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Contributors’
Notes, 25, #1 & 2
GARY ADELMAN is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since 2001 he has published books on Dostoevsky, D. H. Lawrence, and Samuel Beckett. His recent published essays are on Kafka, Ishiguro, and Leonid Tsypkin—the last of these in the Spring 2003 issue of NER. AARON BAKER received his M.F.A. from the University of Virginia and was a Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing at Stanford University. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including Poetry and Post Road, and has been featured on the website Poetry Daily. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the poet Jennifer Chang. RICK BAROT is Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University. His poems are in recent issues of Colorado Review, Epoch, and The Paris Review. JEREMY BERNSTEIN, a theoretical physicist, wrote profiles of scientists for The New Yorker for more than three decades. He is the author of Hitler’s Uranium Club (AIP, 1995), Cranks, Quarks, and the Cosmos (Perseus, 1993), and Three Degrees Above Zero (Scribners, 1984), as well as Dawning of the Raj and The Merely Personal (both from Ivan R. Dee). His book Einstein (Viking, 1973) was nominated for the National Book Award and is part of the Penguin Modern Masters series. He lives in New York City and Aspen, Colorado. ARRIGO BOITO (1842–1918), a poet, novelist, and composer, is best known as the librettist for some of Giuseppe Verdi’s most memorable operas, including Falstaff and Otello. Their twenty-year collaboration is chronicled in The Verdi–Boito Correspondence (University of Chicago Press), edited by Marcello Conati and Mario Medici, translated by William Weaver. Boito is also known for the single opera he composed, Mefistofele, for which he also wrote the libretto. GEOGGREY BROCK’s
poems appear in Poetry, P.N. Review, The Hudson Review, and elsewhere.
His translation of Cesare Pavese’s Disaffections received
the PEN Center U.S.A. Translation Award in 2003 and the MLA’s Lois
Roth Award, and it was named one of the Best Books of 2003 by the Los
Angeles Times. He has also translated forthcoming books by Roberto
Calasso and Umberto Eco. DAVID CASTRONUOVO was Assistant Professor of Italian at Middlebury College from 1996 to 2004. His publications include an article on Arrigo Boito’s libretto for Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Otello, and he is co-translator into English of Angela Bianchini’s novel The Edge of Europe (University of Nebraska Press, 2000). JENNIFER CHANG’s poems have recently appeared in Indiana Review, Pleiades, Seneca Review, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Her work is also included in Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (University of Illinois Press, 2004). She is the winner of the 2004 Campbell Corner Poetry Prize. ALFRED CORN is the author of nine books of poems, the most recent of which is titled Contradictions (Copper Canyon Press, 2002). He also supplied the introduction for Aaron Rose Photographs (Abrams, 2001). The recipient of fellowships and prizes for his poetry from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he has also been presented with an Award in Literature from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and an award from the Academy of American Poets. For 2003–05, he holds the Amy Clampitt residency in Lenox, Massachusetts. DICK DAVIS is Professor of Persian and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University. As author, translator, or editor, he has produced twenty-two books, including translations of two volumes of stories by Ferdowsi, as well as Ferdowsi’s Legend of Seyavash (Penguin Classics). In addition to academic works, he has published translations from Italian (prose) and Persian (prose and verse) and numerous books of poetry. MICHAEL DIETZ received his M.F.A. from the University of Florida. He currently works in Gainesville, Florida, and has work forthcoming in Verse. TED DUBOIS is Professor of Music and also serves as Head of the Department of Music and Dance at West Texas A&M University, Canyon, Texas. KEITH EKISS is the recipient of a 2004 Witter Bynner Poetry Translator Residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute. With Sonia P. Ticas, he has completed translations of Eunice Odio that have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry International, Puerto del Sol, Salt Hill Journal, Two Lines, and other journals. FAIZ AHMED FAIZ is widely regarded as the most important Persian poet since Ghalib and the acknowledged twentieth-century master of the ghazal. Charged with conspiring to overthrow the Pakistani government, Faiz was sentenced to death in 1951. The poems of Dast-e Saba (1952)—from which the poems in this issue are taken—and Zindan Nama (1956) were written in prison while he awaited execution. In 1955 his sentence was lifted and he lived much of the remainder of his life in exile in Moscow, London, and Beirut. In 1982 he returned to his native Pakistan and died in Lahore on November 20, 1984. CAROL FROST’s latest poetry collection from Northwestern University Press, I Will Say Beauty, was published in 2003. Recent work appears in Poetry and Ninth Letter. She is Professor of English and writer-in-residence at Hartwick College. TED GENOWAYS is a poet, translator, and editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. His collection Bullroarer (Northeastern