Miriam Allen deFord (1888-1975) was a figure who spans across genres, but played a central role in the labour and Socialist movement of the United States in the early twentieth century. Born in Philadelphia in 1888, both her parents were medical doctors and strong supporters of what has now become known as first-wave feminism – particularly the right to vote. From about the age of six or seven, she began to become conscious of women’s issues. With her parents’ support and encouragement, at fourteen she became involved with the suffragist movement having been sent to the local suffrage headquarters to stuff envelopes and marched in the national suffrage parade in New York at eighteen.[1] At school, she decided that she wanted to become a writer and began submitting work to a local newspaper. She was able to receive a scholarship to attend Wellesley College before transferring to Temple University after her freshman year where she studied French, Greek, Latin, and advanced English. While at Temple, she also took summer classes at the University of Pennsylvania and, under the auspices of the university, published two essays on the ancient world. The first was in 1911 for The Classical Weekly entitled, “An Epileptic Emperor: A Study in the Psychology of the First Caesar,” and this was followed the next month with an article in The Classical Journal entitled “Latin Literature as Related to Roman Birth.”[2] After graduating from university, she moved to Boston where she worked several different jobs and began to “soap box” in support of suffrage.
Her politics slowly became more radical as she met her first husband, an anarchist named Armistead Collier.[3] It is also during this period that she began to garner a reputation for her writings and deFord began contributing to the Greenwich Village-based radical magazines, The Masses, New Masses, and The Liberator. After Boston, deFord and her husband moved to San Diego where her radical ideologies began to develop further. In San Diego, her husband and all of her friends were either anarchists or members of the IWW, she met and guarded Emma Goldman when the famous anarchist visited, and later interviewed William “Big Bill” Haywood – one of the founding members of the IWW and a member of the executive committee of the Socialist Party.[4] In 1919, she joined the Socialist Party, but left in 1922 after it had aligned itself with the right-wing faction and the Democratic Party, instead joining the Communist Party. Eventually, her marriage to Collier fell apart and she began a relationship with science writer and free-thinker, Maynard Shipley – who was also close friends with and the campaign manager for Eugene Debs.[5] In the 1920s, deFord had also begun working for the Federated Press, a left-wing news service that provided daily press on radical and labour politics and was often staffed and supported by members of the Communist Party. Although her formal membership with any leftist political party dwindled in the late 20s and early 30s, she remained a reporter with the Federated Press becoming acquainted with further radicals and labour activists. In the late 1930s, deFord also began her career as a science fiction and mystery author, including a 1952 short story entitled “De Crimine” in which Cicero is enlisted by a friend of his recently deceased daughter to help solve a burglary-turned-murder of an old Roman woman.[6]
While she worked for the Federated Press, she continued to freelance for a number of magazines and publishers, including the popular Little Blue Books series published by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius out of Girard, Kansas. The Little Blue Books were a progressive, leftist publishing venture created with the express purpose of providing high quality, educational books – through the self-proclaimed “University in Print” – at extremely low costs for those who had neither the time nor money to access a formal education. For this series, deFord published a number of titles such as books on Fascism and Mussolini and handbooks on improving typewriting and writing business letters. But she also translated a number of Latin texts for the series, all published in 1925. This included The Life and Poems of Catullus, Cicero as Revealed in His Letters, Lucretius on “The Nature of Things”, The Augustan Poets of Rome, and Rome as Viewed by Tacitus and Juvenal as well as a handbook entitled Latin Self Taught.
