 I think we're going to get started with our editing translation panel. You guys can read all the descriptions of everyone that buys in the back, but I'll just introduce you. We have Anna Rosenwand, David Shuck, Chris Bishbach, and Kaya Straumanis from Phony Media, Copy House Press, and Open Letter. And the purpose of this panel, this came about after... Answer it! Answer it! Answer it! Answer it! It's a translator calling it the editing question, probably. This came about because last spring at the New German Literature Festival in New York, Sal Robinson, who used to work at Hartcourt with Drinke Willen and worked at Melva House and is now like freelancing and in school, she set up this panel that I was trying to emulate here in which she brought together three translators and their editors to talk about very specific works that they had edited. So we had one of a... We did a book, a huge anthology called A Thousand Forests and One Acorn, of all Spanish language writing, and one of the people who had translated one of the pieces in there spoke with me about how we had to find the right word choices, how we had to change all the punctuation to make this particular story work. And Michael Reynolds was there talking with Tim Moore about how Michael absolutely insists that he will not change anything in text, like any errors or things that you want to shift or do differently. He's very opposed to that, and it ended up being a really fascinating conversation and something that a lot of the people that attended had never really had experience with. They had never been edited in that way. They never thought about the process of how editing a translation differs from editing text that was written in English, how foreign editor will go or won't go, where the limits were. And so I thought that that would be something that would be of interest to people here at Ulta as well. So we tried to replicate that. But a few minor differences, one being that Chris and Kaia don't have their translators with them. So we get to sort of fill in for them, although Heather Cleary is in the audience and has worked with Kaia. She has worked with Kaia in a few books and can sort of talk to that from the back. Also, I do want this to be, I will go through and have questions for each one of the pairings, I guess, or the panelists. But I do think that we should open it up too. So any time that you guys have a question or want to know something or have an opinion, feel free to speak up. I think that this should be more of a roundtable and a discussion about editing translations rather than us explaining and pitching things. So let's start with you guys, David and Anna. They recently, instead of been last spring, published diorama by Rocio Serone, which ended up winning a collection of poetry and it won the Best Translate Book Award for poetry, which congratulations again to both of you. Yeah, absolutely. And so I thought it would be good if you guys talk for a minute about how you two work together on this. You're the one that's representing poetry up here too, which is always a little bit different, I think, to people like me, who I only work with fiction. I never edit poetry and I don't even know, I would have questions to myself about what I would be doing as an editor of a book of poetry. So if you want to talk for a bit about your experience and how you two work together, that'd be great. Yeah, I don't want to make Anna blush so early in the panel, but I think the translation of diorama as it came to me was one of the cleanest manuscripts I'd ever seen. I think I was pulling up some of our conversations and some of the early typesets of this book in preparation for this and I was kind of disappointed. There wasn't more to talk about, but I think that speaks to the quality of the book. I did find a funny email and I remember writing it because I was a little nervous, but I had thought that, and if you see diorama, which is available at the book show, if it's still available, it may be sold out. Hurry. Rush over there after this. The coffee will still be there and I felt like the poem in some sense was the pacing was so important that I didn't want to interrupt it with facing pages and I wrote this kind of very long email to basically propose the idea to Rocio and Anna, suggesting that we put the whole translation into English first, followed by the entire poem in Spanish. Anna, of course, she wrote me from Cusco, in fact, I see, and she was totally in favor of it. And I'll step in to say that facing pages have their place and are sometimes really interesting, but I had always been squeamish about them and felt sort of empowered by a conversation that I had with Pura López Colomé who told me that she didn't allow anyone to publish her in El Fos Edición because she felt that it made a spectacle of the translation work in a way that was counterproductive to people focusing on her poetry and on the translation as the poetry of the translation that her translator, Forest Gander, would do and that she felt that anyone who was interested in looking at it in a scholarly way or in studying and needed to be looking at minute differences could certainly flip back and forth, but she wanted the poetry to stand. So I was thrilled that I didn't, I had been planning, I had been gearing up to fight for that. And when David said, is it all right with you, can we do that? That sounds good. Let's do that. That was a lot of wasted