H. T. Lowe-Porter - Critical Reaction

Critical Reaction

For decades, Lowe-Porter's translations of Mann were the only ones that existed in the English-speaking world. At least one contemporary review misidentified Lowe-Porter's gender as male, rather than female. Mann did express his appreciation to Lowe-Porter for her work, nicknaming her "die Lowe", but also added the caveat "insofar as my linguistic knowledge suffices". In 1993, Theodore Ziolkowski summarised Lowe-Porter's achievement in translating Mann's Buddenbrooks:

"Lowe-Porter provided a valuable service by making Mann's novel initially accessible to the English and American publics."

Other commentary on her translations has 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."

"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."

"Thomas Mann and Proust were lucky in their translators."

Through Lowe-Porter's translations, Mann gained great popularity in the English-speaking world.

The later 20th century saw major revisions on the theory and practice of literary translation. Thus, Lowe-Porter's translations too have been criticized on such grounds as linguistic limitations. For example, while acknowledging the scale of Lowe-Porter's labors and the times when her translations were "most apt and pleasing", Timothy Buck noted that Lowe-Porter rearranged Mann's sentence structure, omitted passages from the originals, added others, and deliberately left out descriptive adjectives and adverbs in the narrative. Buck has also noted inadequacies in Lowe-Porter's understanding of German which sometimes caused her to mistranslate particular words, often on the basis of homonyms. Examples include the following::

Subsequent translators since Lowe-Porter of Mann's work have included Kenneth Burke, David Luke, and John E Woods.