197. Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter, Lost Lady of Translation — with Jo Salas

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AMY HELMES: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off great women writers, or in this case, a writer whose greatest (but largely unsung) success came in the form of translating the works of a literary giant. Kim, you have been suggesting for almost a year now that we should include a lost lady of translation.

KIM ASKEW: Yes, and so it was fortuitous when the creator of the Literary Lady's Guide, Nava Atlas, tipped us off about the subject for today's show and introduced us to our guest, who happens to have family connections to today's lost lady translator. 

AMY: You may think you have never read anything by Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter , but if you've read any work by Thomas Mann, there's a good chance you've read her. She first translated Mann's monumental works from German into English.

KIM: As you can imagine, this was no small feat. Mann's novels are immense, laden with meaning, and linguistically complicated. But not only did Helen Lowe-Porter translate 22 titles from Mann's body of work, in addition to taking on other translating assignments, she did so under seemingly impossible deadlines, while also raising three children and supporting the career achievements of her celebrated paleographer husband.

AMY: Lowe-Porter's translations of Mann's works, including his debut novel Buddenbrooks, undoubtedly led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1929. But did she get any high fives for the assist? Not really.

KIM: Translating the German author was typically thankless work and often frustrating, not only because of Mann's mercurial temperament, but also because what she wanted more than anything was to focus on her own writing, a dream that she never truly fulfilled.

AMY: In some ways, it's a familiar story to this podcast. The self-sacrificing woman behind the great man. In this case, Mann with two Ns. But there's so much more to the life of Helen Lowe-Porter, including that she was good friends with Albert Einstein and she's the great grandmother of former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

KIM: We know all their names. I'd say it's time we get to know her name. So let's raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music plays]

KIM: Our guest today, Jo Salas, originally hails from New Zealand but today calls New York home. In addition to being the cofounder of Playback Theater, an interactive form of improvisational theater now practiced worldwide, Jo is also a Pushcart-Prize nominated writer whose published work includes nonfiction books on theater, numerous short stories, as well as 2015’s Dancing With Diana, a novel about the lasting impact of a fleeting interaction between a young man and a young Princess Diana.

AMY: Jo's latest book, out from JackLeg Press earlier this year, is a work of historical fiction called Mrs. Lowe-Porter. And listeners, I loved this novel. I started it on a plane, and it's usually really hard for me to get into books on airplane flights, but I was just so absorbed in this story. It kept me guessing, I couldn't wait for my return flight so that I could finish it. And so I'm really excited that Jo's with us today to talk about the woman who inspired it. Jo, welcome to the show!

JO: Thank you, Amy and Kim. I'm really delighted to be here with you.

KIM: And we're so glad to have you. Let's start off by explaining to our listeners, Jo, about your connection to Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter and how that connection inspired this book.

JO: Yeah. There is a family connection. Helen Lowe-Porter was my husband's grandmother. I never met her, but I think I would have been inspired by her and her story even if there wasn't a family connection. But the thing is, I probably wouldn't have known about her, because she would have been just H. T. Lowe-Porter, invisible woman behind Thomas Mann's novels. And because she was a family member, I had access to not only papers, letters, and so on, that were hers, but also family stories. So I'd been hearing about her all of my married life. She just became someone in my mind that was very vivid to me, very alive, very appealing. And hidden, you know? Invisible. And I wanted to share what I understood about her and her life. So this is fiction. It's closely based on the milestones of her life, but it also brings in fictionalized elements, because the record of her inner life is quite scant. I mean, she didn't keep a diary. Other people didn't keep her letters, for the most part, and any biographer — and I'm not a biographer — would have to speculate a lot about her life. And for me, it just came much more naturally to make it a novel. So most of the milestones of her life are historically accurate, but I have made up events to give some background to things that she said or commented on in a letter, perhaps.

AMY: Her story is so remarkable, and it would have been so easy for her to get completely lost and forgotten. And really, in some ways, she was almost lost while she lived, you know? She really was a kind of hidden figure. So let's dive into her life a little bit. Helen Porter was born in 1876 in Pennsylvania. She was the niece of Charlotte Endymion Porter, a well known poet, Shakespeare scholar, and literary critic who also translated writers works for the magazine that she co founded, Poet Lore. (She sounds fascinating, too!) But anyway, like her aunt Charlotte, Helen attended Wells College in New York, and then she proceeded to Munich, Germany, which is where your novel kicks off, Jo. So was Helen already fluent in German prior to moving there? And what was important about this time in her life going abroad?

