In Praise of Bad Translations

The New York Times reviews Adam Thirlwells' book The Delighted States and has this interesting observation concerning translations:

As he swirls together his international troupe of writers, along with a fine prodigality of portraits, anecdotes and quotations, Mr. Thirlwell argues and sometimes goads at a universal mutual connection and influence.

That leads to the question of translation. Though he gives many examples of what is lost, he insists that even a mediocre translation will convey a writer’s essence; his style, in other words. Style, he writes, citing Proust, is a matter of vision, not language.

Is this true? Can a bad or mediocre translation convey a writer's essence? This made me think about the case of H.T. Lowe-Porter (1877-1963), who, under the Knopf contract,  had a monopoly on the English translations for the entire works of Thomas Mann until 1980.  It is now generally acknowledged that Lowe-Porter's Mann translations leave much to be desired; they are mediocre, at best.  And yet, it is her translations that brought Thomas Mann to generations of Brits and Americans, propelling his fame to Nobel Prize stratosphere.  And Lowe-Porter was pretty open about her disdain for precision in translation.  In her notes in the preface to the English version of Buddenbrooks she wrote that her commitment as translator was to "the spirit first and the letter so far as might be".  She found Mann's style to be a bit ponderous for English readers, so she "livened it up" a bit, shortened the sentences - and the readers enthusiastically ate it up.  But in the process she also sanitized Mann's prose, eliminating or changing the sexual allusions (Lowe-Porter found Mann's homosexuality distasteful). Lowe-Porter's "renditions" of Mann, then, fit the puritanical orientation of America, making Thomas Mann perhaps more acceptable to American readers than a precise translation may have done. 

After Lowe-Porter's copyright expired in the 1980s, a flurry of new - more precise - translations emerged. But was something lost here as well?  Mann's influence, in America, at least, has ebbed. Or is it Lowe-Porter that we miss?