Contributor

Jonathan Cohen

Contributor

Jonathan Cohen

Jonathan Cohen is an award-winning translator of Latin American poetry and scholar of inter-American literature. He is the editor and translator of Pluriverse: New and Selected Poems, by Ernesto Cardenal, and the editor of By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish, 1916-1959, by William Carlos Williams—both published by New Directions....

In 2017, New Directions published his “centennial edition” of Williams’s breakthrough poetry book, Al Que Quiere! His edition of Williams’s translation of the Spanish Golden Age novella,The Dog and the Fever, was issued by Wesleyan University Press in 2018. Also in 2018, Peepal Tree Press published his translation of Pedro Mir's Countersong to Walt Whitman and Other Poems. His scholarly works include A Pan-American Life: Selected Poetry and Prose of Muna Lee and Neruda in English: A Critical History of the Verse Translations and Their Impact on American Poetry. (Author photo by Gy Mirano.)

Empty Hills—Deep Woods—Green Moss: William Carlos Williams’s Chinese Experiment

By Jonathan Cohen

The object of art is not the outer representation, the seeming, but the informing spirit.—William E. Gates, in Early Chinese Painting (1916)Throughout his career William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)…

Intact at Last!—William Carlos Williams’s Translation of Nicolas Calas’s “To Voyage beyond the Past”

By Jonathan Cohen

There must be a new formalism, invention.—William Carlos Williams to Nicolas Calas (1940)Translation for William Carlos Williams was an especially rewarding way to experiment with poetics. He translated…

On William Carlos Williams’s Translation of Ernesto Mejía Sánchez’s “Vigils”

By Jonathan Cohen

What influence can Spanish have on us who speak a derivative of English in North America? To shake us free for a reconsideration of the poetic line. . . . It looks as though our salvation may come not…

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Jonathan Cohen

Jonathan Cohen

Articles by Jonathan Cohen

Empty Hills—Deep Woods—Green Moss: William Carlos Williams’s Chinese Experiment

Intact at Last!—William Carlos Williams’s Translation of Nicolas Calas’s “To Voyage beyond the Past”

On William Carlos Williams’s Translation of Ernesto Mejía Sánchez’s “Vigils”