University Press, 2001) received the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, the Natalie Ornish Poetry Award, and the Nebraska Book Award. His other honors include a 2003 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. He is the editor of six books, including a forthcoming collection of Joseph Kalar’s poems (University of Illinois Press, 2004), and his essay “‘Let Them Snuff Out the Moon’: Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Prison Lyrics in Dast-e Saba” appears in the current Annual of Urdu Studies. WITOLD GOMBROWICZ (1904–68) is best known for his novels Ferdydurke (1937), Pornografia (1960), and Cosmos (1966); his plays Princess Ivona (1935) and The Marriage (1953); and his journals. Born in Poland, Gombrowicz left the country in 1939, lived in Argentina for more than twenty years, and died in France. He was awarded the Prix Formentor in 1969. JENNIFER GROTZ is the author of Cusp (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), winner of the 2002 Bakeless Prize and the Natalie Ornish Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her translations of Patrice de La Tour du Pin’s psalms received an award from the American Translators Association and appear in Ploughshares, Center, Lyric, and elsewhere. MARILYN HACKER is the author of nine books of poems, including Winter Numbers (Norton, 1994), which received the Lenore Marshall Award of the Academy of American Poets, and Desesperanto (Norton, 2003). First Cities, a reissue of her first three books, was published in 2003 by Norton. She is also a translator of French poetry, notably of She Says, by Vénus Khoury-Ghata (Graywolf Press, 2003), which was nominated for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award, and Birds and Bison, by Claire Malroux, to be published by Sheep Meadow in 2004. She lives in New York and Paris, and teaches at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. RACHEL HADAS is Board of Governors Professor of English at the Newark campus of Rutgers University and the author of over a dozen books of poetry, essays, and translations. Her newest poetry collection is Laws (Zoo Press, 2004). MARK HARMAN, Associate Professor of German and English at Elizabethtown College, translated Franz Kafka’s The Castle (Schocken Books), which was nominated for the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize in 1999 and won the Modern Language Association’s first Lois Roth Award. Harman, who edited and co-translated Robert Walser Rediscovered (University Press of New England), has also translated the selected letters of Herman Hesse and fiction by contemporary German-language authors and has written extensively about modern German and Irish literature. He is currently completing a new translation of Franz Kafka’s novel The Missing Person (Amerika) for Schocken Books. KATHERINE M. HEDEEN has a doctorate in Hispanic Literatures from the University of Texas at Austin. Currently an Assistant Professor of Spanish and International Studies at Kenyon College, she specializes in Latin American poetry and has written about and translated numerous contemporary authors from that region. HAROLD G(OULD) HENDERSON (1889–1974) is most widely recognized for his Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems and Poets from Basho to Shiki, which was published by Doubleday in 1958 and still remains in print. He was also the author of A Handbook of Japanese Grammar and co-editor of Tales from Japanese Storytellers. In 1968, Henderson was one of the founders of the Haiku Society of America, which began with twenty-one charter members and now claims a worldwide membership of more than eight hundred. JAMES HOCH has worked as a dishwasher, cook, dockworker, shepherd, and social worker. He currently teaches creative writing at Lynchburg College. His poems have appeared in anthologies and magazines including Slate, The Kenyon Review, The Gettysburg Review, Post Road, and the website Poetry Daily, and he has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers Conferences, the St. Petersburg Literary Seminars, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. His collection entitled A Parade of Hands (Silverfish Review, 2003) won the Gerald Cable Award. A native of New Jersey, he resides in Charlottesville, Virginia, with his wife, Marianne. MICHAEL IGNATIEFF, a writer, historian, and broadcaster, currently serves as Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University. His books include Isaiah Berlin: A Life (Metropolitan, 1998), Blood and Belonging (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994), The Warrior’s Honor (Metropolitan, 1998), Charlie Johnson in the Flames (Grove Press, 2003), and The Needs of Strangers (Viking, 1984). His novel Scar Tissue (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993) was nominated for the Booker Prize, and his book The Russian Album, A Family Memoir (Viking, 1987) won Canada’s Governor General’s Award and the Heinemann Prize of Britain’s Royal Society of Literature. VLADIMIR JABOTINSKY (1880–1940)—writer, activist, orator, soldier, Zionist—was born in the city of Odessa. In 1898 he left to become a foreign correspondent for a Russian newspaper in Italy and later in Switzerland. The annotated collection of his work, including letters and speeches, was published in Hebrew and fills eighteen volumes. Jabotinsky wrote two full-length novels in Russian; an excerpt from the second of these, The Five, is included in