Word: putnam
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...INGENIOUS GENTLEMAN DON QUIXOTE DE LA MANCHA (1,043 pp.)-By Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra; translated by Samuel Putnam-Viking...
Masterpiece by Mistake. Last week U.S. readers could discover what they had been missing. Samuel Putnam, a Renaissance specialist who has done the best translation of Rabelais, has reversed Cervantes' vast tapestry into English without dropping more than a few stitches of detail and coloring...
...Putnam's translation, Cervantes' style proves in English to be what it is in Spanish: one of the easiest, surest and most varied ever set to paper. Cervantes did not use his poetic gifts as directly as Shakespeare did, yet in a lifelong struggle to shake his talents loose, he found a loving patience and a kind irony that made him at last the deepest, widest humorist who ever wrote...
...Translator. The man who has at last brought Cervantes' masterpiece to life in English spent 17 years directly on the job and a lifetime indirectly preparing for it. Samuel Putnam began translating in Latin class at Hoopeston, Ill. High School, was so good at it that he won a Latin scholarship to the University of Chicago. Ill health kept him from earning a degree but not from trying his writing hand at newspaper work...
Back in the U.S., Putnam joined the Communist Party, did a literary column for the Daily Worker, was an associate editor of the New Masses, kept on translating (Novelists Ignazio Silone, Georges Duhamel) and writing his own books (Paris Was Our Mistress, Marvelous Journey). He spent eight years with the party in "misguided humility" before he quit...