Haroldo de Campos was born in 1929 in São Paulo, Brazil, and is an internationally known, prize-winning poet, essayist and translator. A founder of the "Concrete Poetry" movement of the 1950s, and also a leader in experimental poetry, he was awarded the 1st Octavio Paz prize for his poetry, as well as the Roger Caillois prize in France. His career includes 12 books of poetry, 18 literary studies, and 14 translations, as well as projects for the theater, cinema and the plastic arts. He has published new Portuguese versions of the Biblical books of Genesis and Ecclesiastes, classical Chinese poetry and the first two cantos of "The Iliad." Campos refers to translation as "transcreating" because he draws on the creative Brazilian language in order to "reimagine" texts of Western tradition. His earlier "transcreations" include the works of Pound, Joyce, Mallarmé and other modern writers. Along with a degree in law, Campos, who was nicknamed "the locomotive of São Paulo" by the semiotician Max Bense, is a doctor in literature and was a visiting professor at the University of Texas and at Yale. Currently he is an emeritus professor of semiotics at the Catholic University of São Paulo.