Finding Lost Voices: Let the Rail Sputter and Split, Sanora Babb, Pablo Neruda and the Dancer and Translator, Waldeen
A weekly email that brings back the voices of those who have been forgotten or misremembered.
This week marks just a month before my biography about Sanora Babb Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb will be published. I am getting so excited. There are so many exciting things that are coming soon! In honor of all this excitement, I’m dedicating the next few posts to women in my subject Sanora Babb’s life who you may not know about. This week, I want to share a woman whom Babb deeply admired for her deep commitment to her art. Her friend, the dancer, choreographer, and translator, Waldeen is virtually unknown in the United States because she was considered a “subversive” during the McCarthy Era, and the notorious 1952 McCarran-Walter Act blocked her from ever returning to the United States after 1952.
Waldeen (von Falkenstein) (1913 -1993) was born in Dallas, Texas. Her parents named her after Thoreau's Walden. She started taking dance lessons at the age of four. But it was when she was seven, when her family moved to Los Angeles, that she started her formal training. She started working with the Russian dancer turned movie star Theodore Kosloff at his School of Imperial Russian Ballet. For many years, she thrived under his strict direction. At thirteen, she danced as a soloist for the Los Angeles Opera Company. However, as she came into herself as an artist, Waldeen began to feel constrained by conventional ballet. She wondered what dance would be like if she changed some elements so welded into the classical form but was scolded for these thoughts. For example, when she’d asked Kosloff if she could vary her hand positions during a dance rehearsal, he became livid. Due to this rigidity, two years later, Waldeen broke with Kosloff and instead began fusing modern and classical dance forms. In 1932, she began choreographing her compositions: dances that used ballet as their base without becoming controlled by its form or ideas. She toured Japan with Michio Ito's dance group, then performed up and down the West Coast of the United States and in Mexico.
During this time, Babb first met Waldeen at a Communist Party fundraiser in Los Angeles. Babb and Waldeen were drawn to the party and how it welcomed artists. The two immediately connected. Both were committed to their art, and neither wanted to let their art form be defined by what had come before.
From 1934 to 1937, Waldeen danced in Hollywood films alongside stars such as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to fund a performance she wanted to arrange of her work in New York City. In 1937, she moved to New York to teach modern dance, dance history, and choreography at the Neighborhood Playhouse and the Nicholas Roerich Museum while she prepared for the show that would be her debut. When she arrived in New York, Waldeen found the modern dance that had become popular was the "School of Modern Dance" headed by Martha Graham which offered a style quite different than what Waldeen performed.
Waldeen’s performance took place at the Guild Theater in February 1938. The music that accompanied her pieces was eclectic. It included everything from Bach to a particular arrangement of African-American spirituals by Harold Forsythe. One of her pieces was based on Wallace Stevens’s poem "Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz," which she projected behind her as she danced through the words.
There are these sudden mobs of men,
These sudden clouds of faces and arms,
An immense suppression, freed,
These voices crying without knowing for what,
Except to be happy, without knowing how,
Imposing forms they cannot describe,
Requiring order beyond their speech.
Too many waltzes have ended.
But because Waldeen’s style did not match the accepted style of Graham, the critical response of New York's dance establishment was decidedly cool. As a result, Waldeen became discouraged and realized she had to look elsewhere to find an audience that would embrace her unique form of modern dance.
So, in 1939, Waldeen left New York for Mexico City. The Mexican Ministry of Education had invited her to create a national ballet and school of modern dance under the auspices of the Fine Arts Department (Departamento de Bellas Artes). At this time, the arts were flowering in Mexico, and the excitement soon swept away Waldeen, as she remembered:
Everything was opening up for Mexican artists and they just carried me with them. They were my teachers — they introduced me to Mexico. They took me all over the country. We didn't have cars, so we took buses, trains, rode on horseback. We went to marvelous fiestas out in the countryside. I danced barefoot in the dirt. I was simply saturated with Mexico. I didn't want to go back to the United States … I remember walking down the street and trying to see how people walked so I could incorporate that into my dance. I remember that everything I saw went into the dance I was creating.
Waldeen used this inspiration to organize the Ballet de Bellas Artes, which gave its first performance in the fall of 1940. Waldeen's vision was "to create a new and healthy dance, with real meaning for the Mexican people; a national dance in spirit and form, but universal in its scope." The Ministry of Education, which subsidized Waldeen, encouraged creating and developing a Mexican choreographic movement "free from both false folklorism and the imported ideas and forms … that cannot take root in Mexico."
While in Mexico Waldeen formed lasting relationships with the artistic community, including the muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera, and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.
Waldeen met Neruda soon after he arrived in Mexico, in 1940, as Chile's consul general. She describes Neruda as
"a big bear of a man, absolutely charming. He had a wonderful sense of humor. He was a tremendous conversationalist, much like Diego [Rivera]."
In 1946, Waldeen decided to return to New York to see if the modern dance scene had become more receptive. She moved back to New York to teach choreography at the New School and Hunter College and she performed with her troupe of American dancers at venues like Hunter College, Brooklyn College of Music, and the YMHA (for the Choreographers' Workshop).