this issue. HANS JANOWITZ (1890–1954) was born in Podebrady and attended high school in Prague, where he became acquainted with Franz Werfel, Franz Kafka, and Max Brod. Janowitz was an assistant producer, writer, and actor at the German Theater in Hamburg, but his theatrical career was interrupted by World War I, in which he served in the military. As co-scriptwriter, with Carl Meyer, of Robert Wiene’s blockbuster expressionist film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, he celebrated his greatest artistic success and achieved instant fame. Janowitz subsequently wrote satirical songs and poems for the cabaret, but little else is known about his life until his arrival in New York in 1939, soon after the Nazi occupation of Bohemia and Moravia. Janowitz attained American citizenship in 1950 and lived in New York until his death. (JENS) OTTO (HARRY) JESPERSEN (1860–1943) was widely recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on the history and structure of the English language. Born in Denmark, he completed his doctoral dissertation in 1891, and two years later was appointed Professor of English at the University of Copenhagen, a position that he held until his retirement in 1925. Over the course of his career, he published numerous works of importance, including the seven-volume Modern English Grammar (1909–49), The Growth and Structure of the English Language (first published in 1905, and reprinted in 1969), Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin (1922), and The Philosophy of Grammar (1924), which remains in print. AMAUD JAMAUL JOHNSON is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University and a member of the Cave Canem workshop. BILL JOHNSTON is Director of the Polish Studies Center at Indiana University. His translations include Gustaw Herling’s The Noonday Cemetery and Other Stories (New Directions, 2003), Stefan Zeromski’s The Faithful River (Northwestern University Press, 1999), and Magdalena Tulli’s Dreams and Stones (Archipelago Books, 2004). LAURA KASISCHKE’s sixth collection of poems, Gardening in the Dark, was published this year by Ausable Press. Her most recent novel, The Life Before Her Eyes (Harcourt), came out in 2002. She teaches creative writing in the Residential College at the University of Michigan. MICHAEL R. KATZ has translated a series of novels from Russian into English, including Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Devils, Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Artsybashev’s Sanin, and works by Herzen and Chernyshevsky. He is now completing the first English translation of Vladimir Jabotinsky’s The Five. He serves as Dean of Language Schools and Schools Abroad at Middlebury College. RONALD A(RBUTHNOTT) KNOX (1888–1957) was a wide-ranging British author whose many published writings include works of satire, theological reflection, translation, literary criticism, and detective fiction. His translation of the New Testament was published in 1944, the Old Testament in 1949 and 1950; incorporating numerous revisions, the text appeared in its entirety in 1955. Knox first focused his attention on the problems of the translator in On Englishing the Bible (1949), and reflected more broadly on those problems a few years later in the essay “On English Translation,” which is presented in this issue of NER. JOANN KOBIN’s stories have appeared in many journals and magazines, including Virginia Quarterly Review, The North American Review, New Letters, and New England Review. Woman Made of Sand: A Novel in Stories (Delphinium Books, 2002), has just been published in paperback by Berkley-Putnam. RYSZARD KRYNICKI was born in 1943 in Sankt Valentin, Austria, where his parents were deported to a Nazi labor camp. In Poland in the late sixties he became a leading member of the “New Wave” group of poets, which included Adam Zagajewski and Stanislaw Baranczak. After the publication of his second collection, Collective Organism, in a form severely cut by censorship, his work was published by the Institut Littéraire in Paris and by underground presses in Poland. His most recent collection, Magnetic Point, came out in 1996. Krynicki is a distinguished translator of German-language poetry, in particular of Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs. He has received many awards, among them the Polis Poet’s Award, the Koscielski Foundation Award, and the Robert Graves PEN-Club Award. Since 1989 he has run the independent publishing house a5, which publishes Wislawa Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, Adam Zagajewski, and the work of many younger Polish poets. PETER LASALLE’s books include a novel, Strange Sunlight, and two story collections, The Graves of Famous Writers and Hockey Sur Glace. New stories are appearing in Antioch Review, Tin House, Witness, The Massachusetts Review, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. He has taught at universities in this country and in France, and is currently Susan Taylor McDaniel Regents Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. PATRICE DE LA TOUR DU PIN (1911–75) was best known in France for the three-volume multi-genre work entitled Une Somme de poésie and several shorter books of poetry, including Psaumes de tous mes temps, which brings together the psalms he wrote and revised throughout his life. WILLIAM LEVITAN teaches at Grand Valley State University, where he was founding chair of the Department of Classics. A winner of