Iraj Anvar’s first book of Rumi translations, which he is currently revising, was published in 2002. The new translations in this issue will appear in Birds of Wonder, to be published this year by Pir Press. A leading member of the theater community in Iran until his departure in 1978, Dr. Anvar holds a doctorate in Middle Eastern Studies from NYU, where he was a professor for many years. He has led the New York Ava Ensemble which has performed throughout the United States. The Ensemble is dedicated to playing traditional Persian music using ancient instruments and performing classical Persian poetry, much of which was originally intended to be sung. Dr. Anvar’s credits include translations from English and Italian into Persian.
Laurie Calhoun is Director of Publications at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University. Her metaphilosophical critique of analytic philosophy, Philosophy Unmasked, was published in 1997. These philosophical essays — Michael Walzer on Just War Theory’s “Critical Edge”: More Like a Spoon Than a Knife; The Problem of “Dirty Hands” and Corrupt Leadership; Just War? Moral Soldiers?; A Critique of Group Loyalty — are published on-line in The Independent Review. Her film critiques can be read at Labyrinth, on Wyler’s The Heiress” , and on Coppola’s “Kurtz” and David Lean’s “Lawrence” ; and at New Partisan, on Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. In Jumpcut, she wrote about Errol Morris’ ‘technokillers’.
Born Alexander Mikhailovich Glikberg in Odessa in 1880, Sasha Chernyi was first and foremost a poet and satirist. Chernyi was first published in the St. Petersburg weekly magazine Viewer. The first collection of his satirical poetry, entitled Various Motives, appeared in 1906. It was followed by Satires and Lyrics and several children’s’ poems in 1911. Boldness, wit, and even audacity were characteristic qualities of his work, and his children’s poems were entertaining, educational, and quick-witted. Chernyi emigrated to France in 1920, and lived out of the country until his death in 1932. These translations of his poetry, by Kevin Kinsella, are the first to appear in English.
Helena Cobban is a long-time researcher and writer on the Middle East, a columnist for the Christian Science Monitor, and a contributing writer at the Boston Review. She has written several books, including The Moral Architecture of World Peace (University of Virginia Press 2000), The Superpowers and the Syrian-Israeli Conflict (Praeger Publishers 1991), and The Making of Modern Lebanon (Hutchinson 1985). She writes the blog ‘Just World News’.
Isabel Fargo Cole has contributed often to Archipelago, most recently as translator of Horst Lange’s War Diaries. Shewas born in Galena, Illinois, grew up in New York City, attended the University of Chicago, and has lived in Berlin as a writer and translator since 1995. She is an editor of the Berlin literary magazine lauter niemand, and the initiator of the associated English-language journal for young German literature, no man’s land. Her own Web site is here. She adds:
“I wrote this story (“The Caliph”) 3 years ago while translating Hermann Ungar. The deserter was a figment of the imagination, a riff on Ungar’s Caliph and a rather romantic device for making sense of the war, or conveying the attempt to make sense. Now deserters are an unromantic reality, and a number of soldiers are now seeking conscientious objector status – an extremely difficult process, but one of the strongest imaginable public statements of the war’s senselessness. More information on GI rights, war resisters, COs and ways of helping them is provided by organizations such as The American Friends Service Committee and the Center on Conscience and War.”
Tones and Silences, new paintings by Bridget Flannery will be on exhibition from 15 March to 5 April, 2007, at Cross Gallery, 49 Francis Street, Dublin 8. tel 01-473 8978. Images of her work appeared in Archipelago Vol. 5, No. 1.
Patricia Frederick received a BA in French from Tufts University and a PhD from Rice University. An Associate Professor at Northern Arizona University, she has been teaching French language, culture, literature and film for more than twenty years. Her publications comprise both critical studies and translations of works by Yourcenar and Le Clézio, as well as Franco-African and Caribbean fiction by Djura, Condé, Dadié, and Yacine. Her scholarly interests also include medieval folklore and issues in contemporary culture.
Lucy Gray’s “Balancing Acts” (2003), an exhibition about prima ballerinas who are mothers, was exhibited in Baltimore and Washington, D.C.; an image appeared in Dance Magazine. Her pictures have won awards at Photo Review, Somerset Art Association, and International Color Awards. She took stills for a documentary, “Strange Fruit,” and for ABCs “Dancing with the Stars” and “American Inventor.” The Spring 2007 issue of the literary journal Brick will publisher her interview with Charles Bukowski, which she conducted at his home in 1989. She blogs here. Her website is lucygrayphotography.com.
Kevin Kinsella is a Brooklyn-based writer and translator. Most recently, his work has appeared in/on Eyeshot and Pindeldyboz. His translation of Osip Mandelshtam’s Tristia is forthcoming from Green Integer Books; poems from that collection appeared in Archipelago, Vol. 5, No. 4. He blogs at Languor Management.
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, or J.M.G. Le Clézio (born 13 April 1940) is a French and Mauritian novelist. The author of over thirty works, he was awarded the 1963 Prix Renaudot and the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy, in announcing the award, called Le Clézio an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.” His Nobel Prize speech, interviews, and a fuller biography can be found at nobelprize.org.
Greil Marcus is the author of Mystery Train (Penguin); Lipstick Traces, A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Harvard Univ. Press); The Dustbin of History (Harvard); and many others. His most recent book is The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006). He writes a monthly music column for Interview. In 2006, he taught at Berkeley and Princeton.
