Friday, March 15, 2024

No Longer Lost in Translation

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  A theme! We have a THEME! You know how much I love when that happens.

 

Yesterday, the fab Gabriel Valjan had us all thinking about how our lives have changed since the seventies.   Especially women’s lives.

 

Today, we’ll walk a similar path, but go back many more years into the past.

 

First let me ask: Have you read The Magic Mountain? Or Buddenbrooks? Or Death in Venice? If you read them in English, you have a little-known American woman, Helen Lowe-Porter, to thank.

 

 The literary giant Thomas Mann balked at a female translator, but he might well owe his standing in the Western canon to her. 


Helen Lowe-Porter. That's her name. Here’s her story. By way of her determined not-quite-biographer Jo Salas.

 

 


Anticipation

By Jo Salas

 

In her memoir about her distinguished parents, my mother-in-law Patricia Lowe described visiting her mother in an old people’s home. Helen was wearing her favorite loose black silk pants and sleeveless top, commissioned from a dressmaker. She looked elegant, Patricia wrote, and relaxed, despite her restless yearning to be somewhere else. Helen’s brilliant mind was by then unclear, her natural warmth tainted by anger and bitterness. Her long life had been full of extraordinary achievement but also disappointment and betrayal. 

 


The image stayed with me. A few years later, imagining Helen in her flowing black silk, I wrote a scene, letting my imagination expand and bringing in hints of Helen’s remarkable life story. Eventually—it took years—the scene grew into a novel, Mrs. Lowe-Porter.

 

Helen Lowe-Porter translated the novels (and some nonfiction) of the great German writer Thomas Mann. Mann was already established as Germany’s pre-eminent novelist, though little known elsewhere. Helen’s translations introduced his work to the English-speaking literary public. In 1929, soon after her second translation, The Magic Mountain, Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

 

She remained Mann’s translator for 36 years. Despite the essential part her translations played in his success, she remained invisible behind her androgynous professional name, H. T. Lowe-Porter, noticed only to be criticized. She and Mann slowly developed an affectionate friendship. But his appreciation, either private or public, was rare.

 

Patricia spoke often about her parents and their towering achievements: her father, Elias Lowe, was an eminent classicist who taught at Oxford and was one of the founding scholars of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In her telling, Elias and Helen’s relationship was based on intellectual attraction, not romance—her brief memoir is titled A Marriage of True Minds. Patricia herself felt hopelessly in their shadow, unable to measure up to their brilliance. And resentful: her mother, she felt, had always been preoccupied with matters more important than her children.

 

I didn’t start writing about Helen until after Patricia’s death, when her careful research came into my hands.

 

It included Helen’s correspondence with Mann and his publisher Knopf, as well as with her husband and children. The letters prompted me to re-read a biography written soon after Helen died, by a writer who’d known her personally. From these sources, and from talking to family members who remembered her, Helen began to emerge in my mind as a warm, complicated woman, absorbed in her family as well as her work—quite different from the chilly intellectual that Patricia evoked.

 

A typical letter, written to Elias in the late 1920s when he was visiting New York and she was at home in Oxford, includes household concerns, literary musings, and political comments. But it’s also full of news of the girls –“delightful little creatures”—as well as detailed instructions for the dresses that she wanted him to buy for them, including the colors and fabrics. It’s not the letter of a mother who disregards her children. “The time is not long until you are here,” she writes tenderly to Elias at the end. “It cannot go fast enough for me.” She signed it “Thy H”, as she always did.

 

I shared my first pages about Helen in her old people’s home in a masterclass taught by Lydia Davis, and got enough encouragement to keep going. I knew I wanted to write fiction about her, not biography. But I wanted to build my fictional narrative around the contours and essential meanings of the life that Helen lived—as best as I could comprehend them. I gleaned as much as I could from Helen’s writing and the objective facts of her life and career, along with Patricia’s stories and reminiscences from her grandchildren, my cousins by marriage.

 

As I pondered the cornerstones of this woman’s life, several elements stood out to me: Helen’s lifelong commitment to her own writing, for one. She was a born writer who, to her great sorrow, never fulfilled her literary ambitions. Her gift for languages led her to translation, first for her aunt and mentor Charlotte Endymion Porter, the publisher of Poet Lore magazine. After she married Elias, translation enabled her to help support their growing family. But translation work easily preempted creative work. Once she was contracted to be Mann’s sole translator it was even harder to claim time to write the stories, poems, and plays that jostled for expression within her. She never gave up, not until a final, decisive disappointment in her late seventies.

