75 Years Ago in These Pages
A review of Don Quixote de la Mancha,
trans. Samuel Putnam (Viking, 1949)
Don Quixote is the most frequently translated book in the history of literature [but], claims Mr. Putnam, has remained for English readers dull and unreadable. . . . [In this new translation], Mr. Putnam, eclipsing himself to his greater glory, has in large measure restored the genuine Cervantes to his English readers. He has removed many coats of paint. Sancho becomes a natural and intelligible Spanish peasant. The whole story requires this treatment. The imaginative and mythical flights must be built on a completely natural basis, otherwise the house will not stand. If Sancho is naturally fantastic, if the wineskins are not ordinary wineskins, the contrast and the humor will fail. A cake which is all sugar is not even a cake. . . .
Mr. Putnam is well known as the translator of Rabelais and other French and Italian classics, but he has never done better work than this translation of Don Quixote, which will place the whole world of letters, or rather the whole English-speaking world, deeply in his debt.”
—Aubrey F. G. Bell, Books Abroad 24, no. 1
(Winter 1950): 30–31
From 1933 to 1947, Samuel Putnam (1892–1950) contributed over a hundred book reviews and essays to Books Abroad. An American editor, publisher, and author, Putnam reputedly spent seventeen years on his Quixote.
Born in England, Aubrey Fitz Gerald Bell (1881–1950) studied classics at Oxford and worked as an assistant librarian at the British Museum. He authored numerous biographies, anthologies, travel books, and verse collections, and translated multiple books into English.
