Helen Lane ’43, M.A. ’53

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Helen Lane is one of the leading contemporary international translators of the Romance languages and has achieved world renown for her translations in French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. As foreign editor for Grove Press from 1960-70, she evaluated and reported an average of 150 books in these languages per year and supervised the editing of all such translations.

Lane received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in French from UCLA, where she also completed course work and passed her doctoral examinations for her Ph.D. in Romance languages and literature. Thus far, she has translated 61 volumes, more than 50 articles and short essays and subtitles for 10 films. Lane is a three-time nominee for the National Book Award for Translation and winner of the award in 1974. She also won the American PEN Translation Prize and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Translation Prize for “The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters.”

Her peers describe Lane’s skillful translation as “not the mere rendering of a foreign language into English; they are a recreation of the original work.”