Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter was an American translator and writer, best known for translating almost all of the works of Thomas Mann for their first publication in English.
For more than two decades, Lowe-Porter had exclusive rights to translate the works of Thomas Mann from German into English. She was granted these rights in 1925 by Alfred A. Knopf. In her essay "On Translating Thomas Mann", Lowe-Porter said that while it is not so important that the translator be a great scholar of the foreign language, as few literary practitioners are truly bilingual, it is important that he/she be a master of the resources and subtleties of his/her own. She also said, in her note to her translation of Der Zauberberg :
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.
She wrote an original play, Abdication, which received its first production in Dublin in September 1948.
Thomas Mann translations
Lowe-Porter's translations of Thomas Mann works include the following.
For decades, Lowe-Porter's translations of Mann were the only versions that existed in the English-speaking world, aside from Herman George Scheffauer's. Mann expressed his appreciation to Lowe-Porter for her work, nicknaming her "die Lowe", but also added the caveat, "insofar as my linguistic knowledge suffices". Critic Theodore Ziolkowski said of Lowe-Porter's translation of Mann's Buddenbrooks:
Lowe-Porter provided a valuable service by making Mann's novel initially accessible to the English and American publics.
Other commentaries on her translations have 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. Despite minor inaccuracies, misreadings, and possible errors of judgment, 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. Thomas Mann and Proust were lucky in their translators.
Though early reviewers were generally impressed by the relative readability of Lowe-Porter’s English and by the sheer scale of the task, from the 1950s on doubts were expressed about the accuracy of the translations, culminating in Timothy Buck’s study which led him to conclude that they constituted "grossly distorted and diminished versions" of Mann’s work, and that "the loss, not only of accuracy but also of quality, is inestimable." Not only was her grasp of German so shaky that she made countless elementary errors of comprehension, but she also made frequent omissions and additions and unnecessarily simplified Mann’s characteristic complex syntax. A new assessment of the English translations of Thomas Mann within the framework of modern descriptive-analytical translation studies has been provided by David Horton. Horton seeks to move beyond an exclusively error-based evaluation of literary translation, examines various salient dimensions of versions by Lowe-Porter, Luke and Woods, and demonstrates that Lowe-Porter's approach to translation was in keeping with the practice prevalent at the time.
