The Conversion of Communist
WOLFE, BERTRAM D.
The Conversion of a Communist The intimate story of how a famous translator came to leave the party By Bertram D. Wolfe I FIRST became aware of Samuel Putnam through his translations from...
...As if to remind Sam Putnam of my existence, the publisher adorned the jacket of his new book with a quolaI on from my review of the earlier Rebellion in the Backlands...
...The column was signed Sam Putnam ! A few days later, my correspondent sent me another clipping from the Daily Worker...
...This js the translation of Don Quitvote that the English-speaking world has been waiting for...
...That autumn, it was Sam's turn to read and comment on a book of mine...
...Aretino, Pirandello, Belinski (from the Russian) , Silone, Cervantes, Huysmans, Cocteau and the Marquis de Sade...
...In December, he made public acknowledgment of his change of heart in a letter to THE NEW LEADER, in which journal he professed to find the spirit that he needed: "a deeply rooted faith in a progressively socialized democracy of our own type (by its very nature ever subject to improvement) together with a truly liberal attitude toward differing points of view and an intellectual spirit that for me had come to be summed up in the words of the historian Charles A. Beard: ' walk lightly...
...At last, in the third year after our first strange encounter, he did a Portable Rabelais...
...I want to express my personal gratitude...
...That autumn, I went out to California on a Hoover Library Fellowship to do research for the second volume of my history of the Russian Revolution...
...For your report we will pay you a hundred dollars...
...Even then, he was full of plans for more translations and the study of fresh languages...
...I want only to add the impersonal fact that in 1946, when the United States was badly in need of friendly neighbors, as it is today and always, the State Department sent Samuel Putnam, historian of Brazilian letters and translator of Brazilian masterpieces, on an exchange professorship to Brazil...
...Under the heading...
...by Magdalena Mondragon...
...At that point, Daniel Bell, then an editor of the NEW LEADER, now labor editor of Fortune, took a small part in the drama...
...On May 7, 1949, we finally had our first and only personal encounter...
...that if you say it is merely a good translation v\e will not publish: but if you say...
...His dearest wish in case of death was to have friends who knew him and his work deeply speak for him, and he often said that the one he would prefer above all would be you...
...The second letter read: "So...
...There is one aspect, however, that I should like to mention to you which they will omit: the cold, cruel but invigorating clarity it brings to one who, like myself, knows what it is to have floundered for a decade and more in the Machiavellian mazes of the party line . . only to be disillusioned in the end- disillusioned and more than a little ashamed...
...It was a history of the relations between Russia and the United States from the time of Catherine and the birth of our republic to the moment when Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt met at Teheran...
...On January 16, 1950, Riva Putnam wrote me: "Sam died, unexpectedly and without warning, of a heart attack yesterday, just an hour after he had put his finishing touches on the Cervantes Portable...
...I have wished and wished that you were nearer so that you could be there...
...though Putnam found the journey from his home in Philadelphia to New York too much for his strength, we got to know each other very intimately through an occasional exchange of letters...
...I am taking his body to his native Rossville, Illinois tomorrow...
...In his introduction, Samuel Putnam stated his translator's credo: "To come to grips with the author's mind, with what he thought and what he really wrote . to present it with the greatest possible fidelity, clarity and simplicity . . to attain a style which, like the original, shall be free of affectation, colloquial and modern without being flagrantly 'modernized' . . . combining textual fidelity with readable prose to overcome those obstacles that have inevitably been erected by time and distance as precious antiques need from time to time to be refurbished to bring back the original luster...
...In a letter to me, he spoke for the first time of his conversion...
...You will be the judge...
...he wrote, "will do justice to Three Who Made a Revolution as history and biography and English prose...
...Read as much or as little as you please a single chapter a few pages enough to make up your mind...
...He would have served with equal distinction as an ambassador of good will in any one of a half-dozen other lands whose literature and culture he did so much to make known to us...
...Freyre uses them as symbols to suggest the original cultural antagonism and social distinction between masters and slaves, blacks and whites...
...we will go ahead with publication...
...He did a Brazilian novel, The Violent Land, by Jorge Amado...
...I hesitated, then decided that the book was so good that a polemical analysis of the last chapter would be unjust to the work as a whole...
...Accompanied by his wife, Riva, who was also his lover, nurse, companion, secretary, cook comrade-in-arms and mother of his only son, he made the difficult two-hour journey from Lambertville, New Jersey, his new home, to New York, to have lunch and spend a few hours in talk with my wife and me...
...I sent the giver a note of appreciation, telling him that I was especially moved by the inscription because I thought I understood something of the background from which it sprang...
