The Lost Words of Helen Lowe-Porter, Thomas Mann’s Translator

The Lost Words of Helen Lowe-Porter, Thomas Mann’s Translator

By Jo Salas, author Mrs. Lowe-Porter, available now

In 1942 the German novelist Thomas Mann wrote to his long-time translator, Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter: “Your story which I return to you with sincere thanks is a very lovable, heartwarming piece of work of a delicate cello sound which will stay in my ears for a long time.” He continued for a page and a half of detailed commentary, ending with “The story is so beautiful and has so much tender ‘appeal’ that an editor who turns it down would be a fool.” 

But it was never published.

Lowe-Porter, as well as translating Mann’s mammoth works for 36 years, was a writer in her own right. She wrote short stories, plays, poems, and at least one novel. Her writer’s sensibility is evident in her translations. The language is elegant, the sentences carefully structured. In a letter to Alfred Knopf she wrote about her process: “When I receive one of Dr Mann’s works to translate, what I try to do is to read it, not merely to get the sense but to get the flavour, the mood and tempo, the atmosphere.” She would immerse herself in Mann’s dense prose and then create “as meticulous, supple and intuitive a rendering of the original as I possibly could.” 

Her translations were embraced by contemporary readers in the US and Britain. Mann soon became as revered outside Germany as he was within it. In 1929 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Lowe-Porter had one significant literary success, her play Abdication, or, All is True, inspired by Edward VIII’s departure from the British throne in 1934. The play was produced to acclaim by the Gate Theatre in Dublin and later published in book form by Knopf. It was never produced again. Lowe-Porter’s attempts to interest producers in the US drew a brutal comment from the critic George Jean Nathan: “All women authors over sixty-five should be turned over to the Ku Klux Klan.” 

In her late seventies Lowe-Porter retired from translation. “The reason is perhaps silly,” she wrote to Mann in explanation. “In the end of my life I have so many things in my head that I find I must get them down, whether they ever find a publisher or no.” The product of her retirement was a novel about teenage twins, a boy and a girl, who switch sexes in a bizarre metamorphosis. She sent it to Mann and his wife Katia for their opinion. Again Mann wrote with praise: “[T]he theme of the book is not only original but is treated with stylistic skill and a special kind of psychological intensity.” He also warned that it might offend publishers.

Whether because of its theme or not, the novel was never published and the manuscript is lost. It’s possible that Lowe-Porter, in this final disappointment, destroyed it. Other than Abdication and a volume of poetry published by Oxford University Press, none of her creative writing survives either in print or manuscript.

Full disclosure: I’m married to Helen Lowe-Porter’s grandson and have her papers. Among them is a typewritten list of items given to her biographer, John C. Thirlwall, close to the end of her life. The list mentions “Stories, articles, notes etc” and “Two or three one-act tragedies written many years ago” as well as essays and “half of a detective story.” What happened to this material is unknown. 

What does it mean that so little of the lifelong creative work of this gifted woman found publication? That most of it no longer exists? Based on her two published works and two long essays, “Doctor Faustus” and “On Translating Thomas Mann,” she was an accomplished writer, a person of insight, intelligence, and imagination. Mann himself admired her writing and thought she should be published. So why wasn’t she?

The obstacles are obvious. Lowe-Porter, born in 1876, lived at a time when women had to fight to be respected as professionals in any field. She repeatedly encountered overt sexism, including from Mann, who told her that, as a woman, she was not temperamentally equipped to comprehend the philosophical depths of The Magic Mountain. She had primary responsibility for her children’s upbringing at a time when few successful women writers were also mothers. Perhaps because of these factors, she was perennially self-deprecating, quick to doubt herself, hesitant to claim the vision and talents she knew she possessed.

We can’t resurrect Lowe-Porter’s words. But her dilemma—that of so many brilliant women—deserves to be known.

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Jo Salas is the author of the novel Mrs. Lowe-Porter (JackLeg Press, 2024). She lives in upstate New York. 

Sources:

“The story is so beautiful…” Unpublished handwritten letter from Mann to Lowe-Porter dated 5/26/1942: original translation in my possession

“When I receive one of Dr Mann’s works…” Quoted in letter from Lowe-Porter’s daughters published in Times Literary Supplement on 1/19/96

“All women authors over sixty-five…” Handwritten note to Alfred Knopf on George Jean Nathan’s letterhead

’The reason is perhaps silly,’ she wrote…” In Another Language, John C. Thirlwall, Knopf, 1966, p 131

“T]he theme of the book is not only original…” In Another Language, ibid, p 132

“Mann, who told her that, as a woman, she was not temperamentally equipped to comprehend the philosophical depths of The Magic Mountain…” Based on letter from Mann to Lowe-Porter quoted in In Another Language, ibid, p 9]

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MRS. LOWE-PORTER, a novel

The literary giant Thomas Mann balked at a female translator, but he might well owe his standing in the Western canon to a little-known American woman, Helen Lowe-Porter. Based closely on historical source material, Jo Salas’s novel Mrs. Lowe-Porter sympathetically reveals a brilliant woman’s struggle to be appreciated as a translator and find her voice in a male-dominated culture.

Married to the charming classicist Elias Lowe, whom she met and fell in love with while in Munich, the story weaves one woman’s journey as her husband Elias’s career soars and her translation work earns Mann the Nobel Prize. The novel celebrates Helen Lowe-Porter as she learns to risk stepping out from the long shadow of the dominating men of her life to become a person of letters in her own right.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing