Because It Was Green

THE VALLEY OF THE LATIN BEAR by Alexander Lenard. 219 pages. Dufton. $4.95.

En, nunc ipse in imo est, vobis ostentari paratus. Winnie ille Pu." Hardly the sort of prose one expects to read in a bestseller. But a bestseller was exactly what Alexander Lenard's Latin translation of A. A. Milne's classic turned out to be. Winnie Ille Pu sold 100,000 copies. On every reader's parsed lips was the question: Who was Translator Alexander Lenard?

Rumors ran wild. He was a Hungarian who knew twelve languages, a student of Renaissance research on the human kidney, a painter, a poet, an organist and pianist specializing in Bach, a teacher of mathematics, a pharmacist, a doctor, a many-sided genius who had holed up in the jungles of South America.

In this wittily ironic memoir, Lenard blithely confesses that all the rumors are true. Unlike most memoirists, he is crisply cryptic about his own improbable early life. But with delight and charm, he descants on life in his adopted home in Southern Brazil. If he seems to resemble Albert Schweitzer as an intellectual refugee buried in a jungle, the resemblance is superficial: Schweitzer is devout and ascetic, Lenard is an agnostic and a humanist; Schweitzer is a crusader, Lenard works for pay.

Weathercock. Author Lenard was born in Budapest in 1910. He recalls the outbreak of the first World War, a day when the city went mad with rejoicing, as "the last happy day that mankind was ever to know." The rest of his life has been an attempt to regain the paradise he feels he lost at that moment.

His parents fled Budapest, drifted about the Balkans, settled at last in Vienna. Young Alexander attended the famous Theresianum School ("much patina, titled schoolmates and scanty meals") and went on to complete his medical studies in 1932. In 1938, foreseeing a second World War, he fled to Rome, where he stubbornly detached himself from the organized world around him. He let his passport expire. He applied for no ration book. He buried himself at the Vatican Museum as a librarian, read nothing printed after the French Revolution. But one day he saw German shells demolish the weathercock on a fine old church and abruptly decided that the time for passive resistance had ended.

Working in the wartime underground, he hid Allied airmen in his Rome apartment. Hiding from the Gestapo, he slept on streetcars and in churches. He ended the war with a citation from British Field Marshal Alexander and a job as chief anthropologist for the U.S. Army Graves Registration Service. His duties: sorting and reassembling the bones of U.S. soldiers for shipment home. ("Can't you make it faster?" shouted the major in command. "Can't you make it faster!") In 1952, foreseeing a third World War, he fled to Brazil because "it looked big and green on the map."

Back in Dog patch. As an alien, he found jobs hard to get. He worked as a male nurse in a lead mine. He tutored the daughters of French engineers on the side. To stimulate their interest in Latin, it occurred to him to translate Winnie the Pooh for use as a text. But he decided that paradise must be better than this, and he moved on and out. Wangling a license as a practicing pharmacist, he settled in the village he calls Donna Irma, in the coffee-growing uplands of southern Brazil.

The village was a Brazilian version of Dogpatch. Yet there was eternal spring, big blue butterflies in the forests, and coffee shrubs, banana trees, sugar cane growing wild on every hand. There was a wildly eclectic population: Germans, Italians, Negroes and "others"--who might be descended from Indian chiefs, Spanish monks, Portuguese sapphire hunters, Polish immigrants. No policemen, no cars, no television; plenty of children, flowers and festivals. Lenard settled in as a pharmacist-surgeon, taught music to the children, practiced Bach on the organ at the Protestant church, and contentedly observed the life around him.

Problem of Bulls. His account of it is a delight. The local barber was named Pericles, and the local butcher doubled as a dentist. Mr. Plinz, the milkman, skimmed the cream off his business-one pint from each gallon he delivered to market. Mrs. Plinz was the midwife, ran a dispensary in which her pigs wandered freely among her patients. Local education was both sketchy and imaginative. Sample passage from a history lesson: "In the beginning God and Christ created the world. It is not quite certain where, but certainly not in Brazil; because Brazil was not discovered at that time." Local justice was administered by the town clerk and was strictly ad hoc. Typical case: when a stud bull breaks loose and ravages two neighboring cows, does the bull get stud fees or do the cows get damages? Mostly the villagers settled their own problems. When a hog merchant named Suspenders caught his wife being unfaithful, he bought her a pair of long trousers--and a belt with a lock on it. When a gigantically fat grandmother died in her bed (a mattress supported by six tree stumps), her survivors neatly sawed Grandma in half, buried her in two coffins.

Lenard is something of a sentimentalist who likes to think that all savages are noble and that the only significant achievement of civilization is its art. In these pages he stands revealed as a paradox: something of a sage, something of a child. He loves the quiet life; yet he shyly confesses that he hopes this book will preserve his memory. His name will be remembered as long as people read bedtime stories in Latin.

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