translation

Charles Martin’s most recent book of poems is Signs & Wonders, published in 2011 by Johns Hopkins University Press. His verse translation of the Metamorphoses of Ovid (2004) received the Harold Morton Landon Award from the Academy of American Poets. In 2005, he received an Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He served as Poet in Residence at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York from 2005 to 2009.

Dovid Zisman (1914 – 1960), a Holocaust survivor, was a poet, playwright and performer in Poland. Known for his poetry in the Lodz ghetto, he was sent to a work camp in the German factory Hasag-Pelcery in Czestochowa in 1943 and later sent to the concentration camp Buchenwald. He wrote and performed his writing during his imprisonment and torture in labor and concentration camps. Following liberation, he married Helen Zisman and continued to write poetry and prose.

Laine Zisman Newman, Dovid’s youngest granddaughter, is a PhD student in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. Her practical and academic work focuses on creating and promoting equitable theatre practices. Her creative and scholarly work has been published in Canadian Theatre Review; The Rusty Toque; Journal of Dance, Movement and Spiritualties (forthcoming, 2014); and Studies in Documentary Film.

Shifra Zisman, Dovid Zisman’s youngest daughter, is a Canadian actress and teacher who performed throughout Canada’s east coast in the 1970s as part of the Newfoundland Travelling Theatre Company. As a drama and music consultant, she currently works in Early Childhood Education, and instructs college courses in Toronto, Ontario.

Lope de Vega was born in Madrid in 1562. A poet, dramatist, novelist, and critic, he was also a soldier, and one of the survivors of the tragically misnamed Invincible Armada. He is generally acknowledged as the father of the Spanish drama, and, since his death in 1635, has been widely considered “the Spanish Shakespeare.” The poem presented here is drawn from his collection of “Sacred Sonnets.”

Ryan Wilson holds graduate degrees from The Johns Hopkins University and Boston University. Recent work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in a number of magazines, including 32 Poems, First Things, The Hopkins Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Measure, River Styx, and Sewanee Theological Review, among others. Currently living with his wife in Baltimore, he is a doctoral candidate at The Catholic University of America.