 

Helen’s marriage to Elias was also central to the story I wanted to tell. Her letters and poems tell a story of passionate, mutual love, diverging from Patricia’s story of a bloodless marriage. She described a memory of playing anagrams with her mother as they waited for Elias to come home from Paris.

 

The word that Helen offered for nine-year-old Patsy to decipher was “anticipation,” offered with a secret smile. Patricia comments about how beautiful her mother looked that evening, her cheeks pink in the firelight. Reading her description of that scene, I see a woman eager to be in her lover’s arms again. There was a vigorous erotic bond between them that lasted into their late middle age, when he shattered her heart by seducing their elder daughter’s friend.

 













Helen was an avowed feminist all her life, and she did her best to push against the male condescension and dismissal that confronted her constantly, from Mann’s insistence that only a man could translate The Magic Mountain (he lost the argument), to the terse note that the critic George Jean Nathan wrote about her to Alfred Knopf: “Woman authors over the age of sixty-five should be handed over to the Ku Klux Klan.” (Nathan was nearly seventy himself.)

 

But I don’t know if she saw the trajectory of her life as a feminist story, as I did. The nearest she came to memoir was her long essay about translating Mann, where she writes with characteristic self-deprecation and humor about her work but very little about her personal life.

 

Trying to build a sense of the woman, it helped to summon some of the places where she lived or visited. I found the narrow house on a cobbled street in Oxford where the family had lived, and the clipped lawns of Corpus Christi where Elias taught for years. I was able to evoke her refuge on a Maine island, the tall, graceful cottage inherited from Aunt Charlotte, because I’ve stayed there many times myself. I imagined her at Mohonk Mountain House in upstate New York, just a couple of miles from where I live, visiting Thomas and Katia Mann while he was working on Doctor Faustus.

 

I’ve looked for Helen in the crumbling pages of the photo albums that were hers and then Patricia’s. I see the photo of her with her three little girls, her face gentle, her eyes far away. I see the photo of a happy young Helen fishing in a stream in Bavaria, camping with Elias before they were married. And I see another photo of her, even younger and very pretty. She looks spirited, playful, sharply intelligent, full of hope and confidence at the dawn of her adult life. It is this photo that is now on the cover of my book. She is invisible no longer.

 

HANK: Wow. You never know what  life-altering thing you are about to learn.  Authors, are your books in translation? Have you tried to read them? My books are in a dozen other languages—and I always marvel at them, wondering what the translators thought.

Reds and readers, who has a question?

  

 

  

Jo Salas is a New Zealand-born writer of fiction and nonfiction. Winner of the Pen & Brush prose contest and nominated for a Pushcart Prize, she is a co-founder, performer, and chronicler of Playback Theatre. She lives in upstate New York.  She is the author of MRS. LOWE-PORTER, which is available now.


“Everyone has a story”: Jo’sTEDx talk

71 comments:

  1. Congratulations on your new book, Jo . . . this is fascinating . . . thank you for a most enlightening look at Helen's captivating life . . . it is good that she is no longer invisible.

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  2. Jo, what a wonderful story to develop, and what a treasure of resources you had. I'm looking forward to reading this book.

    My latest mystery includes Amelia Earhart as a character, and I loved giving her a fictional sleuthing self in her younger years. My research (described here next Wednesday!) made her such a fuller figure for me.

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    1. Also, I know I read Magic Mountain, but it might have been in German - I read a number of novels in German in college.

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    2. Edith, I look forward to reading about your research! It's a very particular challenge to blend imagination and historical fact, I've found.

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  3. How wonderful that Jo Salas brought Helen Lowe-Porter's work back to life, and her life made visible. I read Magic Mountain in college and found it a masterpiece. It's really moving that, frankly, thanks to her, Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Thank you for sharing this story about her life, and your fiction of her life sounds very close to reality. All best wishes for this book.

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    1. Yes, doesn't that change the vision of the book altogether? SO amazing.

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    2. Thanks for your good wishes, Elizabeth. Of course when Mann got the Nobel, the press coverage did not mention Helen... Thank goodness things are much better for Nobel translators now (like Jennifer Croft and Damion Searls).

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  4. Fascinating. Thank you for this essay that shines a light on the woman who brought Thomas Mann to English readers and, via the link to Jo's TEDx Talk, introduced me to Playback Theatre of which I had never heard. I studied literary translation at university and found it challenging and creative, frustrating and fulfilling in equal measure; it is its own form of writing, in a way. I'm off, now, to discover Jo's books.

