Edwin Honig, at 91; was poet, translator, Brown professor

Mr. Honig, a professor emeritus who founded the creative writing program at Brown University in Providence, wrote volumes of poetry, and created translations that helped put the work of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa into the hands of those who read in English, died May 25 in his Providence home of complications of Alzheimer’s disease. He was 91.

Service in the US Army and work in academia grounded Mr. Honig in languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Russian, some of which he had already encountered growing up in Brooklyn, N.Y.

A child of 10 when his parents divorced, Mr. Honig “went to live with our paternal grandparents,’’ said his sister, Lila Putnam of Franktown, Colo. “They were very poor, but very happy people. My paternal grandmother spoke Spanish, and Edwin loved the sound of it.’’

Other languages swirled around the Honig children, too.

“On my mother’s side, Yiddish, Polish, and German were spoken; on my father’s, Hebrew, Spanish, Arabic, Yiddish, some Italian, a bit of French,’’ Mr. Honig wrote. “As a child I kept listening to all the jabber.’’

These encounters with language, he said in “The Poet’s Other Voice,’’ seemed to be “part of the business of becoming a poet, a continuing self-renewing act.’’

He believed translation also was a creative endeavor, more than simply finding English equivalents for words penned in Portuguese or Spanish.

“A good translation could bring what was irreplaceable in the original together with what was missing from it,’’ he wrote, adding that “there seemed no use in doing a translation unless I were going to create a new work.’’

Mr. Honig did so most notably with Pessoa, who in the early 20th century wrote under multiple names. Mr. Honig also translated Spanish plays from the 16th and 17th century that were written by Miguel de Cervantes and Pedro Calderon de la Barca.

“The sinewy, quick-moving, bare quality of language was what had fascinated me in the Spanish,’’ Mr. Honig wrote, “and this was what I found missing in the general run of English translations.’’