<\/strong><\/p>\n Ann\u00a0Goldstein\u00a0knows the works of Elena Ferrante intimately \u2013 perhaps more than anyone else in the English-speaking world \u2013 but she doesn\u2019t have any great desire to meet her.\u00a0Goldstein\u00a0is the literary translator who has brought the Italian author\u2019s novels, most famously the Neapolitan Quartet, to Anglophone audiences. In English, like in the original Italian, they have become bestsellers. Ferrante is beloved for\u00a0her truthful depictions of adolescent friendship and the pains of womanhood. But \u201cElena Ferrante\u201d is a pseudonym: the identity of the author is not known to the public, despite numerous attempts to discover her.<\/p>\n Goldstein\u00a0communicates with Ferrante via her Italian publisher. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t really bother me, not to speak to her directly,\u201d she said over Zoom from her book-laden apartment in Greenwich Village, New York City. \u201cThe person who writes the books is the person I know, whoever that person is, the consciousness that\u2019s writing the books is someone that I have a dialogue with.\u201d She giggled, as she did frequently, despite being about to say something she must have insisted many times before. \u201cAnd \u2013 by the way \u2013 I don\u2019t know who she is. And it\u2019s not me.\u201d<\/p>\n Goldstein\u00a0was born in 1949 and grew up in New Jersey.\u00a0She\u00a0has been translating Italian literature into English since the early 1990s and spent the bulk of her career working in the copy department at the\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>, which she joined in 1974. In the late 1980s she became the head of the department, overseeing copyediting and proof-reading. She had studied ancient Greek at university,\u00a0and can read French\u00a0\u201cpretty well\u201d,\u00a0but it was with\u00a0New Yorker\u00a0<\/em>colleagues that she first learned Italian. Over three successive years the group read the trio of books comprising Dante\u2019s\u00a0Divine Comedy<\/em>.\u00a0Goldstein\u00a0was in her late thirties at the time; it is more difficult to learn a language later in life. \u201cYou don\u2019t get the same facility, the same kind of fluency, as if you were a child,\u201d she said, \u201cbut you can do something.\u201d<\/p>\n She retired from the magazine in 2017 and has since pursued translation. She still abides by the many grammatical rules instilled in her by four decades at the\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0(\u201cthings like the serial comma or the Oxford comma \u2013 nobody seems to use that any more, which is ridiculous, because it\u2019s so clarifying\u201d). The two halves of her career are distinct yet overlapping. \u201cI do think that proofreading, copy-editing, editing, they have to do with an attention to detail, and of course translation is all about attention to detail. It\u2019s attention to particular words, to sentences, and how words work in a sentence. It\u2019s about getting everything as right as you can, or what you think of as right, from the way the word is spelled \u2013 and we might have a difference of opinion about that,\u201d that amused her, \u201cto the way it\u2019s used.\u201d<\/p>\n Goldstein\u00a0spoke\u00a0knowingly\u00a0about her own language (\u201cspelled\u201d could of course be \u201cspelt\u201d) and regularly corrected herself, as though always in pursuit of the most precise way of conveying her meaning. She wore a grey V-neck jumper, dangly silver earrings and thick-rimmed glasses \u2013 above which her eyebrows often appeared, jumping up in excitement as she furrowed her brow in concentration and then quickly released it.<\/p>\n Her most recent translation is of\u00a0Forbidden Notebook<\/em>\u00a0by\u00a0Alba de C\u00e9spedes. First published in Italy in the 1950s, the novel comprises a series of diary entries by Valeria Cossati, who secretly writes of her deep dissatisfaction with her life in post-war Rome. \u201cI was struck by the fact that it seems \u2013 it\u2019s a little bit clich\u00e9 to say this \u2013 but it seems so contemporary. It seems like she\u2019s dealing with the same problems that women have now, or have had since then. This was 70 years ago. The daily struggles are different, but the psychological struggles are so similar.\u201d<\/p>\n The book is also being republished in Italy, where it has been out of print for decades. It marks a \u201crediscovery\u201d, a reassertion of an author who was successful in her lifetime, but whom the patriarchal cultural memory has forgotten. It was in Ferrante\u2019s\u00a0Frantumaglia<\/em>, a collection of letters, essays and interviews that\u00a0Goldstein\u00a0translated into English, that she first learnt of de C\u00e9spedes, whose life was remarkable by any standard \u2013 and of particular interest to the translator, who is fascinated by wartime and postwar Italy.<\/p>\n De C\u00e9spedes was the granddaughter of Carlos Manuel de C\u00e9spedes, who\u00a0led Cuba\u2019s revolt for independence from Spain and then served as its first president. She was born in Rome, married when she was 15 and had a child aged 17. In 1943 she and her second husband fled to escape the Nazis\u2019 occupation of the capital. \u201cSo they spent a month hiding in the woods in Abruzzo!