Based in New York City, Ann Goldstein has translated works by, among others, Primo Levi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Elena Ferrante, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Alessandro Baricco, and she is the editor of The Complete Works of Primo Levi in English. Goldstein, who was the head copy editor at The New Yorker for 30 years, is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and awards from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2016, her translation of Elena Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. Goldstein sat down for an interview with Esopus in late 2016 that was published the following spring in Esopus 24; the issue also included facsimile reproductions of three drafts of her translation of Levi’s short story “Hydrogen.”

Tod Lippy: How and when did you first come to learn Italian?

Ann Goldstein: I had always wanted to read Dante in Italian, and in 1986 I convinced some other people working at The New Yorker that they, too, wanted to read Dante in Italian. My colleague Mary Norris, who was then studying Greek at Columbia, had a classmate who was the daughter of Maristella Lorch, a well-known Italian professor there. As it turns out, there were two daughters, and for a year we had an Italian class with one of the daughters, at The New Yorker offices, in which we mostly studied grammar. Then, the next year, the other daughter came, and we started reading Dante. Eventually we read the entire Divine Comedy. We continued the Italian class for quite a long time, and then it became a conversation class, and we would go out to dinner, with a teacher, and talk. The class stopped for a while, but we’ve actually revived it again.

It’s amusing to me that a world-renowned translator of Italian literature would still be taking Italian lessons.

Well, you know, you can always learn something else. We have a teacher, an Italian, and we all talk, and just to have the language in your ear for an hour or so is something—it’s really good.

Do you spend a lot of time in Italy?

No, not enough time. I try to go twice a year, but I haven’t been that successful lately.

Your first work of translation was the Aldo Buzzi story “Chekhov in Sondrio,” in 1992. How did that come about?

Buzzi was a friend of the artist Saul Steinberg—they studied architecture together in Milan—and Steinberg sent Bob Gottlieb, who was at that point the editor of The New Yorker, a book by Buzzi. Gottlieb wanted to write Steinberg a note, so he gave me the book, since he knew I was studying Italian, and said, “Just read enough to be able to give me something nice to say.” I read the book—it was quite short—and I really liked it, so I thought, “I’ll just try to translate it.” And I did, and then Bob published it in the magazine. That was kind of amazing. It’s a very literary piece about Russia and Italy—a strange piece, but a wonderful one.

So you were hooked?

Yes, I really liked the process of translation: of finding a more intimate relationship with the language. And then, I don’t exactly remember the sequence of things, I translated other Buzzi stories—they’re not exactly stories but more memoirs, or little essays—for Dan Menaker [an editor], who had just gone to Random House, and they were published, with “Chekhov in Sondrio,” as Journey to the Land of the Flies. But the next book I translated was Petrolio, by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Even for Pasolini aficionados, Petrolio is considered a hugely challenging read—from my understanding, it was unfinished, and cobbled together from a series of notes and letters that Pasolini had written before he was murdered.

Yes, that’s right. And it, too, is kind of an amazing book, absolutely different from the Buzzi.

And so relevant to the end of his life.

Exactly. Several years ago, an Italian writer called Emanuele Trevi wrote a book about Petrolio, titled Qualcosa di scritto [Something Written], which is the title of certain sections of Petrolio. Trevi worked at the Pasolini Foundation, in Rome, for Laura Betti, and so he wrote this combination coming-of-age memoir, literary analysis of Petrolio, and exploration of sadomasochism. For example, Trevi goes to Greece and visits Eleusis because the Eleusinian Mysteries have a role in Pasolini’s book. I translated the Trevi book, but unfortunately it was published only in England.

What a challenge for an early translation.

Yes, I worked on it for about three years. I knew very little about Pasolini beforehand, but I obviously learned quite a lot.

You’re neither an Italian scholar nor a specialist in Italian literature; do you think there are certain advantages to approaching translation from that particular angle?

I never really know. I mean, experience is usually an advantage. [Laughs.] It’s probably in some ways an advantage not to be an academic, but I don’t think it’s an advantage that there are a lot of things I haven’t read. I’ve read Dante, and a little Boccaccio, and a little of this and that, but I haven’t really studied all of these things, so I would say that I’m sorry that I don’t have that background. The other thing that I don’t have is the cultural background—I’ve never lived in Italy for more than four months at a time, and so I think that’s something of a disadvantage. I mean, I have other advantages—I think working in English as a copy editor is an advantage. It’s a useful skill when it comes to translating.