anxiety. In terms of edits to the manuscript, in this case, because I speak and read and translate from the Spanish, I did have a few small questions. I remember one question about a blueberry chocolate chip muffin and that was originally a chocolate chip muffin with blueberries, I think. So the edits in this book were really, it was a bit loud, but there were three instances of that, basically, and then in the translator's preface, which I think is awesome, I highly recommend it to you. Even if you don't want to buy the book, you can read the preface for free in the bookstore. And then kind of, you know, like one funny thing I noticed was updating the name of the drug lozam to lorazepam, which is, you know, they're both accurate in English, but lorazepam is a little more common. I typically, especially in poetry, you know, I tell my translators, if you feel really strongly about a decision that I'm questioning, explain it to me. And odds are, I will accept your reasoning. And I think that, I'm going to surmise that part of the reason that we didn't have a very involved editing process was because this was such a dense language-y text, right? And I edit fiction, actually, the way I make money is not translating like many of us haven't figured out how to make very much money doing that, but I edit novels, substantive and developmental editing, and a lot of them translated, and make all manner of changes. I mean, rewrite the things, and I think a lot about the translators, and I work with the translators and how terrified I would be to be subjected to my editing. But I think it's very different because it's fiction. And when I've edited poetry, especially very sort of dense language-y poetry, it's all so carefully, and why it was so clean, partly because I'm an editor, maybe, and partly because when you're laboring over every word and line break that way in, you know, experimental or difficult poetry, there aren't going to be a lot of sort of errors that got alighted because you were just going with the flow of the story, or when there's something like the blueberry chocolate chip muffin probably spent time thinking or even talking to the author about like, well, you know, is it meant to be primarily a blueberry muffin? Because in this strange political metaphor she's got going on, am I supposed to read the blueberries as something, you know, and so I think, and the fact that David had already chosen this book before I got involved, this wasn't something that I was pitching. So we were already seeing this book as it was and had a similar vision for how to understand it. And so I think because of that, all these things were syncing up in a way that it didn't make as much sense because I already knew what I was doing. And I think that's very true to my experience too for a number of reasons. You know, the most recent novel we published, which is about 220 pages, I think, I was looking over the track changes and comments that I'd made, that our copy editor and proofreader had made. There's something in the range of 6,500 compared to the 47 notes I see on this book, which are mostly notes for the type setter. How do you, could you articulate your approach at how it's different for the fiction when you're editing that and why you end up with so many more? Is there something that you feel more free in editing fiction or? I think there is a sense of that. One, there's, I think I feel more committed to a compelling or propulsive narrative and that's very, very much a priority when editing fiction. I also think part of it is just the way that translators of poetry work. You know, most of the poetry manuscripts I'm seeing are things that a lot of times poets have been working on for five years or more. You know, like they've had a lot of time to do a lot of the editing themselves. That's very nice. And it's an audience issue, right? I mean, well, a lot of the fiction that press like phoneme and what David's interested in is more literary and more experimental, but nonetheless, you're looking at a broader audience and in terms of the stuff that I work on, editing, sometimes a very, very broad audience. And so you have to be thinking a lot more about how it's playing. And you know, something like this, if we're looking at the spectrum of bringing readers to authors or texts or texts, right, you're really so embedded in the language, when it's practically language poetry. But if you're thinking about story and it's a whole different, I think it makes sense to do so much more editing on that kind of text. This is a question that can actually lead into your story too, Chris, is so when you're talking about editing the fiction, how much are you willing to change the original book when you're editing the translation? Like what is your limit? Do you feel comfortable with that? Do you tend to not? And this is a question for you initially, David, but I know that Chris's story about Valeria Luiselli's book really kind of falls into that same idea. Yeah, so I venture into public or editing translation very naively. And it turns out that by starting with Valeria Luiselli, she's very interested in messing with and ignoring conventions around translation and publishing. And international boundaries. So I'm not necessarily being trained well, but it's a very fun. So she works very closely with Christina McSweeney. Story of My Teeth was published by Sexto Piso. And then Christina did two drafts working closely with