Helen R. Lane was born in 1921 inMinneapolis. She began her career as a government translator, then worked for numerous publishing houses, and even provided subtitles for films, including for Jean-Luc Goddard. Lane received the National Book Award in 1974 for her English rendition of Octavio Paz's Alternating Currents, and she won two PEN Translation Prizes. Her sixty published works in translation include authors as diverse as Elena Poniatowska, Georges Perec, and Augusto Roa Bastos. She died in Albuquerque in 2004.
