Lowe-Porter held the exclusive rights to translate Mann's major works for fifty years. In that time, her translations came under critical attack for being inaccurate, fanciful and clumsy. Yet they couldn't have been all that bad because it was Lowe-Porter's translations that brought recognition of Mann as a literary giant to the English-speaking world. Many a reader owes his appreciation of books like Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain and Doktor Faustus to Lowe-Porter—and many still prefer her versions to other translators'.

Lowe-Porter collaborated with Mann on the English translations of his books for thirty years. Buddenbrooks was their first project. It met with mixed reviews when it was published in 1924 but, as Mann grew popular through her translations of his other works, it was picked up and republished in hardcover by the Modern Library and in paperback as a Vintage edition, and for many years it was ubiquitous.

Lowe-Porter famously had difficulty rendering German dialects and tended to smooth speech into a bland English, or even to skip troublesome passages altogether. She also censored some of the cruder references of the text (though there is not much crudity in Buddenbrooks to begin with).

Nonetheless, no one dared attempt another translation of Buddenbrooks until Woods took it up seven decades after Lowe-Porter's version. His 1993 publication was immediately acclaimed as being more accurate, clearer and more plainly written. It has replaced Lowe-Porter's version so thoroughly that it is hard to find the older translation in stores, although libraries still carry it.

The Berlin-dwelling expert Woods is especially good with dialogue, compared to Lowe-Porter. In Buddenbrooks however I find his attempts to make German speech relevant to an English-speaking audience annoying at times. For example, a character who works as a servant is liable to use "ain't". Tony Buddenbrook's second husband Alois Permaneder, an unsophisticated character from Munich, speaks like an American country hick with his "durns" and "l'ils" and "sho' nuffs".

But this is probably closer to what Mann was trying to get across in his characterization. The reader gets a more raw, less refined, and occasionally more humorous vision of the life and decline of the Buddenbrook family.

Still one can see that Woods borrowed quite a bit from Lowe-Porter's first take and he must have used it as a guide. Think of his translation not as a wholesale revision but as an upgrade to the Lowe-Porter version, filling in the gaps, correcting mistakes and adding a few creative ideas of his own.