the Rome Prize, he is also a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and the editor of “The Yale New Classics,” a new series of translations from Yale University Press. ALEXIS LEVITIN’s translations have appeared in more than 200 literary magazines, including Partisan Review, Grand Street, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, and New England Review. The most recent of his twenty volumes of translations is Forbidden Words (New Directions, 2003). He was awarded a translation residency at the Banff International Center for Literary Translation last summer to work on the poetry of Antonio Ramos Rosa. Under a 2003 National Endowment for the Arts Translation fellowship, he has also been working on two other Portuguese poets . JONATHAN LEVY is the author of many plays for adults and children as well as several works of scholarship and criticism. He is Distinguished Teaching Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and a frequent contributor to New England Review. TRUDY LEWIS is the author of the short story collection The Bones of Garbo (Ohio State University Press, 2003), winner of the 2002 Sandstone Prize in Short Fiction. Her first novel, Private Correspondences (Northwestern University Press, 1994), won the William Goyen Prize. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Chelsea, Fence, Five Points, Meridian, Prairie Schooner, Southwest Review, and other publications. Her story “Limestone Diner” will be included in Best American Short Stories 2004; “West Wind” is a linked story from the same collection. She is a professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia and a member of the Anvil/lyre Studio, an arts collective established by her husband, Mike Barrett. EUGENIO MONTEJO was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1938. He is the author of numerous books of poetry: Élegos (1967), Muerte y memoria (1972), Algunas palabras (1976), Terredad (1979), Trópico absoluto (1982), Alfabeto del mundo (1986), Adiós al siglo XX (1992), El azul de la tierra (1997), Partitura de la cigarra (1999), and Tiempo Transfigurado (2001). He has also published two collections of essays: La ventana oblicua and El taller blanco. In 1998 he received Venezuela’s National Prize for Literature. DEBRA NAILS is Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University, specializing in ancient and early modern philosophy. Her most recent books are Agora, Academy, and the Conduct of Philosophy (Kluwer, 1995) and The People of Plato (Hackett, 2002). KIRK NESSETT is author of a book of short stories, Mr. Agreeable, forthcoming from Mammoth Press, and of a nonfiction study, The Stories of Raymond Carver (Ohio University Press, 1995). His stories and poems have appeared in The Pushcart Anthology, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Raritan, Boston Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing and literature at Allegheny College. HENRIK NORBRANDT is among the most celebrated poets in Scandinavia. Since his debut in 1966, he has published more than twenty collections, including Drømmebroer (Dreambridges), which received the Nordic Council Literature Prize for 2000. His latest book, Fralandsvind (Off-Shore Wind), appeared in 2001. EUNICE ODIO (1919-74) is considered the leading Costa Rican poet of the twentieth century. She was born in San José and died in Mexico City. Her volumes of poetry include Los elementos terrestres (Earthly Elements), El tránsito de fuego (The Fire’s Journey), and Territorio del alba y otros poemas (Territory of Dawn and Other Poems). She was also the author of short stories and numerous political and cultural essays. Her complete works were published by the University of Costa Rica Press in 1996. CORNELIUS PARTSCH is Assistant Professor of Modern and Classical Languages at Western Washington University. His research interests include popular culture, literature and music, the historical avant-gardes, and various genres of popular fiction. He has published a cultural history of jazz and popular music in 1920s and 1930s Germany entitled Schräge Töne: Jazz und Unterhaltungsmusik in der Kultur der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000), as well as “That Weimar Jazz” in the Fall 2002 issue of NER. LUCIA PERILLO’s fourth book of poetry, Luck Is Luck, will be published by Random House in 2005. Her poems and prose have appeared in many magazines, and in 2000 she received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. She lives in Olympia, Washington. PATRICK PHILLIPS’s first book, Chattahoochee (University of Arkansas Press, 2004), received a 2003 “Discovery”/The Nation Award. His poems and translations have appeared in many magazines, including recent issues of Poetry, Agni, and Ploughshares. Among his honors are a Fulbright Scholarship at the University of Copenhagen, the Sjoberg Translation Prize of the American-Scandinavian Foundation, and a Fellowship at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. He is currently a MacCracken Fellow at New York University. GLEN POURCIAU’s stories have been published most recently in New England Review, Mississippi Review, Ontario Review, Tatlin’s Tower, and Quarterly West. DAMON O. RARICK is a Visiting Assistant Professor of German at the University of Rhode Island, where he develops and teaches specialized German for engineering, business, and computer science majors alongside more traditional literature and language courses. He has published