books, 1999). In addition he has researched pre-Islamic traditions in Arabic poetry and is himself a widely regarded poet in English and Arabic. The English version of his The Arab Creation Myth was published by Archangel (Prague, 1996). He was born in the Yemen and came to London, where he still lives, as a child in the late 1950s.

Stephen Watts (guest editor for this issue) was born in 1952 and is a poet and researcher. He has published The Lava’s Curl (Grimaldi Press, 1990) and has forthcoming in Spring 2001 Gramsci and Caruso Poems 1976-1997 (Bellew). He co-edited Voices of Conscience (Iron Press, 1995), an international anthology of poets who have been imprisoned, and for many years he has been compiling a bibliography of twentieth-century poetry in English translation which will be published by King’s College London. He has worked extensively in schools and hospitals as a writer and has published three bilingual Bengali-English books of children’s writings. He has been on the Advisory Panel of the British Centre for Literary Translation and at present works part-time for the Multicultural
Arts Consortium (MAC) in East London and on a ‘Year Of The Artist’ award at the London Hospital. For the past twenty years he has lived and worked in Whitechapel and he has family and cultural roots in Scotland and the Italian Alps.

John Welch is a poet, editor and small press publisher, having run ‘The Many Press’ in London for over twenty-five years. His own books of poetry include Out Walking (Anvil, 1984), Blood and Dreams (Reality Street, 1991) and Greeting Want (Infernal Methods, 1997) and he has translated a chapbook selection from the Panjabi poet Amarjit Chandan (Being Here, 1991). He teaches in a secondary school in Waltham Forest. For many years he has had a strong interest in South Asian literature and has edited an anthology of South Asian writing for use in schools, Stories From South Asia (Oxford University Press, 1988).

Clive Wilmer is an English poet living and working in Cambridge who has published a number of collections with Carcanet Press including The Dwelling-Place (1977), Devotions (1982), Of Earthly Paradise (1992) and Selected Poems 1965-1993 (1995). The Falls was published by Worple Press in 2000. A critic and editor, he has also collaborated with George Gömöri in translating a number of twentieth-century Hungarian poets, notably Miklós Radnóti and György Petri, the latter in two volumes published by Bloodaxe, Night Song of the Personal Shadow (1991) and Eternal Monday (1999), and a volume of Gömöri’s own poetry, My Manifold City (Alba Press, 1996).

Carolyne Wright is an American poet and translator. Her own mostrecent book is Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire and she has translated from Bengali books of poetry by Anuradha Mahapatra (Another Spring, Darkness, Calyx Books, 1996) and Taslima Nasreen (The Game in Reverse, Braziller, 1995), and from Spanish, poems by the Chilean Jorge Teillier (In Order to Talk with the Dead, University of Texas Press, 1993). She has prepared an anthology of modern Bengali women’s poetry in translation, which is awaiting publication.

Peter Zollman was born in Budapest in 1931, leaving Hungary in 1956. He gained a doctorate from Imperial College London in Applied Electron Physics and worked as a research physicist, technical director and managing director for thirty-eight years. Among his book-length publications of modern Hungarian poets are Miklós Radnóti, Last Poems/ Bori Notesz (Babel, London, 1994), Sándor Kányádi, There is a Land (Corvina, Budapest, 2000) and Dezso´´ Kosztolányi, 36 Poems /36 Vers (Maecenas, Budapest, 2000). He has also translated verse dramas by Béla Balázs and Mihály Babits for both publication and performance and has contributed substantially to a number of anthologies of modern
Hungarian poetry, in particular In Quest of the Miracle Stag (Chicago, 1996). In Mid Stream, his translation of the selected speeches of Árpád Göncz, was published by Corvina in 1999.