Valeria and then sent me the English version. Now, I met with Valeria in New York and she told me that she's studying comparative literature at Columbia. So she's also extremely fluent and wrote her thesis in English as well. So she could have written the entire book in English, but she wrote in Spanish. And so she became very interested in her studies and what she's described as the Anglo-American editor-author relationship. And that was something that she wanted to experiment with. And so she wanted me to feel very free to make any kind of recommendation that I wanted with the book. And that she also had some ideas that she wanted to change in restructure. And I said, first of all, well, is Eduardo okay with that? At Sexto Piso, and she's like, yes, that's fine. And I found out this year, it's Frankfurt that actually what she does with him is she has different, as her other books are translated, she makes changes. And then she goes back to him every time and saying that she wants to make changes to the original Spanish. But he says, let me think about it for a minute. No. But so we went through, and then she didn't want me to work directly with Christina. I mean, I could talk to her, it wasn't like a gag order. But she wanted our relationship to be the relationship. And then she would work very closely with Christina. And they would talk about my suggestions and her suggestions. And then Christina would enter the changes and send me the text back. So there was quite a lot of restructuring that went on between the Spanish edition and the US edition. I personally, so my experience and my own kind of theory and thoughts about translation is that as long as the author and translator are okay with it, I would prefer to make as many suggestions as I feel I want to, as if it was just an original English text and let them sort it out. I mean, they can come back to me with questions and stuff, but it's like that's just how I prefer to work, I think. And so I would actually look for more projects where that would be the case. And so probably not doing any dead authors. Probably, well, probably not, unless I really like it. But in which case, yeah, then it would be, I would have to just accept it. That's why it's not, so if it's a dead author, do you feel like that? That then, if the author can't be involved, the changes shouldn't be as drastic. For sure. That's what I think. And that's when we sort of reanimate the issue of the author and the authority and where we're getting our authority to make changes, right? And so even the most liberal minded of us as translators who think that we're not coutowing to that kind of authority when we start thinking about the difference between working with living writers and dead ones realize that most of us probably without significant framing and prophecies to show that we're doing a thing like with the discussion of mistakes and butta layers, which is interesting because I was also just publishing a bunch of divergent butta layers, I feel like we're all beating up on butta layer. But that's okay. No, I can take it. But that's the point, right? He can take it and since we're working with this author and you're working with your author, it gives us all this liberty that they're bestowing this liberty on us, which is a little problematic and complicated. I think Chris brings up a really important point too about our English language editorial culture. And this is something I've heard from a lot of Latin American writers that they don't have the same culture of editorial feedback and dialogue that we do. And oftentimes they're very happy to receive it at the stage of their book being translated into English. And can be remarkably receptive to some pretty significant changes in the original text. I think Danny Han was saying something about Valeria writing a story right now in which Christina's, neither version exists. That somehow they're, I didn't know right, Danny, are you in here? Yeah, is that right? You're saying something, the fact that she was writing in Spanish and working with Christina on the English translation, essentially simultaneously. So to get feedback to make the Spanish, to write the Spanish as she's being translated into English, right? I ask, I ask. Which just as a teaser, I suppose, if you don't know, Valeria Luiselli will be here this afternoon and tonight at the closing reception and we'll talk about these sort of processes and how her book came into being. Tell us about the blue pamphlet. Well, so before the blue one. So Christina, when she worked on the book, created an extremely elaborate chronology that had all of what happened in the book and then different historical things that happened in references that were over and above what was in the text originally. So it's its own creative piece and Valeria loved it so much and I loved it. And we're trying to figure out what to do with it. And in the end, I don't remember who suggested it was my suggestion or Valeria's, but it was her call in the end. We incorporated that as part of the text. So that is the final book of the text and it's not an appendix. It's like book six or seven, yeah. So it's the chronologic is what it's called. So that is another way that she's bringing in and kind of messing, blurring the lines between author and translator. And so then as part of our editorial process, I asked a intern who had studied translation in London to do a fact check on the book and