These days, I edit fiction in my spare time. A few months ago, a kind friend passed my resume on to one of his kind friends, who just happened to work in a senior position in a publishing company. The friend-of-friend must have been pleased with me, for I soon received a manuscript to edit. Which brings me to this evening and the work at hand.
I sit for several hours at a time and work very slowly still, though I am now significantly faster than when I first started. The manuscript is a short novel, originally written in Malayalam, now on its way to appearing in print in an English translation for the very first time. I found it a bit patchy when I first read it, but now, as I edit, it seems, if not a work of genius, at least a very finely balanced piece of work, which has been lucky enough to fall into the hands of a careful yet excited translator.
I worry constantly about my edit. It is hard enough to edit somebody else's work -- it is harder still to edit somebody else's work of fiction, and harder yet to edit somebody's work of fiction that has been translated by yet another somebody else. The author sits at one end of the line, the translator sits somewhere in the middle, I sit at the other end. We all hold a string that moves through our nervous, twitching hands, and sometimes, it is certain, we misinterpret each other completely.
I cannot know if the language of the translation was really intended to mirror the sense of apathy and fatalism that gloats from the first to the last page of the novel, but it seems to. I cannot know what the tone of the author's language was, because I do not speak Malayalam. Then a passage of great passion and yet great misery comes along, and I wonder if the feeling has come in because of the translator or if it was there within the author's text. As I edit, I add words and wonder whether the original Malayalam held the same shades of meaning my additions bring. Oddly enough, I rarely delete any words -- I only change them and know that in bringing in what I see as a more appropriate word, I am also making endless judgments about meaning and tone and voice. I do that everyday at my day job, but it is far simpler with a research paper. The meaning of that is evident; there is a logical argument to cling to. Fiction is terrifying.
I sit for several hours at a time and work very slowly still, though I am now significantly faster than when I first started. The manuscript is a short novel, originally written in Malayalam, now on its way to appearing in print in an English translation for the very first time. I found it a bit patchy when I first read it, but now, as I edit, it seems, if not a work of genius, at least a very finely balanced piece of work, which has been lucky enough to fall into the hands of a careful yet excited translator.
I worry constantly about my edit. It is hard enough to edit somebody else's work -- it is harder still to edit somebody else's work of fiction, and harder yet to edit somebody's work of fiction that has been translated by yet another somebody else. The author sits at one end of the line, the translator sits somewhere in the middle, I sit at the other end. We all hold a string that moves through our nervous, twitching hands, and sometimes, it is certain, we misinterpret each other completely.
I cannot know if the language of the translation was really intended to mirror the sense of apathy and fatalism that gloats from the first to the last page of the novel, but it seems to. I cannot know what the tone of the author's language was, because I do not speak Malayalam. Then a passage of great passion and yet great misery comes along, and I wonder if the feeling has come in because of the translator or if it was there within the author's text. As I edit, I add words and wonder whether the original Malayalam held the same shades of meaning my additions bring. Oddly enough, I rarely delete any words -- I only change them and know that in bringing in what I see as a more appropriate word, I am also making endless judgments about meaning and tone and voice. I do that everyday at my day job, but it is far simpler with a research paper. The meaning of that is evident; there is a logical argument to cling to. Fiction is terrifying.
At first I was afraid to delete anything. Now I remove whole sentences, growing more confident as the chief editor urges me to think of the reader alone. My awe of the author changes to a desire to simply make the book as good as it can be without any substantial changes, and I grow impatient with what sometimes seems like unnecessary verbosity. Then, in a page, I begin to wonder again about whether the verbosity is the translator's or the author's, and run back to the last major edit to restore it to something as close to what I surmise the author, twice-removed from my pencil, intended.
Sometimes I catch a glimpse of an effect that was subtle in Malayalam but is as nothing in English. I am forced to consider how another language -- and one I do not know at all -- might possibly express its meaning, forced to guess at what the author and then the translator saw, expressed, and understood in that language. At other times, I just forge on ahead as though it is my book alone and I have to consider nobody else. This is not an uneven way of working -- it is actually producing a fairly good edit. It is indeed our book, not just the author's or just the translator's or just mine; how could I ever edit it if was only looking around to see what the other two were saying, or if, equally, I never looked around?
It is a traumatic, intense experience -- and I can only imagine how much worse it must seem to anyone who falls in love with what they are reading. I have saved myself from that at least.
At times like this, it behooves me to remember and smile wryly at what the non-editor boss of an editor friend used to say about her work; it was, he said, of no great consequence, practically dispensible, just "some small English." I would not be surprised if my author and translator said exactly that. Being able to smile at the ungrateful is half of my job, being able to feel that the work thanks you in its reaching for its own favoured sort of perfection.
5 comments:
You work is erily like playing the God(dess) of Literature. Remember that with great power comes great responsibility!
Gulp. Don't say the "r" word!
Just stumbled on your blog scribblerji :) Good stuff - Will be back for more!
Thank you so much for the kind words, WRT bluecabbage. Old Goa was mentioned, albeit in brief.
Bikerdude, thanks! Nice to see you here. I apologize for the lack of bosomy ladies in drawings. :P
Hopposaur, you're very welcome--'twas good to read. :)
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