\u201d\u00a0Goldstein\u00a0explained, wide-eyed. \u201cShe wrote a diary \u2013 there\u2019s a little diary that I translated that I\u2019m trying to get published. It\u2019s amazing. I don\u2019t know how she wrote it, but she did, just about being in the woods, and they were slowly being more and more closely surrounded by the Germans. It\u2019s pretty dramatic. She had a wild life!\u201d<\/p>\n Goldstein\u2019s enthusiasm for her authors \u2013 and for her part in the \u201crediscovery\u201d project of an author such as\u00a0de C\u00e9spedes\u00a0\u2013 is evident. The thematic similarity between\u00a0Forbidden Notebook\u00a0<\/em>and many of Ferrante\u2019s works is, she said, a coincidence. \u201cBut I do like novels about women \u2013 I guess. Though not exclusively. I have done a lot more [books by] women, especially first person narrator women. There\u2019s something about it that is particularly congenial.\u201d She stopped herself. \u201cBut I\u2019m always interested in anything!\u201d<\/p>\n She could not, however, explain exactly what she looks for in literature she might translate. She prefers books that are set in Italy, but beyond that \u2013 \u201cI don\u2019t really look for anything. Most books, even if they ostensibly don\u2019t seem interesting, end up being interesting for one reason or another, either for translation issues or language issues.\u201d<\/p>\n She doesn\u2019t see herself as a writer as such \u2013 \u201cI mean, I\u2019m not writing anything of my own\u201d \u2013 and aligns herself instead with the critic\u00a0Cesare Garboli, who wrote: \u201cTo translate is to be an actor.\u201d \u201cThe actor is performing,\u201d\u00a0Goldstein\u00a0said. \u201cIt\u2019s only once, it\u2019s his own personal performance, and nobody else can do the same thing.\u201d Translation\u00a0is also, she said, \u201ca puzzle. You\u2019re solving puzzles all the time. But in order to solve them, you have to interpret.\u201d\u00a0And of course there is never just one answer.<\/p>\n For a long time those critiquing the publishing industry spoke of the \u201c3 per cent problem\u201d \u2013 that just 3 per cent of books sold in English were in translation.\u00a0(The statistic has been cited for both the UK and the US.)\u00a0In the 30 years Goldstein\u00a0has been translating, she has seen that\u00a0number grow. \u201cThere\u2019s definitely more openness to translations,\u201d she said, citing the proliferation of small presses, including New Directions and Archipelago Books in the US, as leading the charge. \u201cThe Ferrante phenomenon\u201d \u2013 as she described it \u2013 has helped translators receive the credit they deserve. \u201cBecause there\u2019s no author, it made people more aware of the fact that there\u2019s a translator involved in the book.\u201d<\/p>\n Goldstein\u00a0has a personal fascination with Italian culture, but also sees a moral pursuit in reading in translation. \u201cIt opens you up to other cultures. We\u2019re all very \u2013 well, especially in America \u2013 we\u2019re so inward-facing, we\u2019re so solipsistic,\u201d she punctuated her pause with a laugh. \u201cOr, what\u2019s the word! I mean, that\u2019s one word. People don\u2019t attend to other cultures. They don\u2019t pay attention, and they don\u2019t want to learn anything. They don\u2019t want to understand how other people might think, how their neighbours might think. It\u2019s just, the more you know, the better it is. The broader your sense of the world \u2013 it can\u2019t help but make you a better person.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The editor and translator who brought Elena Ferrante\u2019s Neapolitan Quartet into English on language and the importance of reading widely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":8190,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[127],"tags":[307,297],"class_list":["post-8189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-curiosidades","tag-books","tag-translation"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globaltranslations.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globaltranslations.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globaltranslations.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globaltranslations.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globaltranslations.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globaltranslations.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8189\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globaltranslations.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globaltranslations.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globaltranslations.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globaltranslations.com.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}This article was first published at The New Statesman<\/a>, on February 24, 2023.<\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"