Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter

Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter (June 15, 1876/1877, Towanda, Pennsylvania – died April 26, 1963, Princeton, New Jersey) was an American translator, best known for her pioneering translations of the works of Thomas Mann.

Helen Tracy Porter was the daughter of Clara (née Holcombe) and Henry Clinton Porter. She was the niece of Charlotte Endymion Porter, editor of Poet Lore, a poetry journal, and an expert on Shakespeare and Elizabeth and Robert Browning. She married the paleographer Elias Avery Lowe in 1911 and took the married name of Lowe-Porter. The couple lived in Oxford; after 1937, their residence was in Princeton, New Jersey. One of their daughters, Frances, was the maternal grandmother of former London mayor and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson. For more than two decades, Lowe-Porter enjoyed exclusive rights to translate the works of Thomas Mann from German into English. She was granted these rights in 1925 by Alfred A. Knopf.

In her essay "On Translating Thomas Mann", Lowe-Porter said that while it is not so important that the translator be a great scholar of the foreign language, as few literary practitioners are really and truly bilingual, it is very important indeed that he/she be a master of the resources and subtleties of his/her own. She also said, in her note to her translation of Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain):

"The violet has to be cast into the crucible....The organic work of art must be remoulded in another tongue....Since in the creative act word and thought are indivisible, the task is one before which artists shrink and logical minds recoil." (Translator's note to The Magic Mountain. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1927)

She also wrote an original play, Abdication, which received its first production in Dublin in September 1948.

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