knowing very well also that there's a lot of facts and facts and it doesn't really matter. But she wrote a like 30 page Excel spreadsheet that was massively elaborate and she really had fun with it. And it has things like, can Macaws suffer from sadness? Yes, and then she lists a source. Can you press a corner of your nail between your upper and lower central and sizers? Yes, is it always raining in Pachuca? Yes, so it's all this stuff and she just kind of commentary on it too. And so we created this 67 page fact check kind of as an extension of the book and we call it book eight. And it's not, so what this book is in the world is a little mysterious. Like is it a marketing tool? Valeria authorized this also, and so that's the thing. She said, don't do it, please. Let's send it out, like do whatever you want with it. And so now Valeria actually, we've been talking about whether or not we will insert this into a future edition of the book at the end. And then how we frame that or whether or not we frame. I mean, certainly the intern will get credit. Her name was Ifa Roberts, by the way. So she's great. And we paid her for this and all that. So it's not just intern labor. Yeah, so that's the fact check. And we printed about 500 of these, sent them out with reviewers and just kind of distributed them. Give them more at a PA too, that's right for size. Right, and so people have been writing about this in some of the reviews. It's come up in the chronologic. And so they said, oh, this should be really posted. It should exist in the world. And so we're trying to figure out what to do with that. And so that much to the kind of possible chagrin to other international publishers and Eduardo at Sexto Piso to see what will happen with the book. So we'll come back to all of these things. But we'll have involved you now, Kaya, in that. And I will frame this by saying that your JT Mahaney who translates Antoine Volodine was supposed to be on the panel with us this morning. But he accidentally scheduled his flight for Saturday morning instead of Sunday morning, so he is not here at all. However, JT worked on, I don't know how many people know who Antoine Volodine is. Volodine is a French writer that writes under a series of pseudonyms. Antoine Volodine is the most popular of those pseudonyms. It's not even his real name. I don't know what his name is. I think it exists, but you could find it. It's not super hidden, but it's hidden enough. He writes under Antoine Volodine, Manuela Drager, and Lutz Bassmann. And he's created, he's published, I believe, 42 books now under these three pseudonyms. Yes, exactly 42. And they're all set within this sort of disjointed common world in which there has, it's kind of futuristic. There's some sort of like apocalyptic thing has happened and that there used to be this group of writers that wrote as post-exoticists. In the post-exoticist movement, these writers use these certain terms, these certain ways of structuring their story and all these invented mythologies to like upend capitalism. It was their main point. So they were jailed and killed and destroyed. And this is like the world that exists in. In his books, all of these characters recur. Like Lutz Bassmann narrates one of the books that we published by, that's written by Antoine Volodine, that includes a description of one of Volodine's other books that has nothing to do with Volodine's other book. So all these people are like the same and different at the same time. So JT worked on these. And I think you were going to talk about JT's approach and your approach to working with him on editing Volodine, right? I guess for my theory on JT's approach and because he's not here, he can't really say that I'm wrong. And I sort of spoke to him for a minute about it last night. And sometimes JT has this affect where you're not really sure if he agrees with or disagrees with you because he just kind of stares at you blankly. And so I'm still not sure if I'm in any way close to my theory of his process on this. And I'll try to make this tie in as much as possible because I was very excited about this last night for about five minutes. And then found out he wouldn't be here. And then everything came crashing down. So I sort of lost my steam on it. But so the second JT is translated to Volodine books for us. The first is post-exoticism in 10 lessons, lesson 11, which was his thesis project as a graduate student at the University of Rochester. And the second book is one that's forthcoming. It's called Bardo or Not Bardo. And to go sort of in the vein of these translations that come in and are incredibly clean, JT is also a person who, when he translates, I think that his work is very clean. And I think he spends, as I think many of us as translators, you spend a lot of time working on this. But one thing I was trying to sort of solidify in my mind as a potential process of his is that when the finished manuscript for the second Volodine book, Bardo or Not Bardo, came to me, it seemed to be at the same stage as what the first book, the post-exoticism in 10 lessons, was after he had worked on it extensively with Chad as his advisor. You were not the advisor or just his portfolio advisor. I was something. But they, on a weekly basis, if not a couple times a week, met and talked about his process and his translation. And my memory is very extensive because I feel like JT was always in our office either googling cemeteries or