Edwin Honig

Poet, critic, and translator Edwin Honig was born on September 3, 1919, in Brooklyn, New York. He earned a BA from the University of Wisconsin in 1941, then served in the U.S. Army in the European arena during the Second World War. He returned to the University of Wisconsin at the end of his service and earned an MA in English.

Honig’s poetry collections include Time and Again: Poems, 1940–1997 (Xlibris, 2001); Shake a Spear with Me, John Berryman (Copper Beech Press, 1974); and The Moral Circus (Contemporary Poetry, 1955). He is a lauded translator of Portuguese and Spanish who is credited with introducing English-speaking readers to the work of Fernando Pessoa. He also translated the work of Federico García Lorca and completed one of the earliest critical studies of the poet’s work less than a decade after Lorca’s death. Honig also translated numerous plays, including works by Miguel de Cervantes. 

For his promotion of Portuguese and Spanish literatures in the English-speaking world, Honig was knighted by the president of Portugal in 1986 and King Juan Carlos I of Spain in 1996. Honig’s other honors include grants from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Endowment of the Humanities. He was also a two-time Guggenheim Fellow.

Honig had a long teaching career, serving as an instructor at New York University, Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of New Mexico, Purdue University, Claremont College, and Harvard University. He was a professor of English and comparative literature at Brown University from 1957 to 1982. In 1973, he founded Copper Beech Press in Providence, a publisher that specialized in poetry and works in translation. While at Brown, he founded its creative writing program.

Honig died on May 25, 2011, in Providence and was a professor emeritus at the time of his passing.