Thomas Mann: Lowe-Porter translations

Does anyone have any comments on the translations of Thomas Mann's works? Are the old Lowe-Porter renderings serviceable, or have they been superseded by Woods? I'm thinking especially of Buddenbrooks, a novel I would like to read. Any comments welcome.

I haven't read the Lowe-Porter, but I've been very pleased with the newer translations by John Woods which I've been reading since I became fascinated by Mann a few years ago. Woods discusses the differences in translation somewhat circumspectly in his introduction to Joseph and His Brothers, but says in that case he tried to capture Mann's more earth-bound style in a less formal way than Lowe-Porter.

ETA I really loved Buddenbrooks -- I hope you do too.

The The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation gets rather sharp about them. I can't quote for you until tonight, but apparently the author of that section felt there were too many mistranslations scattered throughout the text.

rebeccanyc & prosfilaes, thanks for your comments. I'd like to hear how what the guide says. Just glancing at a few pages on the Internet, Woods seems to come off much better than Lowe-Porter with today's readers. I just picked up a copy of Buddenbrooks by Lowe-Porter at a local charity shop - this could be 50p down the drain.

"Not only was her grasp of German so shaky, that she made countless elementary errors of comprehension, but she also made frequent omissions and additions and, especially in Buddenbrooks, unnecessarily simplified Mann's characteristic complex syntax.

But it was perhaps in Death in Venice (...) that the damage by Lowe-Porter was most significant and severe. For here her puritanism, which saw her tone down Mann's treatment of sexuality, especially homoeroticism, throughout his oeuvre, was most disastrous. The result is a reworked, sanitized version..." (The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, Karl Leydecker, "German Fiction: Nineteen and Twentieth Century", pg. 333)

Of course, on Woods he says "whilst representing a vast improvement in capturing Mann's style and retaining his sentence structure, these translations still surprisingly suffer from lapses in comprehension of the German text."

All I can say is that I have really enjoyed the Woods translations, and that his explanation of how his translation of Joseph and His Brothers differed from Lowe-Porter's convinced me that I would have suffered through the L-P.