Can you talk about that a little bit more?

I think that being focused on words to that degree—especially in the weird, specialized system of copyediting we have here at The New Yorker, which is to some extent like line editing—is helpful. It’s very intensive. Our idea is that we’re trying to make the writer sound as much like him- or herself as possible, and in translation you’re trying to do the same thing. You’re trying to bring this voice into English as closely as possible. In a talk about translation I’ve given recently, I offer the example of five different translations I’ve done of five different writers: It demonstrates how different they are not only in Italian but also in English. I think it works—at least, that’s the idea:

My Brilliant Friend (Elena Ferrante, 2012)
“Although his features were very similar to Stefano’s, the same eyes, same nose, same mouth; although his body, as he grew, was taking the same form, the large head, legs slightly short in relation to the torso; although in his gaze and in his gestures he manifested the same mildness, I felt in him a total absence of the determination that was concealed in every cell of Stefano’s body, and that in the end, I thought, reduced his courtesy to a sort of hiding place from which to jump out unexpectedly.”

Mr. Gwyn (Alessandro Baricco, 2012)
“She went to Jasper Gwyn’s studio on the Underground, but she always got out one stop earlier, to walk a little before going in. On the street, she turned the key over and over in her hand. And that was her way of starting work.”

The Street Kids (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1955)
“Riccetto felt a gnawing inside, right in the middle, and decided to skip out on them all: he left through the empty church, but at the door he ran into his godfather, who said: ‘Hey, where you going?’ ‘Home,’ said Riccetto. ‘I’m hungry.’ ‘You’re coming to my house, you bastard,’ his godfather shouted after him, ‘there’s the lunch.’ But Riccetto paid no attention and ran off over the sun-baked asphalt. All Rome was a single roar: only up on the hill was there silence, but it was charged like a mine.”

The Periodic Table (Primo Levi, 1975)
“From the little I know of my forebears they resemble these gases. They were not all physically inert, because that was not granted to them: rather, they were, or had to be, fairly active, in order to earn a living and because of a dominant morality according to which ‘if you don’t work you don’t eat’; but inert they undoubtedly were in their depths, inclined to disinterested speculation, witty conversation, elegant, pedantic, and gratuitous discussion.”

In Other Words (Jhumpa Lahiri, 2015)
“I realize that in spite of the limitations the horizon is boundless. Reading in another language implies a perpetual state of growth, possibility. I know that my work, as a reader, as an apprentice of the language, will never end.”

Why do you feel being an academic could be a disadvantage for a translator?

I think in some cases academics tend to approach things from a particular point of view—whether historical or linguistic or theoretical or something else—which means that they are sometimes trying to satisfy requirements beyond those of conveying a piece of writing from one language to another, and that can get in the way of the writing. Not to say that I’m a great writer, but people underestimate the fact that a translator has to be a good writer in his or her own language, and I think that’s not necessarily the strong point of academics.

You talk about translating Primo Levi and the “dauntingness” of dealing, for instance, with the scientific terms that he often uses in his prose. Are there other specific issues you find particularly challenging when translating from Italian into English?

There are a number of things that are hard about it—that make trouble, I guess I should say. For one, Italian has gender, so the sentence structure is usually much more flexible. The verbs contain the pronouns—and a lot of information, actually, including the tense, the pronoun, the number—so they can move around the sentence to an extent that verbs can’t in English. The modifiers have to stay with their nouns, so sometimes, with a complicated Italian sentence, you have to break it up, because although in Italian its parts go together, in English you just can’t squeeze them in. And Italian sustains repetitions more easily than English. So you can use the same word a bunch of times in an Italian text, where in English it sounds awkward. Also, Italian has all those suffixes that change the nuance of a word: for example, la strada (the big street) and la stradina (the little street). If you keep saying “the big street” in English it sounds a little funny. A little childish. Those are a few of the difficulties.

You mentioned gender, and pardon the reductive nature of this question, but do you feel that being a female translator changes your relationship to the author depending on his or her gender?