JO: She did know some German. She had studied German, I believe, in high school and certainly in college, and she had done some translations for Charlotte, for her magazine. I don't think she would claim to be fluent. Of course, part of her motivation for going to Munich was to become more fluent. She was almost 30, and she had decided that she wasn't going to get married. She was quite committed as a writer herself. But, Helen went to Munich and there she met Elias Lowe, who was another American. He was a budding paleographer, which, paleography is the study of ancient manuscripts. They became friends, and then, gradually, it was more than that. 

KIM: Right. So they married, Helen and Elias, in 1911, and in reading your wonderful account of their relationship, he seems like a really great match for her. 

JO: Yes. They were passionately in love, way into late middle age, where things didn't go so well (as readers will find out if they read the book.) They were both extremely brilliant and highly educated, and the life of the mind was very important to both of them. But It was kind of taken for granted by most people that men's lives and work was more important than women's lives and work. Helen never fully accepted that. I think she was torn about it. She identified as a feminist all her life and was involved in the suffragist movement, but she did become a wife and mother, and her work did suffer. And his did not. His work was uninterrupted, and hers wasn't. Hers was very contingent on the time that she had, both for translation and her own creative writing, which suffered the most of all. But she had to squeeze that in, you know, between looking after kids and looking after him and dealing with this giant of literature that she was translating for 36 years. 

KIM: Let's talk a little bit about how Helen established herself as a translator and a translator for Thomas Mann, no less. How did this come about?

JO: Yeah, as far as I know, they were living in England, she and Elias and their children. He was a professor at Oxford. She'd been doing some translation for Heinemann, the British publisher, when the idea came up of translating Thomas Mann. And Heinemann had a relationship with Knopf, the American publisher. So it was kind of between Knopf and Heinemann that she was hired. Heinemann already knew about her, and they were looking for a translator for Thomas Mann, who was being brought into English for the first time. I think a few, you know, very brief pieces of his had been translated earlier, but the first novel to be published in English was Buddenbrooks in 1924, exactly a hundred years ago. And that was Helen's translation.

AMY: Okay, so, Buddenbrooks is sort of an epic, multi generational saga of the rise and fall of a merchant class family, and I had never read it before, but I wanted to sort have some sort of exposure to Helen, and this was one novel of his that I hadn't read yet, so I went ahead and listened to this as an audiobook with the intent of, like, really trying to pay attention to the words in English and how she would have done this. (Not that I know German at all.) I really liked the novel, so I would recommend it. And I was able to find Helen's translation on audiobook. But there were clear moments while I was listening to it where I realized the skill that she was bringing to the table. I'm thinking of some of the death scenes in particular, of which there are several, that are just very evocative. And it made me think, okay, she had to do more than just translate the words and put it down. She had to convey all of these big, huge emotions. Tell us a little bit more about what translating Mann entailed for Helen. 

JO: Well, as you were able to imagine reading, it's an enormous task. I mean, any translation requires both immense skill and linguistic knowledge and also artistic skills. And thank goodness, you know, translation as a field is becoming much more understood and respected these days. So for Helen, first of all, she was kind of in awe of him. She recognized what a genius he was as a novelist, so she felt very daunted by that. I mean, daunted and excited, to be asked to translate this huge work. And it was huge — eight hundred pages or something. She had this kind of relish for it, you know? She was kind of dying to get her teeth into it. And then she also kind of role-reversed with him. Like, what was it like for this very important man to depend on her? She had that kind of empathy always, which I think he absolutely did not have. She would just put everything into it. I mean, it would take all her time, all her energy, all her focus, all her creativity, for months and months and months. And meanwhile, Mann and Knopf are kind of breathing down her neck saying, “Hurry up! When can you get this to us?” And so on. So she was always both kind of extremely humble and also utterly committed and confident, feeling that, “I can do this. I want to do this.” And she put everything into it that she could.

KIM: It's amazing the level of research, to understand the context of everything in order to make that translation. And the way that you show that in your novel is fantastic. So, um, initially, Thomas Mann didn't want a woman to do the translation. Did he eventually come to appreciate her, and can you talk about some of the other ways she found working with him to be both frustrating and rewarding at the same time?