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    1. Oh, that's fascinating! I'd love to hear more about the process...

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    2. Hi Amanda, I agree, translation is its own deeply creative form of writing. I'm absolutely not a translator myself but the more I learn about it the more admiration I have for this whole field ,

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    3. Amanda--my earlier comment showed up as "anonymous" but it was me!

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  5. JO: Welcome to Jungle Reds. And congratulations on your book. I look forward to reading your book about Helen. She was the mother of your mother in law, right?

    At University, I read Death in Venice by Thomas Mann for a class. I think I have read several books in translation like The 100 Year Old Man (Swedish novel ).

    First impression from the book cover is that Helen has a modern face. I have seen women who have similar face these days. It looks like she did not wear makeup.

    Question: Was it unusual for a feminist to marry and have children in her generation? Or did she become a feminist AFTER marriage and children?

    Diana

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    1. Great question! And I see what you mean about a "modern" face. I always wonder about that.

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    2. Hi Diana, yes, Helen was my mother-in-law's mother. About your questions: I doubt Helen would ever have worn makeup. What strikes me is how her face changed throughout her life. I love this photo for her spiritedness. I believe she was always a feminist, influenced by her aunt and mentor. She didn't expect to marry--she wanted to write and she knew marriage and children would make it very difficult.

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  6. Welcome to JRW Jo! What an amazing story! The whole process of finding the book's story and understanding the women is so interesting, but I'm especially drawn to Patricia's sense of her mother (and father) and how that contrasts with yours. I look forward to reading this!

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    1. Thanks, Lucy. Yes, it was a surprise to find Helen so different from what I'd heard when I started delving into her own words. I wish I'd known her.

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  7. How do you capture the gist of an author's work without altering the meaning? How do you re-create the music inherent in a flow of words when moving between languages? I've always felt that a translator becomes, in essence, a co-author, as a work moves from one language to another. Jo, the story of Helen is fascinating! She's the person behind the curtain--and so interesting to be able to see her from so many perspectives--her letters, correspondence, her own daughter's image. This book is going to the top of my TBR pile!

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    1. SUCH great questions! Yes, you have to know the book, and the nuance, and the tone, and the author's style..such a juggle to get the perfect words and phrasing and music.

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    2. Flora, I've found it so fascinating to learn about translation not only from Helen's writing but also from people writing about translation today, like Kate Briggs and Lydia Davis. It's great that translators are demanding and getting more of the attention they deserve. One of their requests is to be named on the cover. My novel is now being translated (into Georgian) and I requested that the translator's name appear on the cover.

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  8. The relationship of mothers and daughters can be complicated. It strikes me that Patricia's perception was colored by old disappointments and hurts, although I guess it's too late now to ask what they were. We can be clear-eyed or prejudiced against the family of our pasts, and it's fascinating that an almost outsider has such a different take on the same woman as her own daughter.

    Is it me, or does Helen resemble Jodie Foster in the cover photo? Her eyes are full of mischief.

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    1. Love that comparison! Yes, she has a marvelous expression!

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    2. I think Jo herself resembles Helen Mirren. — Pat S

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    3. Karen--I love that mischief in Helen's eyes! (And I do hear the Helen Mirren comment about myself sometimes!)

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    1. We are so fortunate to live after the pioneer women authors. The road may be bumpy with twists and turns, but it is paved.

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    2. SO true! And a wonderful way of thinking about it!

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    3. Mary, I agree--we are lucky now to have all our foremothers.

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  10. This is fascinating, Jo! My son read Dr. Faustus for a grad school class last year and I started it but haven’t gotten very far. He’s also been working with a professor translating a work by Neitzche. Translation is very challenging work! I’m going to look for your novel.

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    1. Translating Nietsche sounds incredibly daunting. Thanks, Gillian.

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  11. I've read Buddenbrooks in English and, to my shame, never even wondered about the translator all those years ago.

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    1. Yes, I think that is so fascinating--I just read a book called The Red Queen, translated from SPanish, and I wondered throughout about the translation. It has to be so meticulous--I guess...although would the author know?

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    2. I think I learned to pay attention to translators through the experience of having my own books about Playback Theatre translated. I was sometimes in touch with the translators, and had a sense of their enormous task.