I just think of it as writing. Every sentence—or even every word—is something that you have to figure out. So no, I’ve never actually thought of it as gendered. I think there are writers you feel closer to than others, but I don’t know that it’s a question of gender, although perhaps in the case of Ferrante it did help that I am female. And then there are, of course, little places where gender is an issue—in the beginning of My Brilliant Friend, someone who’d read my translation said to me, “In the original the name of the person is never mentioned in that passage—yet you mention it.” The reason I had for doing that was I had to somehow indicate that it was a female speaking, because in the Italian you already knew that. So there are lots of little things like that you have to slip in.

So readers give you a lot of feedback on your translations?

Oh, people do. You’d be surprised.

In a recent interview, you mentioned—speaking specifically about translating Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone—that in the process of translation, “you are so inside this person’s mind, inside his thoughts.” Can that be overwhelming, or even oppressive?

Zibaldone is a philosophical tome. It really is his thoughts, his ruminations about everything; it’s not, you know, “I looked out the window and saw this or that.” It’s about his reading, about his theories of language; he copies down quotations from different writers. So in that case you really are almost literally inside his head—his mind.

But is it similar when you’re working on something that’s not that intensely philosophical or ruminative?

You are still in the person’s head. You want to be in his or her head. When you’re working in a writer’s language, you really have to be in his mind.

You’ve said before you sometimes like to toggle between two translations at once.

I do, actually. I think it started as a necessity because I had too much work. [Laughs.] But then I convinced myself that it was actually a good thing because sometimes one person’s use of a word reinforces, or lets you into, somebody else’s use of the word. Or you just see different ways that people use words. There are different writing states. So yes, I’ve decided it’s helpful. You can still be immersed in one person’s mind even if then you go and get immersed in somebody else’s mind. I think that they reinforce rather than detract from one another. Anyway, that’s my idea.

Can you walk us through your process for a typical translation?

I do a first draft very quickly. I may look up words, but I wouldn’t stop to figure out complex stuff. I really just want to get through it. Then, in the second draft, I try to solve the major problems. And then I often do something that I’ve since discovered a lot of translators do, and probably writers, too: putting a choice of different words into the draft that I can pick from—or use as starting points—later on. And sometimes I put the Italian in, just to remind myself of the original wording. But in that second draft I try to solve a lot of those things, especially the larger issues. And then third draft, fourth draft, fifth draft, maybe. I just keep refining.

What are your specific translation tools?

I use a lot of different dictionaries. When I started, obviously, there wasn’t the Internet, but now there’s an incredible amount of stuff online. Endless numbers of regular dictionaries, because, you know, different dictionaries say different things. Then there are dialect dictionaries, which are very useful in Italian. There are some slang dictionaries, although the online ones are not that great. There’s also a site called Word Reference, which has a discussion forum, so sometimes you can find stuff there. I’ve never actually joined it, or asked a question, but I suppose I could. Apart from words, you can also find a lot of information on the Internet—it was very helpful, for example, with the scientific terms in Primo Levi. And then I have people whom I consult.

Italian people?

Yes, usually Italian.

So with that first draft, are you literally typing as you read? And if that’s the case, do you often not know how a particular novel or story is going to end?

Well, that depends. Usually I would have read the book first. But lately that’s not been the case. For example, the Elena Ferrante books were on such a tight schedule: You know, she was just finishing writing them and they had to be translated in a pretty short turnaround time. The last three Ferrante novels I translated as I read. It’s kind of an interesting way to translate. It’s much more like you’re in real time with what’s happening in the book. You’re much more with the character, I would say, in an interesting way. I don’t know that it has an effect on the translation, because ultimately of course you’re still going to go back and read it many times, but for the first draft, I think there’s something exciting about that approach. You also go pretty quickly because you want to find out what happens. [Laughs.] But sometimes you want to go more slowly, if only to make sure you’ve fully understood something.

And when you translate without reading the book first, does it mean there’s more recalibration in later drafts once you realize where the story is heading?

That’s always true. But another thing about the Ferrante books is that when the first one came out I hadn’t read the final one. So I don’t know if I would have done some things differently or not. The Zibaldone is the opposite example, in which there were so many concepts that were set—certain words were meant to be translated certain ways. But then, when the editors went over everything at the end, they sometimes changed their minds and redid the whole. But that was a scholarly project.
   A kid recently told me that there are programs that will tell you how you translated a word in every instance in a book. I mean, I guess you could do that yourself, but it would be pretty tedious. And I don’t know, I feel that somehow you’re probably losing something—the way some people say that something is lost when you write on a computer.

