The secret of Thomas Mann's translator
Before she could sign on to translate the entirety of Thomas Mann, the giant of German letters, into English, Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter had to translate herself.
An American married to a rising paleography scholar at Oxford, Lowe-Porter was raising three daughters and helping make ends meet with occasional translation work when, in 1922, Alfred A. Knopf sent “Buddenbrooks,” Mann's first novel, her way.
Lowe-Porter judged the chances of a warm reception for a woman translator to be slim, and became H.T. LowePorter on the title pages of the two-volume Knopf edition, for which she was paid $750. She would go by that name on Mann's works from then on, including, in 1927, “The Magic Mountain.” By 1929, Mann had been awarded the Nobel Prize.
Mann's preference, too, had been for a male translator for “The Magic Mountain.” He wrote to Lowe-Porter, “the new book, with its deeply intellectual and symbolic character, makes quite other demands on the translator — demands which I sometimes deem would be more readily met by a male rather than a female temperament.” Only after Hermann Georg Scheffauer, his translator of choice, died suddenly, did they continue to work together.
For many, Lowe-Porter's New
York Times obituary in 1963 would be the first indication that she wasn't a man.
Yet as chronicled by Jo Salas in her new novel, “Mrs. LowePorter,” out Thursday from Jackleg Press, Lowe-Porter had her own aspirations as a poet, short story writer and novelist. Her play “Abdication,” a thinlyveiled portrait of Edward VIII's dethroning, was staged by the Gate Theater company in Dublin and published by Knopf.
Even as her translations helped to stem the tide of antiGerman sentiment directed at Mann and German culture after World War I, her efforts were stymied by the breakneck pace of Knopf's contractual commitment to release at least one Mann translation a year. The arrangement covered 22 books, until Lowe-Porter informed Mann in 1951 that she wanted time for herself.
In “Mrs. Lowe-Porter,” she orders a reluctant housekeeper to empty a bookshelf holding the complete set.
Lowe-Porter “struggled all her life with questions of what it meant to be a woman, to be independent, to be an artist,” Salas said over lunch at Café Sabarsky in the Neue Galerie, the museum for German and Austrian art in New York. She fought self-doubt and depression, and the issue of her gender has remained an undercurrent in debates about the value of her translations. (Of his experience reading “Abdication,” theater critic George Jean Nathan wrote to Knopf, “All women authors over 65 should be turned over to the Ku Klux Klan.”)
Such lines hit a familiar nerve for Salas. Born in New Zealand, by 12 she had developed a passion for social justice, she said, “and joined the campaign against nuclear disarmament.” She met her husband, Jonathan Fox, an American-born grandson of LowePorter's, when he was a Fulbright scholar there, and they married after he finished a stint in the Peace Corps during the Vietnam War.