author

John Ridland

John Ridland was born in London in 1933. His British parents and he immigrated to California in 1935, where he has lived most of his life. He spent four years at Swarthmore College and two years in the Army in Puerto Rico. In 1956 he returned to Berkeley to study English, met and married Muriel Thomas from New Zealand, a fellow graduate student, and in 1964 completed a PhD from Claremont Graduate University. He taught English at the University of California, Santa Barbara for forty-three years, including nearly three in Melbourne, directing the UC Education Abroad Program in Australia.

 

Euripides

Euripides (480 BC – 406 BC) was the youngest of the three great Athenian tragedians whose work survives. From the voluminous number of tragedies these three playwrights produced, we have seven apiece by Aeschylus and Sophocles, and eighteen or nineteen by Euripides, who was called in antiquity the most tragic of the tragic poets, and of whom it was also said that he showed people not as they ought to be but as they are. Some of the ancient references to Euripides, while they can’t be substantiated, give a vivid sense of the nature and popularity of his art.

 

Rachel Hadas

Rachel Hadas is Board of Governors Professor of English at the Newark campus of Rutgers University. The most recent of her many books of poems is The Golden Road (Northwestern University Press, 2012); a memoir, Strange Relation, was published by Paul Dry Books in 2011.

 

Fosildo Mirtunzio (Pseudonym)

Fosildo Mirtunzio was the pseudonymous and otherwise unknown author of Veglie auttunnali [Autumnal Vigils], published in Venice in 1796. The translations of his two poems in this issue, as well as the two from Malatesti, will appear in the forthcoming anthology Dancing with the Sphinx: Riddle Poems, edited by Kate Light and Kathrine Varnes.

 

 

Giovanni Raboni

Giovanni Raboni, born in Milan in 1932, worked as an editor and critic. His status as perhaps the greatest Italian poet of his generation is attested to by the inclusion of his complete poems, L’opera poetica (2006), in the prestigious Meridiani series of standard Italian authors. He also published several volumes of critical essays, as well as translations of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal and Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, among many others. He died in September 2004.

 

Antonio Malatesti

Antonio Malatesti (1610 – 1672) was a Florentine poet. His collection of riddles, Una Corona di Enigmi, was published in 1640. La Tina, a sequence of bawdy rustic sonnets, was dedicated to John Milton and presented to him in manuscript; a new edition, edited from this text by Davide Messina, was published in 2014. Malatesti’s later verse was collected in the posthumous Brindisi dei Ciclopi (1673).

 

 

Kate Light

Kate Light’s poetry collections are The Laws of Falling Bodies (Nicholas Roerich Prize, 1997), Open Slowly (2003), and Gravity’s Dream (Donald Justice Award, 2006). A professional violinist, she is also the librettist of The Life and Loves of Joe Coogan, an opera based on an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show; Once Upon the Wind, based on a Russian folk tale; and Einstein’s Mozart: Two Geniuses.

 

 

Michael Palma

Michael Palma has published two poetry chapbooks, The Egg Shape and Antibodies; two full-length collections, A Fortune in Gold and Begin in Gladness; and an online chapbook, The Ghost of Congress Street. His fourteen translations of modern Italian poets include prizewinning volumes of Guido Gozzano and Diego Valeri with Princeton University Press, as well as books by Maurizio Cucchi, Franco Buffoni, Paolo Valesio, Maura Del Serra, and others. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in many journals and over thirty anthologies.

 

X.J. Kennedy

X.J. Kennedy will have two new books out this year: a comic novel, A Hoarse Half-human Cheer (e-book from Curtis Brown Digital, paperback from CreateSpace) and Fits of Concision: Collected Poems of Six or Fewer Lines (Grolier Poetry Bookshop). His translations include The Bestiary of Guillaume Apollinaire (Johns Hopkins University Press) and the Lysistrata of Aristophanesin the Penn Complete Greek Drama series.

 

 

Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri (1265 – 1321) is widely regarded as one of the world’s greatest poets. His Vita Nova (c. 1292 – 95), a combination of prose and poetry that tells the story of his youthful love for Beatrice, was his first book. In 1295 he entered Florentine politics and in the summer of 1300 he became one of the six governing Priors of Florence, the highest political office. During this time, he was also writing the numerous lyric poems that made him famous in central and northern Italy, as well as studying widely and deeply in a number of subjects.

 

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