Edwin Honey

Edwin Honig (born September 3, 1919 in Brooklyn , New York City , † May 25, 2011 in Providence , Rhode Island ) was an American poet , literary critic and translator , who was mainly known through his English-language translations of Spanish and Portuguese literature got known.

Life

After attending school, he studied at the University of Wisconsin , where he received a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in 1941 . After completing his military service in the US Army in Europe during the Second World War , he completed postgraduate studies in English at the University of Wisconsin, completing this with a Master of Arts (MA English). He then worked as a lecturer at Harvard University and several other universities.

In 1957 he took over a professorship for English language and comparative literature at Brown University and taught there until his retirement in 1982. At Brown University he founded the program for creative writing , from which today's department for literary arts emerged. In 1973 he was also the founder and first editor of the Copper Beech Press , a small publishing house in Providence that specialized in the publication of poetry and translations.

Most recently, he suffered from Alzheimer's disease and appeared in a short documentary titled Translating Edwin Honig: A Poet's Alzheimer's , which premiered at the 2010 New York Film Festival , shot by his cousin, film director Alan Berliner . The film portrayed the changes in relationships through language, memory, and self-awareness of changes as the disease progressed.

Publications

He also began working as a translator and, as such, made a significant contribution to bringing the works of Fernando Pessoa , the important Portuguese poet of the early 20th century , closer to an English-speaking readership. He translated the poems of Federico García Lorca and wrote a critical study published in 1944 on García Lorca, murdered by the nationalists Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War in 1936 , which was one of the earliest accounts of the poet in English. In addition, he has also translated numerous stage works such as by Miguel de Cervantes and his compatriot Pedro Calderón de la Barca .

His translations of Cervantes' short vignettes, which were played between the acts of individual plays, under the title Eight Interludes , published by the New American Library in 1964, included interludes such as El viejo zeloso (The jealous old man) and El juez de los divorcios (The divorce judge ).

His other translations include Poems of Fernando Pessoa (co-author Susan M. Brown, 1986), Life Is a Dream (play by Calderón de la Barca) and Four Puppet Plays, Play Without a Title, the Divan Poems, and Other Poems, Prose Poems and Dramatic Pieces (1990) based on the works of García Lorca. His interest in Portuguese-Spanish literature came from his Sephardic grandmother, who came from Spain .

In addition to the translations of other poets, Honig also wrote several volumes of his own poetry such as The Moral Circus (1955), The Gazabos (1959), Shake a Spear With Me, John Berryman (1974) and Time and Again: Poems, 1940-1997 (2000). His poems were shaped by formal precision, masterful tonal control and sometimes biting wit, as for example in the poem "Anon". Other well-known poems from Time and Again are "Pacific Grove", "Pinch-hitting", "To Infinite Eternity", "Turning Eighty", "Up Sooner Than That", "Elsewhere", "On Moving On" and " Fountain ".

He was best known as a critic for Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory (1959).

Web links

• Biography (The Poetry Foundation)
• THE NEW YORK TIMES: Edwin Honig, a Poet, Professor and Translator, Dies at 91 (June 5, 2011)
• Edwin Honig: A Life of Literature (obituary on the Brown University homepage)
• Entry (American Center for Artists)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Short Films: TRANSLATING EDWIN HONIG: A POET'S ALZHEIMER (Punto de Vista Festival) ( Memento from February 18, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
2. ↑ Edwin Honig - Eight Poems (Jacketmagazine)