J. M. Cohen

J. M. Cohen

J. M. (John Michael) Cohen (5 February 1903 – 19 July 1989) was a prolific translator (into English) of European literature. Born in London, he was a graduate of 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. On the strength of a commission from Penguin Books for a major translation of Don Quixote, he quit his teaching job to dedicate himself full time to writing and translation in 1946. His workmanlike and accurate translation of Don Quixote, published in 1950, has been highly praised, although some prefer the translation by Samuel Putnam.

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. He also wrote a number of works of literary criticism and biography.

In its obituary, The Times described him as "the translator of foreign prose classics for our times." The Guardian declared that he "did perhaps more than anyone else in his generation to introduce British readers to the classics of world literature by making them available in good modern English translations."