Cedar Paul


Cedar Paul, née Gertrude Mary Davenport was a singer, author, translator and journalist.

Biography

Gertrude Davenport came from a musical family: she was the granddaughter of the composer George Alexander Macfarren and the daughter of the composer Francis William Davenport. She was educated at convent schools in Belgium, France, Italy and England, and studied music in Germany.
She was a member of the Independent Labour Party from 1912 to 1919, and Secretary of the British Section of the Women's International Council of Socialist and Labour Organizations from 1917 to 1919. She married Eden Paul, and from 1915 onwards was active - under the name of Cedar Paul - as a translator and writer in collaboration with her husband. The pair became members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and Cedar served on the executive committee of the Plebs League in the 1920s. Together with Lyster Jameson, the Pauls made "strenuous attempts to develop psychology" as a component of working-class education in the Plebs League. However, some working-class League members resented them:
Cedar and Eden Paul were extraordinarily prolific translators in the interwar years, translating a range of socialist and psychotherapy works, as well as novels, particularly historical novels. They were the official translators for Stefan Zweig and Emil Ludwig, and their translations from German also included works by Karl Marx, Rudolf Hilferding, Karl Jaspers, Rudolf Brunngraber, Stefan Zweig and Heinrich von Treitschke. However, they also translated work from French, Italian and Russian.
After Eden Paul's death in 1944, Cedar Paul published only a small number of translations under her own name. A. J. P. Taylor, who had read the Pauls' work as a teenager, observed that the pair were no longer much remembered fifty years later.

Works

Translations undertaken with [Eden Paul]