JO: Yeah. He seemed fine with her translating Buddenbrooks, and he was very happy with the translation. He said, “It's as though you were born to it.” "Wie geboren," he said. And as soon as it was published, I mean, he became quickly very well known to the English-speaking reading public. But the next book was The Magic Mountain, a very, very dense philosophical book. And she was very excited to do it. And that's where he put his foot down and said, “I don't want you to do it because you're a woman and women can't understand my depth of philosophy.” And she was very troubled, angry, upset, disappointed, and in the end, the Knopfs, Alfred and Blanche Knopf, they insisted. They wanted Helen to do that and any future books, and they prevailed. But he resented it for a long, long time. He resented that a woman translated that book.

AMY: Okay, so he wins the Nobel Prize in 1929, in large part because it was translated into English so well. It seems from your novel as though Helen was at times overly humble about her role as translator, and she didn't want to take credit, you know, a huge amount of credit, and then at other times she felt really hurt that she hadn't been given credit.

JO: I think both of those things are true. I have a chapter in which Helen is kind of chiding Blanche about Alfred not giving Blanche credit for work that she's done, saying, “Don't let him get away with that.” But then she was remembering her own feebleness when Alfred, in an earlier newsletter, omitted her own name as the translator of one of Mann's novels. All she could manage was a coy objection. And then there's a quote, which is a literal quote from Helen: "I was so interested as not to notice for some time that I was not mentioned as the translator of Death in Venice," she wrote to him. "I make this little comment not very seriously, yet, as sort of a protest in the name of the humble craft. People are always so ready to say that we do not get enough credit."

KIM: I mean, it's almost like a ghost writer or something. I just feel like the translator is the co-author. When you think about something that requires so much thought and work and a whole new way of writing it, when you're writing in another language, I mean, the level of work… to not be recognized for that. We still don't recognize translators as much as we should.

JO: I think that there's much more recognition of that now, that translators are seen as kind of a collaborator, in a sense, or a creative artist in their own right, and that the product that they create is not just a facsimile of the novel, it's its own work of art. But with Helen, you know, there was a fair amount of criticism of her during her lifetime, but then around the Seventies, there was a lot of quite savage criticism of her translations, pointing out mistakes that she made and so on. Which she did. I mean, all translators make mistakes. But the thing is that she also had this really beautiful English that really flows. And there are many contemporary readers who prefer her translations for that reason. But one of the things that these critics really bitterly took her to task for was because when she wrote about translation herself, she wrote about how in addition to all the research and linguistic accuracy and so on, she had to accomplish, she also brought her own artistic sensibility to it. And she said something like, I don't send a translation until I feel like I've written it myself, written the book. You can understand, right? I mean, she's not saying, I wrote this book. She's saying that I respect this book so much that I want my translation to honor it as much as I would honor my own writing. And they ripped her to shreds for that, you know? How dare you present yourself as a co-author.

AMY: There's a little section in your novel where you show if she had done a literal translation from a section of Buddenbrooks versus how she slightly tweaked it. I was wondering if you could show how she kind of put her spin on it.

JO: Okay, sure. So in my book, I quote the German passage, but then I'm, sort of in Helen's head: She wrote the exact English for Mann's phrases. The younger master of the house, when the general departure had begun, had grasped the left side of his breast, where a paper was rustling.

The social smile has suddenly vanished from his face to give way to a tense and worried expression and was playing with his temples as if his teeth a few muscles. That's the literal translation. And then Helen thinks, I need to remind readers who the younger master is, she thought. Left side of his breast? Breast pocket, surely. And let's make it clear that they're all headed to the dining room, as we know from the end of the last chapter. No need for the as if. We know he's indeed clenching his teeth, poor man. When she had the whole chapter translated, she came back to the beginning. She relished this more creative step, rendering it in English that readers would actually follow. And here's her rendition. As the party began to move toward the dining room, Consul Buddenbrooks’ hand went to his left pocket and fingered a paper that was inside. The polite smile had left his face giving way to a strained and careworn look, and the muscles stood out on his temples as he clenched his teeth. 

KIM: I love that.

AMY: Yes, I'm sure this is a controversial notion when talking about translation, but in some ways you're serving as editor right?

JO: Well, I don't know that translators would consider themselves editors. They have to edit their own English. In that sense, yes, exactly. If they didn't, it would just be this clumsy... because, you know, sentences in German are not constructed the same as sentences in English, so she has to put it into English that feels like English. And in her case, it has to be English that sounds idiomatic to both American and British readers, and she's very qualified to do that because she's an American living in England, and she's very familiar with both ways of speaking English.

AMY: Yeah, and being aware that the reader has to be enjoying this. And yeah, that whole like British English versus American English, that's something I never thought about either.