How do you type your drafts, by the way?

On the computer. And then I print them out after maybe the third draft. And I do a read on paper, because you see a lot of things on paper that you don’t see on a computer screen.

That sounds like a New Yorker copy editor speaking.

Yes, I guess so. Because we still do work on paper.

How long, generally, does it take you to translate one page?

I actually just noticed with something I’m working on now—a new translation of Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees—that even on the first draft it’s five pages in an hour. Something like that. Pretty slow. Maybe that’s especially slow.

Do you find that you’re always drawn to one particular character?

If there’s a first-person narrator, I think it’s almost impossible to not have some feeling about being that person. When you read a book, it’s the same thing. I’m always convinced by the first-person narrator: I just take that point of view, somehow. I guess if there’s not a first person, there’s probably some character I identify with. But I don’t think it’s relevant to the process of translation.

From what I understand you’ve never had any direct interaction, even via email, with Elena Ferrante. You’ve also translated a number of works by dead authors; does it somehow seem like the same thing?

Yes, in a way. I guess there is a difference in the fact that the dead author can’t read the translation, whereas the living author can. I think that Ferrante did read my first translation, and maybe some of the other early ones, so I had a feeling that somebody was looking at what I was doing who cared about how it came out. I believe that Ferrante reads English, so I presume she knows whether she liked it or not. I probably could have emailed her directly. But it’s true, I never would have worked with her closely in any case. With the later books, she’s been more accessible—and who knows what will happen now?

Are you confident that Anita Raja is the real Ferrante?

I have no idea. I don’t know. No one has said anything—confirmed or denied, not the publishers nor Raja herself. I’ve never known who Ferrante was—as far as I know, no one does, except for the publishers.

It seems like such an elegant way to deal with literary celebrity on some level.

I know. But people are now saying, “Well, she gave all these interviews; therefore she’s already compromised.” Or the fact that she’s now published Frantumaglia, a collection of letters, essays, and interviews. But that feels like hairsplitting, in a not-useful way. In a gotcha way.

You talk about “not wanting to be there” for some of the more intense scenes in her books. Does dealing with unpleasant or disturbing passages in prose make the translation process harder?

It means, at least for me, that I can’t go over it too many times in a row. I have to get up and walk away from it. That’s also true of some of Levi—especially the concentration-camp passages, of course. These kinds of things are upsetting, so it’s hard to stay with them on that level of having to get the words—the sense of them, of the whole passage—right. But if it’s uncomfortable in the original, of course it should be uncomfortable in English. You have to put up with it, as the translator who has to read it a hundred times. You try to get it right, however distressing. But it can be hard.

I’m also thinking of those incredibly intense sexual scenes in Petrolio, in which he describes each partner’s genitalia in such insane detail.

Yes. That was difficult, in many ways. [Laughs.] And it was so early, so I didn’t have much experience translating sex scenes into English—which I have since come to have many experiences with. People accuse me of being “proper” in my translations of these kinds of scenes, but, the Italians, at least in the books I’ve translated, don’t use a lot of slangy or really “dirty” words. They’re graphic but they’re very particular: The body parts are the body parts. And in the Pasolini, in a way, that’s at least partly the point. It’s meant to be brutal, and there’s a kind of brutality in just using the physical, plain words.

Do you think one must have a good intuition about others—to be a “people person,” in a sense—to understand and translate what they’re trying to communicate as authors?

I don’t know. When I worked on Petrolio, as I already mentioned, I read a lot about Pasolini. I looked at many of the movies, I read the earlier novels, I read several biographies. I read a lot about him. So in that case I really studied him, partly because I really wanted to know him. And honestly I became a little obsessed with him, which is easy to do. And because that book is so weird and fragmentary, I wanted to at least imagine that I knew something about the personality of the writer. It was sort of the opposite with Ferrante. In her case, there was really nothing to go on. Normally I don’t try to find out about the writer. It’s really about the text.

It must be odd on some level to become the voice of Ferrante not only to all English-language readers of the book but also in a very public way.

