J. M. Cohen

J. M. (John Michael) Cohen (5 February 1903 – 19 July 1989) was a prolific British translator of European literature into English.

Life

Born in London, J. M. Cohen was educated at St. Paul's School, London and Queens' College at Cambridge University. After working in his father's manufacturing business from 1925 until 1940, he was moved by a wartime shortage of teachers to become a schoolmaster. In addition to teaching young people, he spent the war years teaching himself Spanish and Russian, and he 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. His workmanlike and accurate translation of Don Quixote, published in 1950, has been highly praised, and remained in print until 2000. However, some critics have compared it unfavourably to the translation by Samuel Putnam on the basis of Cohen being "too faithful to the original."

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 (alongside E. V. Rieu). 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.