Context
Helen Lane, 1921 – 2004
Ronald Christ
Helen Lane, who died August 29, 2004,
at the age of 83, was the preeminent translator of French, Spanish,
Portuguese, and Italian fiction. Among the long list of authors she
translated are Augusto Roa Bastos, Juan Goytisolo, Juan Carlos Onetti,
Jorge Amado, Luisa Valenzuela, Mario Vargas Llosa, Marguerite Duras,
Nélida Piñon, and Curzio Malaparte. A long-time supporter of Dalkey
Archive, as well as a contributor to the Review of Contemporary Fiction,
Helen Lane will be remembered as both a friend and coconspirator in
bringing the best of contemporary fiction to the English-speaking
world. We asked her good friend and fellow-translator Ronald Christ to
write about Helen’s life and accomplishments. Though petite, Helen Lane was mighty and sometimes called the
queen of translators, leading Margaret Sayers Peden, known to all as
Petch, into fondly dubbing her “Queenie.” Helen was also an intensely
attracting person, like some babies and certain animals, and with age
her small stature grew enhanced by the disproportionate size of her
head, leading me to dub her “Panda.” She acknowledged her titles with
that inimitable smile and tilt of her head revealing half-closed
crescents of large eyes, and we now fondly and proudly recall all that
those titles hailed, Helen having left us—been translated, she liked to
quip—on August 29, 2004, after a stroke at her home in Albuquerque, New
Mexico. Helen’s mastery of translation flowed from several converging
sources that made her unique. She had been a cryptographer during WWII;
she had served as foreign editor in the 1960s at Grove Press, and she
continued writing reader’s reports on proposed books for various
publishers and agencies into the 1980s; she had studied both Romance
languages and literatures at UCLA and the Sorbonne, coming to command
seven languages, as written and spoken; and she was a graceful as well
as forceful stylist in English. The last quality is the most important
for any translator, while her editing prowess gave her a rare reader
over her shoulder—herself. Her editing extended to the books
themselves: I recall a shocked academic discovering that Helen had
trimmed Sábato’s Of Heroes and Tombs and also recall a critic,
Latin American, who told me that the English translation was the only
version of the book, including the original, that she cared to read. Helen’s manner of working, as she described it to Margaret
Sayers Peden and as I observed it at her home in France where Dennis
Dollens and I had gone for a weekend and stayed three months, was
remarkable, literally astonishing. Early on, between the lines of the
books themselves, later, on enlarged photocopies (140% was her
preference), she wrote brief solutions and posed queries as she read
the book. Then, on her doughty Selectric or, later, her Mac, she typed
out the translation, apparently retained in her head from that
preliminary reading, leaving only the puzzle passages and the revision
of her English to the final editing phase, which she relished. All
accomplished between 10 p.m. and 3 or 4 a.m. on seven-day workweeks.
She hated bright sunlight as much as she hated bending over, so she
tended her vegetable and flower gardens seated on the ground, shielded
by an umbrellasized straw hat; she kept her main dictionary and Roget
exactly at her fingertips on a low, deskside table in her midnight
study. Helen’s greatest satisfaction came from difficult texts, the
harder the better; her final pleasure from squaring up the pages for
mailing, knowing there was not a grace note she could add or subtract.
When she reached that final state, her expression matched the silently
beaming one when she ate fine, exotic food. Translating was both art
and service, work and ritual for her: “To translate is to ‘carry
across’—and what better way of helping in the dharmatask of bringing
all sentient Being ‘to the other shore?’ ” With Helen’s being carried across, literature loses a great
artist; to translators, publishers, and authors, an intimate idol. Her
prized friend, the award-winning translator Carol Maier, whom Helen
admired for her dedication as well as her craft, writes:During the last decade, it was my honor and privilege
to be Helen’s friend. From her I learned what it means to define
oneself as a translator. Her written words about translation were few,
but her words in translation are innumerable. In those words she leaves
an unparalleled legacy, a rich example to be treasured and studied in
depth. She was a woman of wit, precision, candor, and spunk. And she
knew how to laugh.
And Petch, our grand doyenne, recalls:
When I began translating, there was a role model ready and
waiting: who but Helen Lane? I am, and have always been, awed by the
scope of her knowledge as well as her unerring ear. Imagine, memorable
translations from French, Portuguese, and Spanish. We have lost a
treasure, a friend, a stellar member of our community, but she has left
us a legacy: her work, and the inspiring figure of her person. We will
miss her, but she is here.
Indeed, Helen Lane ¡¡presente!!
