In the literary realm, translation is an underappreciated art and its practitioners mostly unsung heroes. When we fall head over heels for a novel that originated in a language not our own, we owe a great debt to the person who translated it, though we probably don’t even know their name.
In academia, meanwhile, battles rage on as to how literal the translation process needs to be in order to produce a finished product that is both authentic and readable. An idiomatic expression instantly understandable to native speakers can become confusing nonsense when translated word-for-word. Moreover, fashions in translation methodology come and go over time. Translators themselves constantly question their own output, struggling with the impossibility of capturing every nuance of a foreign author’s multileveled meaning, not to mention tone, cadence, lyricism.
The decades and the critics have not been kind to the memory of Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter, the Pennsylvania-born translator of most of the works of Thomas Mann into English: 22 books over a period of 36 years, for publisher Alfred A Knopf. The first of these, Buddenbrooks in 1924, followed by The Magic Mountain in 1927, introduced Mann’s work — already highly esteemed in Germany — to English and American audiences. They also helped spur his nomination for the Nobel Prize, which he won in 1929. Mann himself expressed initial qualms about having his works translated by a woman, but later came to appreciate Lowe-Porter’s success in rendering his sometimes-obscure references and often-convoluted syntax into compelling reading for Anglophone readers.
While they sold well for Knopf, Lowe-Porter’s original English translations eventually fell out of favor and are no longer in print. “She did for sure make mistakes, which were pounced on by male critics in her time, who were pretty harsh toward her,” says Jo Salas, author of a new novel based on the translator’s life, Mrs. Lowe-Porter (JackLeg Press, 2024). “There’s a new generation of male translators who really took her to task. Some of their criticism was justified and some wasn’t.”
For example, one particularly obscure passage in The Magic Mountain was dropped altogether at Mann’s request, who deemed it untranslatable (into French as well), but Lowe-Porter was subsequently blamed for the omission. She was also accused of bowdlerizing some of the author’s homoerotic language, when in fact it was Knopf who had made that decision, based on Puritanical publishing standards of the era.
The novel includes some illuminating examples of Lowe-Porter’s first passes at literal translations of Mann’s paragraphs, juxtaposed with her final versions, polished until they shine. It becomes abundantly clear that she knew what she was doing, took her work seriously and in fact had a true gift for translation.
Salas, a New Zealand native who has lived in New Paltz for most of her life, is well-known regionally and beyond as co-founder, with her husband Jonathan Fox, of Playback Theatre. Besides traveling across the globe to train leaders in how to use Playback techniques, she has written a great deal of nonfiction on that subject, on arts therapy and the importance of storytelling. Her Improvising Real Life: Personal Story in Playback Theatre has been translated into ten languages. She also writes short stories, and her 2015 novel Dancing with Diana imagines the profound effects of a chance encounter with Princess Diana on the life of a wheelchair-bound youth.
As it happens, Helen Lowe-Porter was Jonathan Fox’s grandmother (also the great-grandmother of former UK prime minister Boris Johnson, but that’s another story entirely). She died before Salas came into the family, but memories of her still reverberated among her descendants. Salas had many conversations with Fox’s mother, Patricia Tracy Lowe, as the latter was writing a memoir about her parents. Patricia, her sisters and Lowe-Porter’s grandchildren characterized the translator as “remote, intellectual, conscientious about her work; not very warm as a parent and grandparent.” After Patricia’s death, however, Salas discovered an entirely different, much more sympathetic character in the letters and other writings that Lowe-Porter left behind. “We sat down with her files and it was like meeting her face-to-face. She loved her children. She loved her husband, despite his infidelities.”
The Helen she brings to life in her novel is a feminist heroine caught in a classic dilemma for a 20th-century woman of letters: She must continually put her own literary ambitions aside to fulfill the roles of translator to the eminent German author, of housekeeper and mother to three daughters and of adoring wife to a renowned scholar of paleography. Elias Avery Lowe’s work documenting medieval Latin texts keeps him on the road much of the time (his 12-volume compilation Codices Latini Antiquiores is considered a classic contribution to his field), offering him ample opportunities to exercise the “open marriage” on which he insists. But neither his research nor his teaching post at Oxford generates much income, so Lowe-Porter has to help support the family with a heavy translation workload. Mann and Knopf expect her to crank out a volume a year, while the novel she dearly wants to write languishes in a drawer.
“Like Mann, Elias was highly regarded and very sure of himself. Both in their different ways took her for granted,” Salas notes. While giving lip service to women’s suffrage and sexual freedom, Elias also expects wives to do all the work on the home front, including childcare. There’s a poignant episode in which Helen has to figure out how to explain lightly to Knopf that her overdue manuscript was delayed by having to nurse three kids with chickenpox, without reinforcing the prejudice that women can’t be trusted to commit themselves to a profession.
While it’s clear from their letters that Helen and Elias are “obviously in love with each other until late middle age,” in Salas’ words, eventually Elias takes his license to prowl too far when he seduces their eldest daughter’s best friend. After that, the couple become estranged, but they never actually divorce and at times continue to live together.
The threat of war in Europe takes them to Princeton, where he’s one of the founders of the Institute for Advanced Study, and they become friends with Einstein. Mann also moves to America. To entice local readers, there’s a chapter devoted to Helen Lowe-Porter and Blanche Knopf meeting up with Thomas and Katia Mann at Mohonk Mountain House in 1945 to discuss his ideas for Doctor Faustus, in which he metaphorically depicts his homeland’s corruption by Nazism as an ambitious composer selling his soul to the Devil.
In her 70s, Helen finally achieves a brief flush of fame for her own writing. Abdication: Or, All Is True, a play written in Shakespearean blank verse about King Edward VIII giving up the throne to wed American divorcée Wallis Simpson, is produced in Dublin to great acclaim in 1948. No backers can be found for a US production, however; that particular bit of gossip about the British royals is already old tabloid news. She also writes a novel titled Sea Change, inspired by a French fairy tale about twins who magically swap genders. We only know it ever existed via a letter from Mann praising the manuscript; in the novel, Helen burns it in despair.
Mrs. Lowe-Porter is a fresh new take on themes that remain resonant for many women, enshrined in classic tales by the likes of Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Kate Chopin – in this case inspired by the life of a real person who deserves to be better remembered. “It became clear to me that this was a feminist story. Helen tried to get the recognition that she was owed, and to make space to do her own work,” Salas says. And historical fiction seemed to her to be the way to convey that story best, obscuring the identities and experiences of Helen’s living descendants.
“I don’t claim that my Helen is the Helen. What I’m doing is a kind of translation,” says Salas. “Playback Theatre is a parallel process, and I was aware of that process when I was writing this. It’s part of the artist’s job.”
An article about Mrs. Lowe-Porter by Celia McGee, “The Secret of Thomas Mann’s Translator,” appeared in the February 1 issue of The New York Times. The novel itself is available from local bookstores including both the New Paltz and Saugerties locations of Inquiring Minds, Oblong Books in Rhinebeck and The Golden Notebook in Woodstock. The novel can be ordered like any other book from Amazon, BookShop etc, or from any bookstore. The ISBN is 9781956907056.
Upcoming live readings and discussions of Mrs. Lowe-Porter with author Jo Salas will take place at 6 p.m. on February 15 at ShoutOut: Writers Read at CMM Distillery in Saugerties, in conversation with Nancy Kline; and at 6 p.m. on February 29 at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck, in conversation with Sari Botton, editor of Oldster magazine.
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