Maida Castelhun Darnton (1872-1940): Translator, Editor, and Cultural Impresario

Maida Castelhun Darnton

Plot 5, Lot 127, W 1/2

Maida Castelhun Darnton was an American translator, editor, and cultural impresario who moved easily between San Francisco, New York, and Paris in the early 20th century. She was the daughter of Dr. F. C. Castelhun of San Francisco, a physician and lecturer, who published occasional verse and essays. 

She married the critic and Broadway columnist Charles Darnton and eventually settled for stretches in Paris, where her bilingual skill turned into a career translating and shaping European literature for U.S. audiences. Publishing under “Maida C. Darnton” or “M. C. Darnton,” she brought continental books to English readers and worked as an editor on cross-Atlantic literary projects that helped introduce “the new spirit” in European writing to American newspaper and magazine audiences. Contemporary notices in 1932 place her in precisely that world of anthologies, translations, and publishing collaborations, identifying her professionally as an editor and literary translator. 

Cartoon of Maida Darnton

Darnton also turned up in American feature pages in the early 1930s, reflecting the period’s appetite for European letters and for interpreters who could bridge languages and scenes. Those same pages show her credited for editorial and translation work that circulated widely beyond New York—evidence that her name (often as M. C. Darnton) had become familiar to general readers well outside the publishing capitals.

She came from a remarkable California family. Her sister, Ella Castelhun, was among the first women licensed as architects in California, an early professional pioneer at a time when few women held technical credentials. [Read about her HERE] The Castelhun brothers were notable as well. Paul Castelhun drew headlines as a standout football player at the University of California, Berkeley, appearing in the Bay Area sports pages during the program’s ascendant years. And in a grim episode that made national briefs during the First World War era, another brother died in a brewery accident—drowning in a vat of beer—a family tragedy recorded in contemporaneous press accounts. 

Castelhun Family Plot (photo Michael Colbruno)

Darnton’s cosmopolitan marriage, Paris years, and steady work as a translator gave her a vantage point onto both American mass media and European literary modernism. Reviews of the day single out her translations and editorial hand for making continental literature legible to U.S. readers, and notices across the country show the breadth of her reach.

Unfortunately, she is remembered today only on her memorial page and in scattered newspaper articles.