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  12. What a fascinating, multi-faceted life! Although circumscribed in a familiar way: HER income helps support HIS career. What strikes me most about Jo's mother-in-law's memories is how unreliable a narrator children are of their adult parent's lives. So close and intimate, but also missing so much context - and clouded by the child's later experiences as a teen, young adult, and caretaker of an old person.

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    1. Also, as another upstate NYer, I'd love to know where Jo is from!

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    2. Ans yes, I often think about how I thought about my parents when I was younger, and how I understand that a different way now. (and have sometimes wished I could apologize...:-))

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    3. Julia, thanks for your comment. I can't claim that "my" Helen is the "real" Helen, but at least it offers another angle on her. I live in the Mid Hudson Valley, in New Paltz. Where are you? (But right now I'm in New Zealand, my homeland.)

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  13. This is an incredible undertaking, Jo. I am delighted that Helen Lowe-Porter's story has been preserved - it is so important to unerase (is that even a word?) the contributions of women that were woefully undervalued. Bravo!

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  14. This is a fascinating story, Jo, on so many levels! I read Death in Venice years ago but in those days never considered the translation--what an oversight! My books are translated into quite a few languages but it is my German translater who I've worked with on every book in the series and consider a friend. He is so meticulous and thorough! One of my regrets is that I don't speak German and can't assess how his choices have changed--and perhaps improved?--the books.

    How wonderful that you've made Helen and her work visible. I can't wait to learn more about her.

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    1. Deborah, it's wonderful that you have this ongoing relationship with your German translator! His translations must be good if your books continue to be published in German.

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    2. Deborah, that comment was from me. I didn't mean to be anonymous!

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  15. This sounds like an incredible project with a lot of research, as well as translation on Jo’s part (deciphering, if you will, her mother-in-law’s view of her own mother and the other viewpoints she found).

    Julia’s comment about children being unreliable translators of their parents’ lives is so apt. That viewpoint can also change when viewed through an older vs. younger child’s eyes. My older sister views our parents vastly differently than I do, based on her experience.

    Thank you, Hank, for sharing Jo’s book with us today! — Pat S

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    1. Oh, my pleasure--so pleased to have this platform where we can share things like this!

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    2. One of the bittersweet things about this project was being in daily imagined conversation with Patricia, feeling close to her and sad that she was gone. We'd often talked about Helen but as I learned so much more about her I wished so much that I'd known more.

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  16. What a fascinating, infuriating story! women just don't get the credit they deserve. I wonder if some of Patricia's perception of her mom was based on comparisons to friends' moms. Pat D

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    1. That's something I don't know. I never heard Patricia refer to other people's mothers, or to childhood friends, for that matter.

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  17. I read "Magic Mountain" and "Death in Venice" back in my twenties, so I guess I read her translations. My senior year of college I took a class on translation, where we translated poems and short stories (I, from Spanish to English). Wow. It sure opened my eyes to what it takes to convey not just the literal meaning, but also the metaphorical meaning and subtext of a literary work in another language. Thanks for this beautiful post, Jo and Hank!

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    1. Oh, what a terrific and valuable experience! The comparative use of language is such an eye-opener to both languages involved...

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    2. Thanks, Leslie. That would be such a great experience for any student of literature--to actually do some translation.

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  18. Jo, how lovely that you were able to bring Helen to life through your story. She certainly doesn't sound like a cold, distant person when you talk about her.

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  19. What a wonderful story and such a rich life. She touched all of us who read her Mann translations.

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    1. Kait, I think Helen would have loved this comment--that she herself touched readers, even after her death.

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  20. This post got me thinking about Carlos Ruiz Zafon's wonderful books, The Shadow of the Wind and the two subsequent novels in that trilogy. They were translated from Spanish to English by Lucia Graves, the poet Robert Graves' daughter!

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    1. I'm not familiar with Carlos Ruiz Zafon but now I'm curious, especially with Lucia Graves as translator. I studied Robert Graves' poetry when I was young and many of his lines are still with me. Thank you!

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  21. This is going to be the next book I read on my Kindle. Just added it. What an incredible life!

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  22. Helen sounds fascinating. Her daughter's less kind description of Helen than your research revealed, Jo, to me goes back to the age-old or too-old question of a mother working. She's always seemed to be pretty much damned if she does or damned if she doesn't.

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    1. ANd still--is that true? Such a good point!

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    2. I'm afraid you're right, Kathy. So hard for women, then and now, to find a balance that satisfies their children (and themselves). At the same time, Patricia was very proud of her mother's accomplishments.

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