Neruda wrote parts of his epic poem Canto General while living in Mexico, including "América, No Invoco Tu Nombre en Vano" (America, I Don't Call Your Name in Vain). Before she left for New York, he entrusted his poetry to Waldeen, asking if she would consider translating it into English because he respected her as an artist.
It was in New York that that Waldeen started translating Neruda's Canto. After long days of teaching dance and doing choreography she went home close to midnight to work on her translations of Neruda’s poem. One of her translations would make its debut appearance that year in the October issue of Masses & Mainstream. She also incorporated Neruda’s work into her dance performances.
But Waldeen once again became disillusioned by her experience in New York. She remained at odds with the dance establishment, and her dancers in Mexico were writing to ask her to return. And so, in August 1948, she went back to Mexico, working now for Ballet Nacional, with which she would travel into remote regions of the country, dancing in rural schools, village plazas, stadiums, and fields.
Back in Mexico City, in September 1949, Waldeen performed a dance adaptation of "Let the Rail Splitter Awake" at the closing session of the American Continental Congress for World Peace. Her ballet featured a dozen dancers wearing costumes and masks and a recorded dramatic reading of her translation of Neruda’s poem arranged by her husband, Asa Zatz. The three readers were the Mexican actress Rosaura Revueltas, the Bolivian painter Roberto Berdecio, and Neruda himself. The recording of the translation was inter-cut with original music written for her ballet by Hershy Kay.
Waldeen’s written translations of Canto General were the first English translations. She collected many of them in a chapbook called Let the Rail Splitter Awake and Other Poems. A chapbook that would later be discovered by the poet Allen Ginsberg. Babb would also publish several more of Waldeen’s translations of of Canto General in the spring 1952 issue of California Quarterly.
In the late 1940s, the FBI had begun stopping by Sanora Babb’s home in Los Angeles to investigate both her and her husband, the cinematographer James Wong Howe. Babb was under surveillance and was interviewed by agents. Her file contains the facts of her involvement with the Communist Party: when she joined, which branch she was a part of, and a list of her publications with New Masses and other communist-related publications. Babb realized that due to her membership in the Communist Party and her association with the League of American Writers, it was in her best interest if she followed the mass of artists migrating to Mexico City to escape being investigated. The scholar Alan Wald suspects her desire to temporarily relocate to Mexico was an “effort to evade a subpoena to testify before a congressional body.”
Waldeen invited Babb to move to Mexico City and live with her and her husband, Asa Satz. In 1950, Mexico City was filled with expatriate artists who mingled with Mexico’s artistic elite. The “exile community” included Communist Party leaders from the United States, members of the Hollywood Ten, and several artists and writers whose lives were connected to the communist community: Martha Dodd, Albert Maltz, Dalton Trumbo, Gordon Kahn, Hugo and Jean (Rouverol) Butler, Howard Fast, John Bright, Julian Zimet, and Elizabeth Catlett. The group as a whole was called the “American Communist Group in Mexico,” or ACGM, by the FBI.
Babb would stay in Mexico City for a year and a half, then return to Los Angeles. But, thanks to the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, Waldeen would never be able to return to the United States. In a famous tribute to Waldeen written in 1956, Diego Rivera proclaimed: "In each of her dance movements, she offered our country a jewel.” If only America had felt the same about her.
Upcoming Events
Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb launches on October 15. Pre-order your copy now!
October
October 4th - 3:15 - 3:30 PM - 58th Western Literature Association Conference The Hilton Resort of El Conquistador, Tucson, Arizona.
October 15 - Vromen’s Bookstore in Pasadena, CA - Iris Jamahl Dunkle in Conversation with The Lost Ladies of Lit Co-hosts Kim Askew and Amy Helmes,
October 16 - 6:00 PM - Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at Bookmine in Napa.
October 18 - 7:00 PM Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at Copperfield’s Santa Rosa, CA - Register here.
October 23 - 5:30 PM - Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at Readers’ Books 130 East Napa Street, Sonoma, CA.
October 30 - 7:00 PM - Iris Jamahl Dunkle in conversation with Harry Stecopoulos at Prairie Lights Bookstore, Iowa City, IA
November
November 1 - 6:00 PM 7:30 PM - Catamaran Lit Chat with Iris Jamahl Dunkle - Catamaran Literary Reader - 1050 River St., Studio 118 Santa Cruz, CA 95060
November 7, Oklahoma Center for the Humanities, Tulsa, OK
November 13 - Book Club at Pasadena Heritage
November 18 - The Book Club of California
November 19, 4:30 PM UC Davis Manetti Shrem Museum in conversation with Matthew Stratton
November 20, 5:00 PM UC Berkeley, English Department (Room 300)
November 22, TBA University of Oklahoma
January 2025
January 24 - Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH
January 25 - Reading with Jan Beatty at White Whale Books in Pittsburgh, PA
January 27 - Iris Jamahl Dunkle in Conversation with Donovan Hohn at Literati in Ann Arbor, MI
January 28 - Iris Jamahl Dunkle at Morgenstern Books, Bloomington, Indiana
February
February 26, 6:00 PM Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at King's English, Salt Lake City, UT
February 27 - Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at American West Center, Salt Lake City, UT
March
March 5 - The Bill Lane Center for the American West: Stanford, CA
March 13- 5:00 PM Garden City Community College, Kansas
March 21 - 2:00 PM New York Public Library, New York City