...Then he cited my review of Rebellion in the Backlands, adding: "Here's another book we don't have to read because it has been favorably reviewed by Bertram D. Wolfe in the Herald Tribune...
...With that began a literary friendship, and...
...Obviously, the party nabobs had decided to push the book because of the self-same last chapter which I had decided to ignore...
...The first praised the literary columns of Sam Putnam, urging that they be reprinted in pamphlet form to show writers and intellectuals the Communist attitude toward culture...
...Written in a turbulent baroque prose always bordering on drama and poetry-"a monstrous poem of brutality and force," Euclides himself had called it-and filled with Brazilianisms, regionalisms, Negroisms, Indianisins and all the intensity of the human and geological inferno that was its setting, Os Sertoes was a work to tax the skill, patience and artistry of the best of translators...
...In both cases, he has wrestled with an enormous vocabulary of Brazilianisms, Indianisms, Africanisms, and has given these masterpieces a style that closely approximates their originals, yet has comparable literary quality in our own language...
...It contained two letters that had every appearance of having been cooked up in the office of the paper...
...We might do well to remember that the human spirit is fearfully and wonderfully made, and that a Wise Man once urged that, in things of the spirit, more can be accomplished by coals of fire than by bullying...
...He learned his first words of German from a Bavarian shoemaker at the age of 9; read the forbidden Rabelais in a hayloft at the age of 12 and, the same year, began to study Latin and Greek...
...But you don't have to read the whole thing...
...In any case, our country is the richer because Samuel Putnam lived in it, and in other lands, from 1892 to 1950...
...This is the second time that Samuel Putnam has made available to us a great Brazilian master-piece that is at the same time a masterpiece in its genre and in the literature of our time and hemisphere...
...Who's the translator...
...Samuel Putnam, the sensitive and conscientious scholar, was brought face to face with Sam Putnam, the party-line literary critic...
...This was a field in which I have no special knowledge, and here at last was a book which should not have come to my desk...
...It was a literary column, apparently a regular feature of the paper...
...I was deeply moved on contemplating his frail figure and realizing that this weak, tubercular man, who spent a good part of each waking day flat on his back, had managed to produce some nine or ten original books, hundreds of articles and poems, and fifty translations from perhaps a dozen tongues...
...Thus...
...A few days later, a friend sent me a clipping from the Daily Worker...
...Sam Putnam says that The Road to Teheran, by Foster Rhea Dulles, is a book we don't have to read because it was favorably reviewed by Bertram D. Wolfe in the Herald Tribune...
...Published in Brazil in 1902, it was soon recognized by Brazilians as nosso livro mvremo- "our finest book...
...Dilemma of a Literary Ffatchetman," he told his readers the story of my review of the Foster Rhea Dulles book and Sam Putnam's reaction thereto...
...a brief history of Brazilian literature, and a survey of four centuries of Brazilian writing which he entitled Marvellous Journey...
...The resulting dialogue, inaudible to the spectator, puts an end to Act I of this little drama...
...The book is as vast as Brazil: the author broods over the birth of his land and people until he is "able to feel the life lived b\ our ancestors in all its sensual fullness...
...At 57, he began the study of Rumanian to explore yet another literature for America...
...Sam Putnam had condensed a book without reading it because it had been favorably reviewed by a writer of whom he knew only that party leaders had attacked him...
...On the flyleaf were inscribed the words: "For Bertram D. Wolfe, A critic who has been kinder to me than I deserve, Samuel Putnam...
...Here the little drama of the conversion of a Communist might well end, but there is an epilogue...
...Though I was there on a Slavic Fellowship, Sam wrote to the head of the Romanic Division about me and I ended up with an appointment as Visiting Lecturer in Spanish Culture, giving a course in Don Quixote...
...It must have produced a very puzzled Sam Putnam...
...Two souls in one breast were suddenly forced to confront each other...
...There is neither recognition nor monetary reward in translation," he once wrote...
...It was Os Sertoes, translated from the Brazilian Portuguese of Euclides da Cunha under the title...
...Each of them came to me to review...
...I ended my article: "I cannot close this review without a tribute to the translator...
...Here," it said of The Road to Teheran, "is one book we don't have to read, because it was favorably reviewed by Bertram D. Wolfe in the Herald Tribune...
...For two years, Samuel Putnam labored over another great Brazilian classic, and early in 1946 he produced The Masters and the Slaves, a translation from the Poutuguese of Gilberto Freyre's Casa Grande e Senzala...
...I read the manuscript with considerable trepidation...
