Oh, come on.

[tree_and_leaf]

If you recommend as one of the best translations into English the work of a translator who not only willfully disregards the sentence structure of the source text (in ways going beyond what the differences between English and German requires), makes positively embarrassing howlers apparently based on unintelligent guesswork (I know "Melone" sounds a lot like "melon", but even if you don't have access to a dictionary to find out it's a bowler, context should at least have given away that it was a hat and not a piece of fruit), misses bits out, makes things up, and writes, at times, remarkably odd sounding English, then I question your judgement quite severely.

I'll admit that Thomas Mann isn't the easiest read on the planet. But he's not unreadable, which is what Lowe-Porter makes him sound.

Comments

[antisoppist]

At least he included Anthea Bell.

[tree_and_leaf]

True. Her Asterix translations are magnificent.