Edwin Honig (1919-2011)

Poet, translator, and professor Edwin Honig passed away on May 25 at the age of 91, after a battle with Alzheimer's, as The New York Times writes. Honig was emeritus professor of english and comparative literature at Brown, having taught there for a quarter century before retiring in 1982. NYT notes Honig's translation work with Fernando Pessoa and Federico García Lorca, of whom he also wrote a critical study. As well:

Professor Honig translated many plays, including those of the 17th-century Spaniard Pedro Calderón de la Barca and those of his 16th-century countryman Miguel de Cervantes.

Published by New American Library in 1964, Professor Honig’s translation of Cervantes’s “Interludes” — short vignettes performed between acts of full-length plays — comprises earthy entertainments like “The Jealous Old Husband,” “The Divorce-Court Judge” and “Trampagos, the Pimp Who Lost His Moll.”

Professor Honig was knighted by the Spanish and Portuguese governments for his service to their national literatures.

As a critic, he was known in particular for “Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory,” published in 1959. . .His own poetry collections include “The Moral Circus,” “The Gazabos,” “Shake a Spear With Me, John Berryman” and “Time and Again: Poems, 1940-1997.”

Ron Silliman points us to eight poems Honig published in Jacket #16 (2002).