Armand Robin

Armand Robin (January 19, 1912 – March 30, 1961) was a French poet, translator, and journalist.

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.

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