An Invisible Woman
The case of the missing translator
Colm Tóibin’s 2021 novel The Magician is a closely biographical story about the novelist Thomas Mann, a giant of 20th century literature, a Nobel Prize winner, and still a household name in his native Germany. Researching and writing about the life of his translator, Helen Lowe-Porter, I’ve spent a lot of time in Mann’s company, reading biographies of Mann and of his handsome, talented, troubled family members as well as his novels. I’ve studied some of the correspondence between him and Lowe-Porter, formal and sometimes testy in the beginning, becoming affectionate and mutually appreciative as the years passed.
Mann and Lowe-Porter worked intimately together for 36 years. She translated 22 of his books, both fiction and non-fiction. Although scholars have since drawn attention to inaccuracies, English-speaking readers at the time embraced the translations enthusiastically. There is no question that Lowe-Porter’s meticulous, graceful work enabled Mann to be recognized as a pre-eminent novelist of his time.
So I was eager to see how Tóibin would portray her. The novel follows Mann’s life from youth to old age, focusing on his family, his homosexuality, his political evolution, and his writing career. When I reached the pages covering the time that his books were first published in English I was surprised to see that this milestone went unmentioned. Mann’s American publisher, Knopf, appears briefly in a later chapter, with a few passing references thereafter. Lowe-Porter herself appears only once, on page 312, when Mann’s domineering fan Agnes Meyer refers to her as “your so-called translator Mrs. Lowe-Porter.”
Mann’s life was long, complex, and interwoven with the pivotal events of the twentieth century. Fiction writers, whether their work is based on real life or not, must choose what to emphasize and what to leave out, depending on what serves the themes of the book. It was Tóibin’s prerogative to shape the narrative according to his own vision. And in his vision, Mann’s relationship with and dependence on his translator is extraneous to the story he wanted to tell.
Still, the omission feels depressingly familiar to me. Whether in fiction or real life, work carried out by women, even on the massive scale of Lowe-Porter’s, remains too easily and unfairly overlooked.
It’s a very old story, this invisibility. There are countless women, some known, some not, whose ideas, creativity, and labor have been subsumed into the achievements of others, in the arts and literature, science, psychology, and academia.
I’ve been relieved to see a few outstanding women emerging from the shadows in recent years — like the female African American mathematicians who contributed substantially to NASA’s space program in the 1960s, in the movie Hidden Figures. Or the publisher Blanche Knopf in Laura Claridge’s biography, balancing the better-known story of her husband’s success.
It’s not easy for a woman to fight her way out of undeserved obscurity. The artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude collaborated on startling, monumental works — wrapping buildings, or a stretch of coastline. For many years their projects were credited solely to Christo. Late in their shared career, they revealed that Jeanne-Claude was equally the creator and tried to insist on equal credit. But by then Christo’s single name was too well known for the public to change their understanding.
Language itself is part of the problem, since language both expresses cultural attitudes and helps to create them. Until relatively recently, “he” was commonly used to mean both men and women. “The male embraces the female,” as the sexist dictum goes. But if I say “A good teacher listens to his students” you’ll imagine a man in the classroom, not a woman. Thanks to women’s insistence on inclusive language, this prejudiced usage is no longer acceptable in most settings (at least in English, where it’s easy to avoid sexist pronouns).
The way we name ourselves is also telling. In some cultures it’s been customary for women to change their names to their husbands’ — a custom reflecting the historical ownership of women by men and now signifying conformity, especially if accompanied by the archaic “Mrs.” Women have increasingly abandoned the tradition, though many maintain it, from either external pressure or their own preference. The phrase “man and wife” is still unthinkingly invoked as though the man in a couple has personhood while the woman exists only in relation to him.
If you do keep your name you’re still liable to be pluralized under your husband’s. Ms. Jones, married to Mr. Smith, will disappear into “the Smiths” — another effective way of rendering a woman invisible, whether in print or private communication. (A woman who’s not married to her partner is spared this treatment, as are same-sex couples.) In a book ostensibly honoring “women of genius,” the female author refers to Lee Krasner and her husband Jackson Pollock as “the Pollocks,” Denise Scott Brown disappears into “the Venturis,” and so on. (The awful “Mr. and Mrs. John Smith” seems to live on these days only in lists of wealthy benefactors.)
Helen Lowe-Porter, like many women in earlier times and now, hesitated to demand fitting recognition for her work. Despite her independent spirit, society’s expectations of women weighed on her — to put one’s family first, to consider men’s work more important. She felt torn between asserting the value of her work and retreating into the shadows.
She was fully aware that she was not a genius on the order of Thomas Mann. So how to measure the value of her labor without claiming more than her due? She was extraordinarily smart, erudite, conscientious, committed, and an artist in her own right: she wrote fiction and poetry all her life and brought a finely-honed aesthetic sensibility to her translations.
In Helen’s lifetime she received little recognition. Mann occasionally expressed his gratitude to her. But more often he was critical and impatient. Reviews rarely mentioned the translator, and when they did they could be unfair. The academic critic Harry Levin lacerated her in print over an omission from the original German text — an omission that Mann himself had requested.[i]
And so, in a 500-page novel about Mann, his lifelong translator — in significant ways his creative partner — is absent. In my novel based on her life (MRS. LOWE-PORTER, forthcoming February 1, 2024 from JackLeg Press), Thomas Mann is a secondary character. Helen, with her ambition, her brilliance, her self-doubts, her loving, wounded heart, is centerstage.
[i] Thirlwall, J. 1966. In Another Language. pp 113–116.