deFord’s translations emphasised accessibility and understandability for an audience who may have had little to no prior knowledge of these Latin authors. Each of her translations reads not as a cut-and-dry translation, but, instead, as a narrative using the translations of select passages as a guide to revealing interesting aspects of her subject’s life. One such example of this comes in The Life and Poems of Catullus where deFord translates poem 26:
Furius, my villa never is exposed
To southern winds, nor eastern storms’ attack,
Nor savage northern gales nor eastern blast:
But to a fifteen thousand and two hundred
Seseterces’ debt. O ruinous, baleful wind.[7]
deFord omits the formal Latin names for the winds – Austri, Favoni, Boreae, and Apheliotae – instead giving them their directional names. Even more significantly, she provides context for this “fifteen thousand and two hundred sesterces’ debt.” In a footnote, she explains,
A sesterce, or sestertius, was worth about 5.4 cents. The mortgage on Catullus’ villa was therefore about $820.80, making the probable value of the estate about fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars. Of course the purchasing value of money was much higher in Rome than in America today; but even so, in an age of many multi-millionaires – Crassus, for example – Catullus could hardly be considered well-to-do.[8]
Aside from the monetary context, deFord’s inclusion of this note also speaks to another aspect of her translations: her authorial intervention via her ideological beliefs.
deFord’s long involvement with and beliefs in progressive, socialist, and communist causes bleeds into her translations. As an example, in the passage cited earlier, deFord’s decision to claim that Catullus “could hardly be considered well-to-do,” is intended to argue that while Catullus’ money would have gone a lot further in Rome than in America, his overall income was nowhere near that of other Romans and more in line with the average income of a middle-class or below American. This allows her reader to see Catullus as a compatriot, albeit a much more well off one, rather than an out-of-touch elite who was able to find the time to write poetry due to the exploitation of the labour of others. Moreover, her translations of passages from Tacitus’ Annals which discuss the tyranny of Nero are framed in such a way that her audience would associate the Roman emperor with capitalism, the United States government, and other enemies of the working class; an association that was quite common during her time (insert image as an example).
deFord’s translations exist as a key instance of disseminating the ideologically charged translations of the texts of ancient Rome to the working class. deFord’s leftism and interest in classical culture was a key factor in how she approached her translations and her work at the time. Given the widespread popularity of the Little Blue Books, her translations are a key point in the popularisation of classical culture. The translations deFord created for the series are integral instances of reception by people who have been historically excluded from accessing classical texts. Haldeman-Julius writes of her Catullus translation,
Our readers, who are a little timid about the ancients (particularly the poets) will not shrink from your Catullus. The notes are useful, and your running comment puts one into the spirit of the things.[9]
This profile was written by Christopher Anaforian (PhD Candidate, University of St Andrews).
[1] Miriam Allen deFord, interviewed by Sherna Berger Gluck, March 6, 1973. For more on deFord’s feminism see Sherna B. Gluck, From Parlor to Prison: Five American Suffragists Talk About Their Lives. New York: Random House, 1976.
[2] Miriam Allen deFord, “An Epileptic Emperor: A Study in the Psychology of the First Caesar.” The Classical Weekly 5, no. 10 (December 23, 1911): 75-77. Miriam Allen deFord, “Latin Literature as Related to Roman Birth.” The Classical Journal 7, no. 4 (January, 1912): 147-157.
[3] Miriam Allen deFord, interviewed by Sherna Berger Gluck, March 6, 1973.
[4] Miriam Allen deFord, interviewed by Sherna Berger Gluck, March 6, 1973; Miriam Allen deFord, interviewed by Sherna Berger Gluck, March 8, 1973.
[5] Miriam Allen deFord, interviewed by Sherna Berger Gluck, March 8, 1973.
[6] Miriam Allen deFord, “De Crimine.” Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine 107 (October, 1952). For the full text see Mike Ashley, ed. The Mammoth Book of Roman Whodunnits. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2003.
[7] Miriam Allen deFord, The Life and Poems of Catullus. Girard, KN: Haldeman-Julius Company, 1925, 19.
[8] Miriam Allen deFord, The Life and Poems of Catullus. Girard, KN: Haldeman-Julius Company, 1925, 19.
[9] Haldeman-Julius, Emanuel. Emanuel Haldeman-Julius to Miriam Allen deFord. Box 1. Folder 81, Haldeman-Julius Collection, Axe Library, Pittsburg State University, Pittsburg, Kansas. November 15, 1924.
