Robert Goffin (b.1898 d. ??) was a Belgian poet, music critic, and Avocat a la Cour d'Appel in Brussels. He was called "the first serious man of letters to take jazz seriously enough to devote a book to it." His books include poems (Jazz Band); critical studies (Aux Frontieres du Jazz; Horn of Plenty: The Story of Louis Armstrong; Jazz: From the Congo to the Metropolitan); works on Mallarme, Rimbaud, and Verlaine; and The White Brigade (on the German occupation of Belgium, 1940-45). The Best Negro Jazz Orchestra is taken from Nancy Cunard's anthology Negro, published in 1934. It will be reprinted in the forthcoming Beckett in Black and Red (Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1999), a collection of translations done by Samuel Beckett for that anthology edited by Alan Friedman.