Quick Facts
Biography
Armand Robin (January 19, 1912 – March 30, 1961) was a French poet, translator, and journalist.
Life
Robin was born in Plouguernével by Rostrenen (Côtes-d'Armor) and came to Paris. He was unable to settle down for all his life. He traveled to the USSR in 1934, and returned shocked by the reality of communism. During the German occupation of France during World War II he worked in radio broadcasting foreign news.
Robin continued his language studies so that he understood twenty-six languages. He translated works from English (Shakespeare), Russian (Yesenin, Blok, Pasternak), Hungarian (Ady), Polish (Mickiewicz), Italian (Ungaretti), Chinese (Tu Fu), Flemish, Finnish, German, Arabic, Spanish, Kalmyk, etc.
He joined the French Anarchist Federation in 1945, which published his Poèmes indésirables (Undesirable Poems). He authored "La fausse parole" (The False Word), which dissected the mechanisms of propaganda in the totalitarian countries.
On March 27, 1961, Robin was arrested because he had no identity document, and died three days later under mysterious circumstances in a Parisian hospital.
Works
Own poetry with translations
- Ma vie sans moi (1940); My life without me
Poetry
- Poèmes indésirables (1945)
- Le Monde d'une voix, Éditions Gallimard (1968)
- Fragments, Gallimard (1992)
- Le cycle du pays natal, La Part Commune (2000)
Translations
- Poèmes d'Ady, Le Seuil (1946), Le temps qu'il fait (1991)
- Poèmes de Boris Pasternak (1946)
- Quatre Poètes russes (1949)
- Poésie non traduite (1953)
- Poésie non traduite II (1958)
- Rubayat d'Omar Khayam (1958)
- Les Gaillardes Épouses de Windsor et Othello de Shakespeare (1958)
- Le Roi Lear de Shakespeare (1959)
- Écrits oubliés II, Ubacs (1986)
Novel
- Le Temps qu'il fait (1942)
Radio broadcasts
- Pâques fête de la joie, Calligrammes (1982)
- Poésie sans passeport, Ubacs (1990)
Essays, articles
- La fausse Parole, Minuit (1953), Le Temps qu'il fait (2002)
- L'homme sans nouvelle, Le temps qu'il fait (1981)
- Écrits oubliés I, Ubacs (1986)
- Expertise de la fausse parole, Ubacs (1990)
Correspondence
- Lettres à Jean Guéhenno, Lettres à Jules Supervielle, Librairie La Nerthe (2006)