I’m careful to say, “I’m not Ferrante, and I can hardly speak for her, but I can speak about her books.” So yes, I guess I’m a voice of the books. And it’s completely strange; it’s not anything that in a million years I thought I would ever be or do. So it’s an odd role. I started doing it, I think, because I felt an obligation to the books. I thought, especially with the earlier, lesser-known ones, that they were really wonderful books, and that she was a great writer, and I wanted to promote her work. And people like to talk about her books, which is also really interesting. So I felt some responsibility to them—not to mention to the publishers, of course.

I guess one silver lining is that quite a bit of attention has been brought to translators and translating.

I think that’s an important element. It means that translation becomes important. People now pay attention to the fact that books are translated—that there is not only the author but another person behind the book they are reading—so it’s good for all translators. Even in the past few years, translation has gotten a lot more attention, so I’m thrilled about that. Translators should be recognized.

You’ve also done a fair amount of editing of other translators’ work for books like The Complete Works of Primo Levi. Did you find that the “voices” of Levi were very different depending on the translator?

I don’t think they were that different, but I had certain criteria of what I might call faithfulness to the text, so when they were different, I tried to make them less so.

There’s the copy editor coming through!

Yes, exactly. I guess I tried to make everybody sound like me. [Laughs.] But seriously, as far as I can tell, I think it worked pretty well.

Is it easier to copyedit translations than it is to copyedit English-language authors?

It depends, but, generally speaking, copyediting translations is more difficult. There are different kinds of problems that you run into. You come upon things where you’re not sure if there’s an issue with the translation or if there’s something weird in the original. And sometimes, of course, you have to give up something that’s weird in the original because it’s just too weird in English. Then, there’s the whole question of slang, or dialect—that’s the worst example.

Have you translated much dialect?

No. Ferrante doesn’t write in dialect, thank goodness. But Pasolini’s Ragazzi di vita [The Street Kids] has a lot of dialect—and in fact it’s not even exactly Roman dialect; it’s Pasolini’s version of Roman dialect. That was hard. I asked a lot of people about it—including a lot of Romans. But I didn’t translate it into a dialect or accent in English. There really isn’t an equivalent. My solution was to try to make the parts in dialect—which were mostly dialogue—“slangier.” But that’s a really hard issue. There are people who have theories about it. I don’t know, it seemed to me that a reader would be put off by a line of dialogue spoken by a street kid in Rome that came out in, say, a Southern accent. The BBC did a dramatization of the Neapolitan novels. Someone wrote a play based on each of the novels, and it was decided to use North of England accents for the little girls. To me, that’s weird—it sounded weird.

Has someone purchased the film rights for Ferrante’s novels?

Yes, an Italian film company in combination with RAI is doing a TV series, eight parts for each book. I believe they’re trying to co-produce it in English. But I don’t know who is going to direct or produce. A very good Italian novelist and screenwriter, Francesco Piccolo, is doing the screenplay. And I think that Ferrante has some kind of say in it.

You’ve mentioned never wanting to translate poetry; you said elsewhere that prose is “more grounded.”

There might be different ways to translate a prose sentence, but, basically, there’s only one meaning there. I probably shouldn’t say something like that. But it seems to me that, however unstraightforward it may be, it’s still straightforward: It’s one unit, somehow. The sentence is grounded in a paragraph, and it has a definite grammatical, syntactical relationship to the sentences around it. In a poem, the words could have many relationships to the words around them. And even if you were to do a literal translation of a poem, you might not have the right literary translation. Whereas in prose I think you can feel a little more confident that the words are part of a whole, somehow.

You mentioned in an earlier interview that a translator is like an actor interpreting a role, or a performer singing a piece of music.

That’s actually a quote from Cesare Garboli, from an essay of his, which Domenico Scarpa and I included in the book In un’altra lingua (Einaudi, 2016). It’s worth quoting in full: “To translate is to be an actor. The same attitude, the same condition of the spirit that leads us, institutionally, to perform, to create theater, to physically breathe the life of another. And, as it happens in the theater, there are amateur translators, professionals, touring companies, repertory groups. There is the commercial cooperative that translates mystery books, or the one signed up for the latest best seller. There is the refined translator and the colloquial, the lead and the walk-on. And there is, finally, the translator of genius: the great actor. He is the actor who has understood that, to be a great actor, it’s enough to believe blindly in one’s own lines, nothing else is needed.”