8 April 2009

Entry 22

The edit

In the week since I delivered the translation to Arcadia, it has had its first and most substantial edit; following this, it has now just been returned to me with queries. But the edit process for a translation is different from the edit process for an original-language text, though. This is essentially because one crucial stage is entirely missing.

You see, if I had written a novel I would be sending it in first-draft form to the publisher now, and my editor – probably the person who had commissioned it – would be in a position to make some pretty substantial comments. Chapter 17 isn’t very interesting. You should expand the character of the lion-tamer. The ending with the failing parachute is very funny, but that whole section doesn’t really link together yet. Consider cutting the dining-room scene (not funny); and maybe add a little to the dog-walking sequence in chapter 21, which is quite good but could be expanded a bit so it’s not so lost between the much stronger hen-party and the Bible-salesmen vignettes. And have you thought the heroine should perhaps be a man instead? Or the whole thing might be narrated by Monty’s fish?

And then, when I had dutifully rewritten according to the editor’s suggestions – or bravely argued that what I’ve done is better – only then would we get down to the copyedit, the line-by-line edit-and-polish.

With a translation it’s different. The text – which has already been edited and published in other languages – may be a translator’s first draft but is still considered fundamentally a stable thing, not a negotiable one (the plot / characters / sequence / dialogue / scenes / themes / paragraphs are fixed now just as they are, as they were at first publication, and neither the new publisher not the translator can / should do anything about that). So the first sight the publishers get of the translation it goes straight into the line-by-line edit.

So that’s what’s been happening. Angeline has been through the text this week, reading it to see if it makes sense, to see if it sounds good, standardising things to the publisher’s norms (single or double quotes, UK or US spelling, etc), correcting things that are just wrong (any typos that have slipped through my own reading, spelling mistakes …), and raising with me any queries that come up during this polishing-up process. In one case I’m deferring to the author to solve a query I can’t answer myself (I’ve just emailed JEA tonight to ask him – aseptic or ascetic?), but otherwise he has no part to play in this process. Indeed, unless he particularly wants to look at proofs, he has nothing to do but wait for the finished copy to turn up through his letterbox.

I’ve only had the briefest of scans over the main edited text itself, but Angeline has said she thought it read well and seems to have amended only with a very light touch (which I appreciate, obviously).

And once that light-touch edit was done, there were a total of twenty-something queries left for me to answer. They range from pointing out little things that sound odd (a word repeated within a couple of lines, perhaps) that I simply hadn’t noticed; to suggesting slight improvements (this word is OK, but maybe that word would be better?; in this case relating to that pesky breast adjective again); to a question along the lines of ‘Just checking, did you really mean this?’; to a slightly more dubious ‘Something seems not quite right here …’ when I’ve inexplicably missed some words out entirely …

Angeline is the book’s first reader, so if a line isn’t clear to her (it’s not clear whom the locusts are fighting, exactly …) that’s a good enough reason to consider changing it. More often than not her suggestions to rewrite involve tiny changes that make a disproportionately big difference (add a comma here, change ‘could’ to ‘must’ there) and then it’s easy enough for me to see that what she’s suggesting is clearly an improvement. Occasionally I’ll defend what I’ve done, usually justifying it by returning to the original (yes, I know it’s a bit odd, but the comma’s definitely correct here – it’s definitely meant to be ‘dark, red’, rather than ‘dark red’).

Anyway, all extremely straightforward. Responding to all the queries took perhaps half an hour. And that’s it – Angeline will incorporate the answers, including the one I expect from JEA tomorrow, and we may then exchange thoughts on a couple of things not quite resolved (there’s a word I’ve used that doesn’t actually exist, and she – quite unreasonably – wants me to stick to real words, and we may go another round over that one); but that’s it – off to the typesetters it will go next week. Next stage, proofreading.

PS Thanks to the person who emailed me to say how much he loved the jacket design; I won’t mention his name here because I want to be able to say (without getting anyone into trouble) that he also commented that the jacket design of his own new book (he’s a translator) is much less attractive, and that even after some struggles with his publishers to change it. (He sent a couple of versions and I quite agree.) I think Agualusa and I both know how lucky we are. And I’m very glad you like it too.

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Estação das Chuvas © José Eduardo Agualusa
English translation © Daniel Hahn