November 18, 1995

Miron Grindea (January 31, 1909 to November 18 , 1995)  edited the ADAM International Review: A Literary Magazine in English and French.  In a 1969 issue we find he includes poems of Baudelaire's. This specifically, "Spleen" from Les Fleurs du Mal:

....the tomb always understands the poet...
.....

My cat that on the bare floor seeks a litter
Turns its thin mangy body without rest.
The soul of an old poet roams the gutter

Grindea was not French or English, though he accidentally wound up in England just before the War started. Miron Grindea was a Roumanian Jew.  According to his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article:

During the 1930s Bucharest was in intellectual and political turmoil, with the Antonescu regime and the Iron Guard fanning the flames of antisemitism and enacting harsh laws that left many Jewish intellectuals unemployed. Grindea attended Bucharest University and the Sorbonne, studying the humanities, and in 1936 he became the editor of Adam, a magazine focusing on Jewish culture and commentary. Editorials lamented the exodus from Bucharest and other European cities of Jewish intellectuals. He was also a music critic. At a recital at Bucharest Conservatory he fell in love with the pianist Carola Rabinovici....and devoted a whole article to her performance. They married in 1936 and had a daughter, Nadia.

Grindea, in editing Adam showed his ability to spot talent. The periodical was described thusly:

....‘Throughout the panoramic sweep of editorial content—from Strindberg to Senegal—three great themes persist: music, Proust and anti-Semitism’, with ‘music [as his] greatest passion’ ....

The Grindeas' flat at 28 Emperor's Gate, South Kensington, off the Cromwell Road, became the centre of Adam's and Grindea's universe, ‘more redolent of Paris or Vienna than London’. Assistants came and went, since Grindea was ‘hopeless at delegating … obsessive and disorganized’ .... From the early 1950s the Grindeas also had a spacious apartment off the Hove seafront, filled with artwork and cultural artefacts, and a plethora of books. Grindea was forever seeking funds to continue Adam..... The printer's bill was a constant worry and the editorials contained frequent and urgent pleas for support. Grindea also raised money for causes he considered worthy, for instance assisting David Gascoyne, and Dylan Thomas's family. 

Grindea's life intersected that of other great men.  From the same source we learn:

It was the influence of his subsequently distinguished near-contemporary Mircea Eliade and ... [Eliade's] intellectual exuberance that first gave ...[him] the impetus to write’ .
.....
In a cartoon drawn on a napkin Picasso depicted him as a Don Quixote bird of prey. His final years were blighted by a lengthy illness. He continued to edit Adam and was working on the 500th issue when he died. He took pride and pleasure in his family. Awards came to him, including the Prix de l'Académie française (1955), appointment as a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur (1974) and commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1985), the Lundquist literary prize, Sweden (1965), an honorary DLitt from the University of Kent, Canterbury (1983), and appointment as an MBE (1976) and then OBE (1986). Before his death his archives were sold to King's College, London.

His wife was the family's main financial support, with her musical performances, and music teaching.

[Of course there were other]... supporters who helped relieve his perpetual financial anxiety: ...[including] T. S. Eliot, who gave some of his Nobel prize money to Adam. ...
 In the end ...Adam outlived all its contemporary magazines, running for nearly sixty years...