Robert Kelly’s   selected poems, RED ACTIONS, is available from Black Sparrow Press, which will be publishing in November 1998 his poems of 1994-1996, THE TIME OF VOICE. He is working on a fifth collection of short fiction. He teaches in the Writing Program at Bard College. Born two years before the death of Mary Butts, he laments never having known the woman whose re-emergence onto the literary horizon is one of the most important events of recent years.

Carlo Levi Della Torre is an Italian essayist and scholar. The exhibit for which this essay was written may be seen, on-line, at PhotoArts.

Gabriele Leidloff  is a visual artist whose work has been exhibited internationally and on the web. For further information please contact:
Art Resources Transfer, Inc., New York City, Bill Bartman
Galerie für Zeitgenöessische Kunst, Berlin, Michael Kapinos.
Gabriele Leidloff

Katherine McNamara  is the editor and publisher of ARCHIPELAGO. Her non-fiction narrative, NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH, A Journey into the Interior of Alaska, is forthcoming from Mercury House.

Ewald Osers, who was born in Prague, has lived in England since 1938. He has three times chaired the Translator’s Association; is a member of the team preparing the new Oxford German-English Dictionary; is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; and was Vice-President of the International Federation of Translators. He has translated over one hundred books of poetry and prose from Czech and German. In October 1997, President Václav Havel presented him with the Medal of Merit (Medaile Za zasluh (II. stupen)) for his work; he is the only living English-language translator to receive such a medal. Among his better-known translations are Ivan Klíma’s fiction, including MY FIRST LOVES, A SUMMER AFFAIR, and LOVE AND GARBAGE. Catbird Press/Garrigue Books has published Osers’ translation of Karel Capek’s WAR WITH THE NEWTS. Mr Osers winters in Naples, Florida, and summers in Reading, England.

Simon Perchik was born in 1923 in Paterson, N.J. He served in the armed forces as a pilot, and was educated at New York University (B.A. English, LL.B. Law). His poems have appeared in Partisan Reveiew, Poetry, The Nation, North American Review, APR, Harvard Magazine, New Letters, Massachusetts Review, Beloit, Southern Humanities Review, Denver Quarterly, The New Yorker, among others. His books of poems include: THE GANDOLPH POEMS (White Pine Press, 1987); BIRTHMARK (Flockophobic Press, 1992); REDEEMING THE WINGS and THE EMPTINESS BETWEEN MY HANDS (Dusty Dog Press, 1991, 1993); LETTERS TO THE DEAD (St. Andrews College Press, 1993). His newest book is THESE HANDS FILLED WITH NUMBNESS (Dusty Dog Press, 1996). He is married, has three children, and lives on Long Island, where he practices law.

Jaroslav Seifert was born in Prague in 1901 and died in Prague in 1986, two years after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. Throughout most of his life he was not only a poet but also journalist, translator of French and Russian poetry and The Song of Songs, and editor of volumes of nineteenth-century Czech poetry. During the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia (1939-1945) he became the unofficial national poet. In the early years of Communist rule, his poetry was banned, but later was slowly brought back into print. In 1967, at the height of the Prague Spring, he was officially declared National Artist of Czechoslovakia, and on the day of the 1968 Soviet invasion he was named chairman of the Union of Writers, which he remained until the organization was dissolved a year later. His work was once again banned for many years, but continued to be published in samizdat. THE POETRY OF JAROSLAV SEIFERT, tr. Ewald Osers, ed. George Gibian, brought out by Catbird Press/ Garrigue Books in 1998, is the first major edition of Seifert’s poetry to be published in the United States.

Claire Turyn is a photographer who lives and works in Paris. An exhibit of her photographs can be seen, on-line, on PhotoArts.

Franca Varini (translator) lives in New York.

James Wintner  (translator) is director of JHW Editions, publishing limited editions/livres d’artists, including PICASSO/WORDS GERTRUDE STEIN/ MUSIC VERGIL THOMSON (1992) and SPECIALIST, Robert Sheckley. Illustrated by Susanna Bergtold (1993).

In Memorium
Paul Flamand (1909-1998)
Co-Founder, Editions du Seuil
Remembered by Cornelia Bessie in
ARCHIPELAGO Vol. 1, No. 4.

Moshe Benarroch’s new poems can be read at RedFrog. A selection of his work appears in ARCHIPELAGO, Vol. 2, No. 1.

Anna Maria Ortese, A MUSIC BEHIND A WALL, Selected Stories, Vol. 2, has just been published by McPherson & Co. Her story “The Great Street” appeared in ARCHIPELAGO Vol. 1, No. 1.

Viriditas Digitalis, our philosopher of the garden, is on hiatus, sends regrets, and will return in the next issue.

The series “Institutional Memory,” in which the Editor converses withdistinguished publishers who love books and writers, will resume in the next issue, with Katherine McNamara’s conversaton with William Strachan, now Director of the Columbia University Press, formerly Editor in Chief, Holt.