Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter (born Helen Tracy Porter, 1877, Pennsylvania; died 1963, Princeton, New Jersey[1]) was an American translator, most celebrated for her translations of the works of Thomas Mann.[2]
Helen Porter was the niece of Charlotte Endymion Porter, a well-known literary figure of the day. She married the paleographer Elias Avery Lowe in 1911, and took the married name of Lowe-Porter. The couple lived in Oxford; after 1937, their residence was in Princeton, New Jersey. One of their daughters, Frances, was the maternal grandmother of London Mayor Boris Johnson.
Lowe-Porter was the translator who for more than twenty years enjoyed the exclusive rights to translate the works of Thomas Mann from German into English. She was appointed in this capacity by Mann's American publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, in 1925.
In her essay "On Translating Thomas Mann", Lowe-Porter said it is not so important that the translator be a great scholar of the foreign language, as few literary practitioners are really and truly bilingual, but that it is very important indeed that he/she be a master of the resources and subtleties of his/her own.[3] She also said, in her note to her translation of Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain):
"The violet has to be cast into the crucible....The organic work of art must be remoulded in another tongue....Since in the creative act word and thought are indivisible, the task is one before which artists shrink and logical minds recoil." [Translator's note to The Magic Mountain. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1927]
In addition to her translations, Lowe-Porter wrote an original play, Abdication, which received its first production in Dublin in September 1948.[4]
Lowe-Porter's translations of Thomas Mann works include the following (dates in brackets refer to the German publication, the dates after to the English-language translations).
Initially, Lowe-Porter was not Mann's first choice as translator, or "mediator" (Vermittler), in his own term, of his works. Mann had initially wanted Herman George Scheffauer, who had previously translated Mann's short story "Herr und Hund" (as "Bashan and I"). In addition, Mann had received negative reports of Lowe-Porter's translation of Buddenbrooks. However, the American publisher Alfred A Knopf overruled Mann's concerns and selected Lowe-Porter as sole translator of Mann's works into English. Lowe-Porter fulfilled this task for the next 25 years, translating all of Mann's later fiction except for "Die Betrogene" ("The Black Swan") and Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man.[5][6]
For decades, Lowe-Porter's translations of Mann were the only ones that existed in the English-speaking world. At least one contemporary review misidentified Lowe-Porter's gender as male, rather than female.[7] Mann did express his appreciation to Lowe-Porter for her work, nicknaming her "die Lowe", but also added the caveat "insofar as my linguistic knowledge suffices".[6] In 1993, Theodore Ziolkowski summarised Lowe-Porter's achievement in translating Mann's Buddenbrooks:
"Lowe-Porter provided a valuable service by making Mann's novel initially accessible to the English and American publics."[8]
Other commentary on her translations has included the following:
"The Lowe-Porter translations of Thomas Mann, despite occasional inaccuracies almost inevitable in works of such length and complexity, convey the ironic and pyrotechnical style of the original with great effectiveness." [9]
"Despite minor inaccuracies, misreadings, and possible errors of judgment (to which all translators are subject, whatever they may say) Lowe-Porter's translations are widely beloved and have become classics in their own right, to stand beside Constance Garnett's Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Scott Moncrieff's Proust. She is indisputably, in quantity as in quality, one of the great translators of our time." [10]
"Thomas Mann and Proust were lucky in their translators."[11]
Through Lowe-Porter's translations, Mann gained great popularity in the English-speaking world.
The later 20th century saw major revisions on the theory and practice of literary translation. Thus, Lowe-Porter's translations too have been criticized on such grounds as linguistic limitations. For example, while acknowledging the scale of Lowe-Porter's labors and the times when her translations were "most apt and pleasing", Timothy Buck noted that Lowe-Porter rearranged Mann's sentence structure, omitted passages from the originals, added others, and deliberately left out descriptive adjectives and adverbs in the narrative. Buck has also noted inadequacies in Lowe-Porter's understanding of German which sometimes caused her to mistranslate particular words, often on the basis of homonyms. Examples include the following:[6]:
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Subsequent translators since Lowe-Porter of Mann's work have included Kenneth Burke, David Luke, and John E Woods.[6][8]