Latvian poet and translator Uldis Bērziš was born in 1944. His first poems appeared in 1963, but the first of his six volumes did not appear until the 1980s. His poetry has been translated into French, Swedish, Estonian, Lithuanian, Russian and other languages. A polyglot, he has translated poems for many languages, including Turkish, Persian, Spanish, English, Polish, Swedish, Russian and Old Icelandic. His current project is translation of the Koran and the Old Testament from Hebrew and Arabic into Latvian. His awards include the Literary Award of the Baltic Assembly (1995) and Order of the Three Stars (1995).
Translator Ieva Lešinska (b.1958) is an editor, journalist, poet and translator living and working in Riga, Latvia. Once a culture editor for Radio Free Europe in Munich, since 1993 Ms. Lesinska has been on the editorial staff at the magazine Rigas Laiks and also holds a full-time position as English language editor at the central bank of Latvia. She has received special notice for her translations of Anglo American poets into Latvian, including T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Allen Ginsberg's Kaddish, as well as selected poems by Robert Frost, Seamus Heaney, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, and others. Her original poetry has appeared in Latvian periodicals and anthologies. She is currently working on a book of Òdocumentary fictionÓ. In this issue, she has translated Berzins, Gaile, and Zandere.