Robert Graves

by John Michael Cohen

Biography

120 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1960

About the author

John Michael Cohen was a prolific translator of European literature into English.

Cohen launched his translation career with the first English translation of poems by Boris Pasternak, then unknown outside the Soviet Union. His translation of Pasternak garnered praise from American poet John Ashbery, in his book Other Traditions.

In 1946, on the strength of a commission from Penguin Books for a major translation of Don Quixote, Cohen quit his teaching job to dedicate himself full-time to writing and translation.

In addition to his translations of major works of Spanish and French literature for Penguin, Cohen also edited several important anthologies of Spanish and Latin American literature, as well as many of the Penguin Classics.
He played an instrumental role in the Latin Boom of the 1960s by translating works by Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, and Carlos Fuentes, and by bringing the works of Gabriel García Márquez to the attention of his future English publisher.
He also wrote a number of works of literary criticism and biography.