Jeffrey H. Matsuura is an attorney with the Virginia law firm, the Alliance Law Group. His practice focuses on legal, regulatory, and public policy issues associated with science and technology. Mr. Matsuura has been counsel for several technology-based companies; served as an advisor to governments in the U.S. and abroad on technology policy matters; and taught and lectured extensively on technology law and policy. He was a member of the faculty and Director of the Program in Law and Technology at the University of Dayton School of Law, a visiting fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s AHRB Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law, a research fellow at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, and a visiting professor at Cape Technikon University, Cape Town, South Africa. He is the author of five books on legal aspects of science and technology, including, most recently, Nanotechnology Regulation and Policy Worldwide. Mr. Matsuura earned degrees from Duke University, the University of Virginia School of Law, and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Kevin McFadden’s Eight Poems In The Manner of OuLiPo are in Archipelago. His work has also appeared in Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry Daily, Antioch Review, Quarterly West, Ploughshares, and other literary journals. He is the winner of the 2006 Erskine J. Poetry Prize and runner-up for the Academy of American Poets’ 2006 Walt Whitman Prize.
Frank McGuinness is a poet and playwright living in Ireland. His many plays include Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (Dublin, The Abbey Theatre, 1985) and, most recently, There Came a Gypsy Riding (London, Almeida Theatre, 2007). He has adapted Lorca, Ibsen, Chekhov, Brecht and Weill, and has also written for television and film. His story “The Sunday Father” is in New Dubliners, edited by Oona Frawley (Dublin: New Island Books; New York: Pegasus Books).
Jonathan McVity, who translated Beatrix Ost’s My Father’s House, with the author, was first based in Germany during his undergraduate years reading English at Oxford University. Among his other translations are Karl Kraus’s Dicta and Contradicta and the maxims of Vauvenargues.
Rodney Nelson’s poems got into print long ago (Georgia Review, Nimrod), and a few chapbooks followed (e.g., Oregon Scroll, Thor’s Home); but he turned to fiction and drama and did not write a poem between 1982 and 2004. Thus, all of the work now appearing in electronic magazines—e.g., Cipher Journal, nthposition, Liminal Pleasures, Big Bridge, Hamilton Stone Review—is new. A lifelong nonacademic, Nelson has worked as freelance copy editor, licensed psychiatric technician, and hemodialysis technician, living mainly in northern California and northern Arizona. At the moment he is in his native Dakotas.
Beatrix Ost is an artist whose work is exhibited internationally. She has also worked as a playwright, producer, and actress in the German and American theatre and cinema. She has lived in the United States with her husband Ludwig Kuttner since 1975, and currently divides her time between Charlottesville, Virginia, and New York City. My Father’s House, her first book, will be published in the U.S. in May 2007, by Books & Co./Helen Marx Books; it was published first in Germany, where it was a best-seller.
Tracy Robinson is a writer in Montréal. Her story “What War Is” appeared in Archipelago, Vol. 6, No. 2.
Anne Twitty is a writer and translator whose works have been widely published. She received the PEN Prize for Poetry in Translation in 2002 (for Maria Negroni’s Islandia) and a NEA Translation Fellowship in 2006 (to support the translation of the same author’snovel Ursula’s Dream). Anne Twitty’s original writing on themes related to spiritual traditions has appeared in several issues of Parabola. After studying Rumi with Dr. Anvar, she began to collaborate with him on these translations, to be published later this year by Pir Press published by Pir Press.
Katherine E. Young’s poetry has appeared most recently in Poet Lore, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Iowa Review (where she is a three-time finalist for the Iowa Award), Southern Poetry Review, and Shenandoah. She is a three-time semifinalist for the “Discovery/The Nation” reading in New York and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A chapbook, Gentling the Bones, will be published by Finishing Line Press in 2007. She has lived and worked in Russia and the former Soviet Union off and on for the last 25 years; she currently lives in Arlington, Virginia.
News of Our Contributors
The Virginia Festival of the Book takes place in Charlottesville, Virginia, March 21-25. Katherine McNamara will be moderator of “Altered State(s): American Culture Now” with Daniel Mendelsohn, Dahlia Lithwick, and Hal Crowther. Please check the Festival schedule for more information. Check local C-Span/BookTV schedules, as well.
Paul Sohar, translator of Sándor Kányádi , the Transylvanian Hungarian poet, writes to tell us that new translations of Kányádi appear on Hungarian Literature On-Line. Sohar’s translation of Kányádi’s great “All Soul’s Day in Vienna” appeared in Archipelago, Vol. 3, No. 4; and “Song for the Road,” in Vol. 4, No. 1 . Kányádi’s Dancing Embers, translated by Paul Sohar, is available from Twisted Spoon Press, Prague, with a Foreword by Katherine McNamara.
March is Small Press Month.
April is National Poetry Month.
Poetry Daily celebrates its Tenth Anniversary in April 2007!
Matt Madden, the graphics author, now publishes a blog. Recently, his 99 Ways to Tell A Story: Exercises in Style, appeared. Some of some of his “Exercises in Style“ appeared in Archipelago, Vol. 5, No. 2.
Oliver Khan, whose poems appeared in Archipelago, Vol. 10, Nos. 1&2, manages a new blog, Creative Writing Contests.
Tom Daley, whose poems appeared in Archipelago, Vol. 7, No. 2, has brought them out in a chapbook, Canticles and Inventories (Cambridge, Ma.: Wyngaerts Hoeck Press).