KIM: Yeah. I feel like I have even more respect for translators than I had before, which was already a lot. So there's an amazing section from your novel that sums up the process of translating, and I was wondering if you could read that passage for our listeners because it's really beautifully put.

JO: Oh, thank you. Yes. sure. I put on my metaphorical boots and my rucksack. I go exploring the world in which the story takes place. I breathe the air. I smell the vegetation. I walk the furrows. I shade my eyes and gaze at the surrounding hills. I float over farms and cities. I sit in town squares. I eavesdrop on conversations. I observe the clothes and gestures of the book's characters as they argue and conspire, as they love and hate one another. I comb the libraries for books that can tell me the history and geography I will need to know. I seek the writings of experts to fill in the gaps in my own knowledge. The mythologists, the historians, the musicologists, the scholars of archaic Bible translations or medieval German. The pile of reference books grows and grows. And then, finally, I'm ready. I pile a stack of paper on my desk. I take up my pen. Word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page, chapter by chapter, a novel in English takes form alongside its German brother. And then, inevitably, I see that this new work is hideous, clumsy, and unreadable. It makes me ill to look at it. I have snatched a living child out of its cradle and left a crude wooden doll in its place. Then comes the alchemy. I must use my dark arts, my art, to breathe life into the doll. I whisper my incantations over it. The air fills with words. German and English words, idioms, words that are obvious and surprising, beautiful and grotesque, words no longer used, words not yet born, words that fly like birds, sometimes in formation, sometimes in a crazy scatter. The words settle around the wooden doll. They warm it, caress it, clothe it. Slowly, slowly, the limbs move, the heart beats, eyes flutter open. There is new life with its own new grace. I rejoice in its birth. I send it out into the world, a gift given. 

KIM: Fantastic. 

AMY: Such a great way to explain the work that's being done there. I love it. And, also, side note, she's got … three children?

JO: Three girls. 

KIM: I feel so lazy, Amy. I'm not doing enough!

AMY: And to add to that, you know, after successfully translating The Magic Mountain in 1927, Helen goes on to translate 20 more Thomas Mann titles. Twenty! Including Death in Venice and Dr. Faustus. This work spanned the course of three and a half decades. Yet all the while, Helen lamented the fact that it was depriving her of time to do her own writing. And Jo, there's a wonderful section of your novel where you have one of Helen's characters from one of her own novels that she's working on barge in to interrupt her and say, “Hey, why aren't you paying attention to me?” I thought that was such a wonderful device. What do you actually know about her ambitions to write her own stuff?

JO: We do know for sure that she imagined herself as a writer from a young age. She wanted to be a writer. There isn't a lot of evidence of her writing, her creative writing. Tragically, it seems to have been lost. And whether she destroyed it herself or whether it was lost in some other way, we don't know. Only a few things were published. Ironically, one of the ways that we do have evidence of her writing is because she sent things to Mann to read, to get his comments. I have a letter that he wrote in 1942 in response to a short story that she wrote, which he loved, you know? He praised it very, very highly. He said "Any editor that turns it down is an idiot." But it was never published. We don't know why. We don't know where she sent it or what happened to it, the manuscript. And then when she was in her mid-70s, she said to him, "I'm going to retire as your translator." And she said, "The reason is perhaps silly, but I want to work on my own writing while I still can." So she did. She wrote a novel. And again, she sent it to Mann. And again, he praised it. (Although it was a little sort of backhand praise because he said, "I think the subject matter might be offensive to publishers," he said.) Um, it dealt with gender, actually. Two siblings switching gender. And he found that disturbing and suggested that she should not submit it to the Knopfs, which she must've been very hurt by, I think. But again, it wasn't published. It got as far as an agent, and the manuscript has disappeared. The only things that are published are a small book of poems, late in her life, and a play that was very successful. It's a sort of adaptation of the story of Edward VIII's abdication in the Thirties. He abdicated the British throne. She was very inspired by that. She wrote the play in a kind of Shakespearean blank verse, and it was very successfully produced. Once. One run of, I don't know, a few weeks. And never again.

KIM: Would you, um, maybe read something from her writing so our listeners could get a feel for it?

JO: Yeah. I mean, again, all I have that's published is this lovely little book of poems and the play. So she was someone who was very politically aware all her life. I mean, not only women's rights, but, she lived through two world wars and then the McCarthy period here in the U.S. And she was very distressed, heartbroken, by the execution of the Rosenbergs. And your listeners probably know about this, but the Rosenbergs were accused and convicted of spying. Ethel Rosenberg, it seemed like all she did was kind of support her husband. She was not a spy herself, but she was also executed. And Helen wrote a poem about it, and it's called "Waste." 

