Samuel Putnam

Samuel Putnam (October 10, 1892 – January 15, 1950) was an American translator and scholar of Romance languages. He is also noteworthy as the author of Paris Was Our Mistress, a memoir on writers and artists associated with the American ex-patriate community in Paris in the 1920s and early 1930s. Work Putnam's most famous work is his 1949 English translation of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote. It is the first version of the work in what would today be considered contemporary English; there is still archaic language, but less than in earlier English versions. The language is formal when spoken by educated characters, but seldom old-fashioned, while the peasant characters speak in colloquial modern English. Putnam worked on the translation for 12 years. He also published a companion volume, The Portable Cervantes, that included an abridged version of his translation, in addition to English versions of two of Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares. Daniel Eisenberg, comparing translations of Don Quixote, called Putnam's translation the most "sensitive", and by far the best documented.