...Europeans and Africans over the span of three centuries, and the gradual closing up of that social distance by mating and intermarriage and democratic class fluidity in the course of the formation of the Brazilian nationality and "cosmic race...
...The value of your book for those like me lies in the fact that, by showing us the historical bases of our error, it restores something of self-respect and affords the basis for a new start...
...And the Books Editor of the Herald Tribune, thereby reminded that I had reviewed the other work, sent me Masters and Slaves...
...The Conversion of a Communist The intimate story of how a famous translator came to leave the party By Bertram D. Wolfe I FIRST became aware of Samuel Putnam through his translations from Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French and other tongues into English...
...My review exalted the book and praised the translation and the translator...
...But I received a copy all the same...
...studied at the Sorbonne from 1909 to 1914, made Paris his mistress, edited an expatriate literary review, wrote poetry, art and literary criticism, biography, literary history, articles on sexual pathology...
...Here we let the curtain drop on Act II, with Sam Putnam and Samuel Putnam still engaged in a troubled internal dialogue...
...It's a pity Sam doesn't read the New Masses, for if he did he would find in the latest issue a warmly favorable review of two-and-one-half pages by Corliss Lamont...
...I expostulated that I was too busy with my own writing, that Quixote was too big a manuscript, that publishers did not pay readers enough for readings...
...But his translations were so sensitive, so right, so amazing in the variety of languages and the range of taste, that I came to know his name and to think of Samuel Putnam as one of those rare writers whose genuine vocation is translation...
...Printing costs are so high, and this book is so big...
...Things are not so simple.' . This comes as a great relief to one who, for nearly a decade and up to three years ago, out of misguided humility had forced himself to live in the stifling atmosphere of the party line with all its ruthless intolerance for the processes of the mind...
...As I read it, I was inclined to pronounce it a livro supremo of the Americas...
...I have often thought of his conversion thanks to a book review, and of the complexity of the human spirit, as I have watched Congressional committees dealing with the youthful, or not so youthful, errors or dreams of former Communists...
...Others...
...It is probably a compliment when a translation isn't noticed...
...Let your conscience be your guide as to what test passages you select and how much you read...
...Casa Grande is the "Big House" of the master, and Senzaht the slave quarters...
...failed to take a degree there because of the ill health which dogged him all the days of his life...
...Rebellion in the Backlands, "with introduction and notes by the translator, Samuel Putnam...
...He lectured on comparative literature at the University of Brazil, made our own literature better known to Brazilian intellectuals, was elected a member (I believe the only Anglo-Saxon member) of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, and was awarded the Brazilian Government's Pandia Colgeras Prize for literature in 1947...
...Curtain on Act III...
...and, handicapped by frail health, tubercular lungs and other illnesses which caused him to spend a good part of each day flat on his back, he did over 50 translations of novels, plays and poetry, including Rabelais...
...The letter was signed: "Puzzled Reader...
...Early in 1944, I reviewed The Road to Teheran, by the historian Foster Rhea Dulles, for the New York Herald Tribune...
...one of the editors of the Viking Press called me up: "Bert, we'd like you to read a new translation of Don Quixote and give us your opinion...
...I decided to say nothing about the last chapter, concluding my review with the words: "unreservedly recommended...
...Thenceforward, fate willed it that Samuel Putnam should be continuously linked up with me and his name with mine...
...The man has worked sixteen years on the translation...
...won a scholarship to the University of Chicago as a result of a translation from Latin while a high-school student...
...He had fallen in love with the languages and letters of foreign lands in his childhood in Rossville, Illinois...
...Once more, a capricious fate had linked our two spirits...
...He talked and planned with me until time for his nap, and he had lain down for only a few moments . he died that quickly...
...It turned out to be a great book-to my mind, one of the two greatest books on sociology ever written on the American continent...
...Because of its timeliness, the Herald Tribune took my brief review of a scholarly book and, dressing it up with an imposing picture of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill seated on the portico of the Russian Embassy at Teheran, gave it the entire first page of the Sunday Book Review...
...He quotes your strictures on other translations in his preface...
...a Mexican novel, Yo Como Pobre...
...Early in 1948...
...A week later, the Books Editor of the Herald Tribune sent me a new book to review...
...Only the last chapter troubled me because it was faintly tainted with the Grand Alliance illusions which boded ill for the planning of a decent peace...
...This time, it was from the "Letters from Our Readers" column...
...My report to the publisher, my congratulations to Sam Putnam and, in due course, my inevitable review in the Herald Tribune confirmed that these high and difficult aims had been nobly carried out...
Vol. 37 • June 1954 • No. 23
