Helen Lane

This article is about the translator. For the cancer patient and originator of the HeLa cell line, see Henrietta Lacks.

Helen Lane (1921 – August 29, 2004) was a renowned translator of Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian language literary works into English. She translated works by numerous important authors including Jorge Amado, Augusto Roa Bastos, Marguerite Duras, Juan Goytisolo, Mario Vargas Llosa, Curzio Malaparte, Juan Carlos Onetti, Octavio Paz, Nélida Piñon, and Luisa Valenzuela.

Career

Lane began her career in the 1940s as a government translator in Los Angeles, before moving to New York City to work for publishers there. She became a freelance translator in 1970, and moved to the Dordogne in France. In addition to her books, she also provided subtitles for films by Jean-Luc Godard and Haskell Wexler.

She received the PEN Translation Prize in 1975 and 1985.

Life

She was born Helen Ruth Overholt in Minneapolis and graduated summa cum laude in 1943 from the University of California, Los Angeles, where in 1953 she went on to gain a master's degree. after that, she continued there in postgraduate work, as well as at the Sorbonne.

List of translations

Alternating Current, Lane's translation of Octavio Paz, won the 1974 U.S. National Book Award in the category Translation (a split award).

• On Heroes and Tombs (Ernesto Sabato)
• The Storyteller (Mario Vargas Llosa)
• A Fish in the Water (Mario Vargas Llosa)
• Essays on Mexican Art
• Caetana's Sweet Song
• Massacre in Mexico (Elena Poniatowska)
• The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters
• State of Siege
• The Perón Novel
• Santa Evita
• The Memoirs of Fray Servando Teresa de Mier (Servando Teresa de Mier)
• I, the Supreme (Augusto Roa Bastos)
• Les choses: a story of the sixties (Georges Perec)
• Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (Mario Vargas Llosa)
• The War of the End of the World (Mario Vargas Llosa)

References

• Saxon, Wolfgang (September 2004). "Helen Lane, a Translator of Literature, Dies at 83". New York Times. Retrieved 2008-04-04. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |month= and |coauthors= (help)
• Christ, Ronald. "The Translator's Voice: An Interview With Helen R. Lane". Retrieved 2011-06-26. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |month= and |coauthors= (help)