Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Template:Use mdy dates Template:Short description Script error: No such module "infobox".Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".Script error: No such module "Check for clobbered parameters".Template:Wikidata image Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter (Template:Nee Porter; June 15, 1876 – April 26, 1963)[1] was an American translator and writer, best known for translating almost all of the works of Thomas Mann for their first publication in English.[2]

Personal life

Helen Tracy Porter was the daughter of Clara (née Holcombe) and Henry Clinton Porter. She was the niece of Charlotte Endymion Porter, editor of Poet Lore, a poetry journal, and an expert on Shakespeare and Elizabeth and Robert Browning.[3] She completed early schooling in native Towanda, Pennsylvania and attended Wells College in Aurora, New York, graduating in 1898 as a member of Phi Beta Kappa.[4] She worked with her aunt to prepare works of English literature for republication.[4] She married the paleographer Elias Avery Lowe in 1911. The couple lived in Oxford; after 1937, their residence was in Princeton, New Jersey. Their great-grandson is Boris Johnson, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.[5]

Career

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.[6]

In her essay "On Translating Thomas Mann", Lowe-Porter discussed translating Mann's novels, and expressed some thoughts on translating generally. She wrote, for example, that in translating the second volume of Mann's Joseph series, Young Joseph, she had "been forced—since the English version was for both markets [British and American]—to emasculate the style, in some degree, taking care to write only what would be acceptable literary usage on both sides of the ocean".[7] She also said, in her note to her translation of Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain):

[T]he violet has to be cast into the crucible, the organic work of art to be remoulded in another tongue.... [S]ince in the creative act word and thought are indivisible, the task was seen to be one before which artists shrink and logical minds recoil.[8]

She wrote an original play, Abdication, which received its first production in Dublin in September 1948.[9] It was "a thinly-veiled portrait of Edward VIII's dethroning" and was published by Alfred A. Knopf.[10]

Thomas Mann translations

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).

  • Buddenbrooks [1901] 1924
  • The Magic Mountain [1924] 1927
  • Death in Venice [1913] 1928
  • Mario and the Magician [1930] 1931
  • Joseph and His Brothers, comprising:
    • I The Tales of Jacob [1933] 1934
    • II Young Joseph [1934] 1935
    • III Joseph in Egypt [1936] 1938
    • IV Joseph the Provider [1943] 1944
  • Stories of Three Decades 1936
  • The Beloved Returns [1939] 1940
  • The Transposed Heads [1940] 1941
  • Essays of Three Decades 1947
  • Doctor Faustus [1947] 1948
  • The Holy Sinner [1951] 1951
  • A Sketch of My Life 1960

Critical reaction

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.[11]

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.[12]

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.[13]

Thomas Mann and Proust were lucky in their translators.[14]

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"[15] of Mann's work, and that "the loss, not only of accuracy but also of quality, is inestimable."[15] 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.[16] A review of John E. Woods' translation of Mann's Buddenbrooks states that, in her translation of the novel, Lowe-Porter "leveled Mann's colorful variety of speech into a uniformly even style, in certain cases simply omitting passages. As a result, much of the novel's humor was lost."[17]

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.[18] Horton seeks to move beyond an exclusively error-based evaluation of literary translation, examines various salient dimensions of versions by Lowe-Porter, David Luke, and John E. Woods, and demonstrates that Lowe-Porter's approach to translation was in keeping with the practice prevalent at the time.[19] A review of Horton's book concludes, "Not the least of Horton's accomplishments is to rehabilitate [Lowe-Porter's] reputation...."[20]

References

<templatestyles src="Reflist/styles.css" />

  1. ↑ pp. 428-429, Notable American Women: The Modern Period: a Biographical Dictionary, Barbara Sicherman, Carol Hurd Green, Harvard University Press, 1980; Template:ISBN.
  2. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  3. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  4. ↑ a b Cite error: Script error: No such module "Namespace detect".Script error: No such module "Namespace detect".
  5. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  6. ↑ "Blanche and Alfred Knopf ... induce[d] Mann to take Mrs. Lowe as translator ..." In Another Language: A Record of the Thirty-Year Relationship between Thomas Mann and His English Translator, Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter (1966), by John C. Thirlwall. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf (pp. 10-11).
  7. ↑ "On Translating Thomas Mann," in Thirlwall, In Another Language, p. 191. Parts of this essay were published earlier as ″Translating Thomas Mann″ in Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures (Volume 9, Issue 2 (1956)). See Thirlwall, p. xviii, n.3.
  8. ↑ Translator's note to The Magic Mountain. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1927 (quoted in Thirlwall, In Another Language, p. 15).
  9. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  10. ↑ Celia McGee, The Secret of Thomas Mann’s Translator". The New York Times, January 30, 2024.
  11. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  12. ↑ William Arrowsmith & Roger Shattuck, eds. The Craft & Context of Translation, a Symposium. University of Texas Press. Austin, 1961.
  13. ↑ Viktor Wakovsky: Artwork, Artifice, Forgery: The Translator's Craft. Fratelli Verlag, San Francisco, 1983.
  14. ↑ Jean Cocteau, Diary of an Unknown, New York: Paragon House, 1988.
  15. ↑ a b Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  16. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  17. ↑ Theodore Ziolkowski, "The Earthier Side of the Buddenbrooks," New York Times, April 18, 1993.
  18. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  19. ↑ "Like other translators of her generation, Lowe-Porter strove to become invisible, to produce a text that read as if it had been written in English. Her willingness to rewrite Mann in this way was fully in keeping with common practices of the time." Todd Kontje, review of David Horton, Thomas Mann in English, in Translation and Literature, vol. 23, issue 2, pp. 292-297, quotation at 294 (July 2014)
  20. ↑ Kontje, p. 297.

Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".

Further reading

  • Gledhill, John Richard Morton. Strategies in Translation: A Comparison of the Helen Lowe-Porter and David Luke Translations of Thomas Mann’s 'Tonio Kröger', 'Tristan' and 'Der Tod in Venedig' within the Context of Contemporary Translation Theory. English translation by the author of a 2003 Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Erfurt. [1]
  • Salas, Jo. Mrs. Lowe-Porter. Washington, DC: Jackleg Press, 2024. Template:ISBN Biographical novel about Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter[1]
  • Thirlwall, John C. In Another Language: A Record of the Thirty-Year Relationship between Thomas Mann and His English Translator, Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966.

External links

Template:Boris Johnson Template:Authority control

  1. ↑ Celia McGee. "The Secret of Thomas Mann’s Translator". The New York Times, January 30, 2024.
Retrieved from "http://debianws.lexgopc.com/wiki143/index.php?title=Helen_Tracy_Lowe-Porter&oldid=2289131"