Before she sat in the chair, she turned and kissed the wardress who had led her there. Then, thus sitting, she died. Was this not fitting? Was this not fine? And was it not well done? For what is rarer under the sun than this, to save in death our humanness? Uh, I do fear we are too blind to see we can ill spare and must not waste such human love as this.

KIM: Wow.

JO: Yeah. I find it very moving.

KIM: Very moving. That's exactly what I was going to use. Wow.

AMY: And it is sad that she didn't have as much time to work on her own writing as she would have wanted to. But at the same time, what she did is so remarkable and such an incredible feat that she should be so proud of.

JO: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, she was very accomplished.

 KIM: In our intro, we had pointed out that Helen had a friendship with Albert Einstein. 

JO: Yeah, they were neighbors. He was friends with both her husband and Helen. They wrote funny little poems for each other, and she would help him sometimes if he was giving a talk. She would kind of go over it and smooth it out for him. And they would give each other presents, and he thought highly of her, it seems like. He was kind of a family friend. My mother in law and her first husband, he was a witness at their wedding. So we have this lovely photo of him standing there looking very benign with the happy couple beside him. My husband, you know, would play in his garden when he was a little kid. His brother would play the piano for him. He was kind of a benign presence somehow both in Helen's life and in the family's life.

AMY: I love that. I'm sure he felt a kinship just having somebody that knew German he could just converse freely with. 

JO: Right, and they saw eye to eye politically, and she was very politically aware, as I think I said. And you know, he was someone who was very concerned about what was happening in Germany. He was very concerned about McCarthyism, and so on. And they shared a point of view about those things.

AMY: We also mentioned earlier that Helen was the great grandmother of former British prime minister Boris Johnson. And you note in the forward to your book that his politics would have appalled her. But I'm also wondering, what do you think she might have thought of your novel? She definitely had opinions.

JO: She definitely did. I think it was in the afterword that I mentioned Boris Johnson, rather than the forward, because I don't want people to have that in the front of their minds as they're reading, necessarily. I know she would have been distressed by someone like him. There are plenty of other members of the family that she would have been very proud of, I think. Um, what would she have thought about my novel? I can't feel the least bit confident that she would have been pleased. I mean, she was such a self-effacing person. And of course, I've made all kinds of things up. I just don't know. I mean, I worry about it sometimes. Have I done her an injustice or not? Or is it the opposite? I mean, my intention, and it comes from a sense of enormous respect and affection for her, is to bring her out of the shadows, to bring her into the light. I hope she would have felt some gratification about that. But she might also have felt that this was her life and no one else had a right to write about it. I'm not sure. I hope, at least, there would have been parts of it that she would have been pleased with. I wish I had met her. I wish I had been able to ask her lots of questions. And in the absence of that, I have to rely on imagination, empathy and fellow feeling in some way.

AMY: Well, we wouldn't be discussing her today had you not written this, and I wouldn't have had a clue about who she was. I mean, I had read Thomas Mann before, and I probably had read her translations. You see “H. T. Lowe-Porter,” and you don't think twice about it, but to now hear her entire story, It's wonderful. I felt like I had a very naive understanding of what a translator does, and I just have a new appreciation for her. And getting to read your novel was like getting your cake and eating it too, because it's such a fun book to read. So thank you, and thanks for joining us today. 

KIM: This was wonderful. 

JO: Thank you so much, Amy and Kim. It's been really a pleasure to have a conversation with you.

AMY: And before we sign off here, I also want to let our listeners know about a wonderful translator and librarian from Melbourne, Australia, named Marie Lebert. She has extensively documented women translators throughout history and has even compiled an online dictionary of 150 different translators, from ancient times through to the 20th century. And we're going to include a link to that in our show notes. Marie reached out to me, and she wrote an article for this podcast, which highlights more than a dozen other important lost lady translators of literature across the centuries. We're going to be sharing that article in our show notes, as well as our Facebook and Patreon pages. It'll be available there to everyone without a subscription. So please go check it out. And Marie, thank you so much for all the work you're doing to recognize these tremendously important women.

KIM: Yes. Thank you, Marie. And listeners, do you have a favorite novel translated from another language? Use the new “fan mail” feature of this podcast to text us directly and let us know. It's in the show notes, wherever you listen to our podcast.

AMY: And don't forget, also, to give us a rating and review wherever you listen. Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.