John Felstiner spent three years on the USS Forrestal after graduating from Harvard, then got his PhD at Harvard. Since 1965 he has been teaching literature at Stanford, with stints at the University of Chile, The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and Yale. He has held Rockefeller, Guggenheim, NEH, and NEA fellowships.

John's first book was The Lies of Art: Max Beerbohm's Parody and Caricature (Knopf, 1972). His next, Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu (Stanford, 1980), won the Commonwealth Club Gold Medal for Non-Fiction. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (Yale, 1995) was named a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award and the MLA's James Russell Lowell prize, and it won the 1997 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism (judges: Denis Donoghue, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Elizabeth Hardwick, Geoffrey Hartman, Seamus Heaney, Frank Kermode).

His Neruda and Celan translations won the British Comparative Literature Association's 1st and 2nd prizes. The Limited Editions Club has published his Neruda translation, Heights of Macchu Picchu, with photogravures by Edward Ranney, and will publish his Celan translation, Todesfuge / Deathfugue , with an etching by Gisé le Celan-Lestrange. John's Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (Norton, 2001) won the Modern Language Association, American Translators Association, and PEN West translation prizes, and was Finalist for the American PEN and the Helen and Kurt Wolff prizes. He hosted the 1982 ALTA conference at Stanford.