Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter (June 15, 1876 – April 26, 1963) was an American translator and writer, best known for translating almost all of the works of Thomas Mann for their first publication in English. Personal life 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. The couple lived in Oxford; after 1937, their residence was in Princeton, New Jersey. Their great-grandson is Boris Johnson, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Career For more than two decades, Lowe-Porter had 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 discussed translating Mann's novels, and expressed some thoughts on translating generally. She wrote, for example, that in translating the second volume of Mann's Joseph series, Young Joseph, she had ″been forced—since the English version was for both markets [British and American]—to emasculate the style, in some degree, taking care to write only what would be acceptable literary usage on both sides of the ocean.″ She also said, in her note to her translation of Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain): [T]he violet has to be cast into the crucible, the organic work of art to be remoulded in another tongue.... [S]ince in the creative act word and thought are indivisible, the task was seen to be one before which artists shrink and logical minds recoil. She wrote an original play, Abdication, which received its first production in Dublin in September 1948. Thomas Mann translations Lowe-Porter's translations of Thomas Mann works include the following (dates in brackets refer to the German publication, the dates after to the English-language translations). Buddenbrooks [1901] 1924 The Magic Mountain [1924] 1927 Death in Venice [1913] 1928 Mario and the Magician [1930] 1931 Joseph and His Brothers, comprising: I The Tales of Jacob [1933] 1934 II Young Joseph [1934] 1935 III Joseph in Egypt [1936] 1938 IV Joseph the Provider [1943] 1944 Stories of Three Decades 1936 The Beloved Returns [1939] 1940 The Transposed Heads [1940] 1941 Essays of Three Decades 1947 Doctor Faustus [1947] 1948 The Holy Sinner [1951] 1951 A Sketch of My Life