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