several translations, most recently for a volume entitled Flight of Fantasy: New Perspectives on Inner Emigration in German Literature, 1933–1945 (Berghahn Books, 2003). ELIZABETH REES’s poetry has appeared in Agni, The North American Review, Partisan Review, and The Kenyon Review, among other journals. Her first chapbook, Balancing China, won Sow Ear Press’s chapbook contest in 1998. A second chapbook, Hard Characters, was published in 2002 by March Street Press. F. D. REEVE lectured in Russia on poetry for two weeks in connection with Robert Frost’s 125th birthday. His current work is The Return of the Blue Cat—poems with a CD of his reading with the jazz trio Exit 59—forthcoming from Other Press. VCTOR RODRIGUEZ NUNEZ is one of the most significant contemporary Cuban writers. He is the author of seven books of poetry, many of them recipients of literary awards, including the David Prize (Cuba), the Plural Prize (Mexico), and the Renacimiento Prize (Spain). Rodríguez Núñez has also published various anthologies, critical editions, prologues, and articles on Hispanic literatures. He is currently Assistant Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College. ANTONIO RAMOS ROSA has published more than fifty volumes of poetry and has been awarded all of Portugal’s major literary awards, as well as France’s Prix Jean Malrieu. The well-known critic Jean Starobinski wrote an homage to the poet for Le Courrier de Centre International d’Études Poétiques in 1990. Translations of Ramos Rosa’s work have appeared in Italy, Spain, France, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, and England. Alexis Levitin’s authorized translations of his poems have been published in a dozen literary magazines, including Atlanta Review, Bitter Oleander, Confrontation, Southern Humanities Review, and Xavier Review; his translation of Ramos Rosa’s Selected Poems will be brought out by Guernica Editions of Toronto in 2005. MARK RUDMAN’s Rider trilogy (Wesleyan University Press) received the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. His most recent book is The Couple (Wesleyan). A book-length companion to Rider, Sunday’s on the Phone, will appear in 2005 (Wesleyan), and he has just completed a book of essays, Out of the Loop. He lives in New York City with his wife and son and teaches poetry part-time at New York University. UMBERTO SABA, one of the three great Italian poets of the twentieth century, was born Umberto Poli in Trieste in 1883 to a Jewish mother and a Christian father. His father abandoned the family before Umberto was born—“Out of her hands he slipped like a balloon,” according to one of Saba’s sonnets—and the son later rejected the father’s name. Saba’s masterpiece is Il Canzoniere (The Songbook), a kind of autobiography in verse that evolved over several decades. He died in 1957. CHRISTIAN FRIEDRICH DANIEL SCHUBART (1739–91) was a poet, preacher, musician, and chronicler of his times. For several years he produced his Deutsche Chronik (German Chronicle), a twice-weekly compendium of political reportage and criticism of literature, music, and the arts. While imprisoned for alleged crimes of adultery and satirical remarks, he devoted his attention to poetry and mysticism. A collection of his poems appeared in Stuttgart in 1785–86. During this period he also wrote Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Ideas Toward an Aesthetic of Music), which is excerpted in this issue of NER. Edited by Ludwig Schubart, the author’s son, the treatise was published posthumously in Vienna in 1806. MELISSA STEIN’s poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Many Mountains Moving, Seneca Review, The North American Review, Calyx, River City, Crab Orchard Review, and many other journals, and have been included in several anthologies. She is a freelance writer and editor in San Francisco. ALEXANDRA TEAGUE’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in Quarterly West, The Threepenny Review, The Paris Review, and other journals. She lives in San Francisco, where she directs the Writing Lab at City College. SONIA P. TICAS is Assistant Professor of Language and Latin American Literature at Linfield College, Oregon. She is currently collaborating on a book about the development of feminism in Central America. ALISSA VALLES pursued studies in history and Slavic languages in London; she is a poet and translator from Russian and Polish, employed by the Institute of War Documentation in Amsterdam. She studied poetry in Houston and is now a doctoral student at the Committee on Social Thought of the University of Chicago and a poetry editor for the web journal for international literature Words Without Borders. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Verse, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Pleiades, The Antioch Review, Magma, The Iowa Review, Jewish Quarterly, and elsewhere. MARK WISNIEWSKI’s first novel, Confessions of a Polish Used Car Salesman (Hi Jinx Press, 1997), is in its second printing. A collection of short stories, All Weekend with the Lights On, was published by Leaping Dog Press in 2001. He won a Pushcart Prize in 1999, and his stories have appeared in magazines such as The Missouri Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Black Warrior Review, The Yale Review, TriQuarterly, The Gettysburg Review, The Sun, and others. “Karmic Vapor” is drawn from You Don’t Drag a Woman, a novel he has all but finished.
CORRECTION For the Record |