talking to Chad about this book. And so my theory, and I think it sort of makes sense. It's lots of a crazy theory, as it makes sense, where his experience with working on Chad with that first book as his thesis project carried over into his next translation of Volodine. So all of that was built into his translation process already. So that's sort of my theory that he absorbed very much what he learned in working with Chad as an editor and applied that to his next translation. I think to the point where it seemed like he had spent a year and a half working on it in a sort of academic setting, which maybe sounds bad. But what I wanted to tie in with that is that I had the great opportunity to go to the Sozopol Fiction Seminars in Bulgaria this summer, which everyone should apply for or find some way to get involved in because it's a really great experience. And most of the panels that they had were about editing and editing translations because Bulgaria, like many countries, doesn't really have editors that actively work on the books that go to be published. And one of the women who spoke was a translator who had worked on a project with us, named Olga Nikolova. And one thing, she wrote me an email to apologize about this later because it made me sound like a monster, sort of, but she had been in Rochester for three months, a couple of years before we started working on the book of her translation that we then published, which meant that she spent three weeks workshopping her translation with us and then a couple of years went by and she submitted it for a Bulgarian literature contest that we have and her book ended up being chosen. And the quality of the translation from when she had workshopped it with us to when she submitted it as something that we would publish was vastly improved. I was very surprised. And then in Bulgaria, she was saying that as she was translating the book, she was imagining the workshops that we had had in Rochester and anticipating my commentary. And it didn't, I mean, and, you know, we crack jokes in our workshop and we say things. So she basically imagined me like perched on her shoulder making sort of sarcastic or catty comments about certain phrasings, which I don't really remember doing in Rochester, but the point being that what I want to try to connect that I sort of believe JT did after working with UCHAD was similar to what Olga experienced, is that she, you know, when people talk about the translator being the first editor for the text, I think there's another level where she was anticipating what I as an editor would say as she was working. So she'd type out a sentence and look at it and go, I know what Kai is gonna say about this sentence and I don't really like that, so I'm gonna change it and rework it until she anticipates that my reaction would be not that and something that would be more favorable to her mind. And I don't know, I mean, I guess it worked because the translation was really great and there were some parts that we had to work on. So I think JT did a similar thing and I really, there wasn't a lot of content editing. There were some questions that we had about certain phrases or certain terminology that, I mean, I've read a few of the other Volodyne books that are in English and we wanted to make sure that those concepts or ideas were connected across the Volodyne canon, but other than that, I think that his experience working with you carried over to the point where I basically had to spell check and circle a few things, ask him questions. I always, and Heather knows this as well, I very much enjoy having a conversation with her translators as a translator myself. I wanna ask those questions, understand if something seems funny to me, I'll highlight it and if the translator explains it and I'm okay with it and then I get it and it's fine, then we'll keep it and I don't know if that makes any sense. I just wanna ask how you felt about that as an editor. I mean, the fact that she had internalized you as her reader, right? Yeah. In this really profound way. You said you felt like what she then produced was something that was much closer to being ready for publication. And so it's a lot of responsibility. And like. Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess to be fair, and it's fair point to her, she's a very cynical person with a very dry sense of humor, so the way she presented this sort of revelation made me sound like a horrible person. But she, and like I said, she wrote to me later to apologize for how it may have sounded, but she said it really, she valued that as her internalized experience because it really did change the way that she approached her own work. And I mean, in our case, it helped because she had spent time with us and she knew us as opposed to, you know, other translators of ours who may not know us personally. And similarly with JT, he had lived in Rochester for two years and so he kind of, it's possible. So that's what I'm trying to connect that he may be able to, he may have that luxury of anticipating what our editorial reactions will be. And also he knows that we have read other works of bulletin, so maybe that changed the reception, well definitely changed the reception in that sense. Something that's sort of coming clear here are to tie those together as like a sort of theme is that there's a lot of times that we have these sort of panels and there's a lot of people that are translators who are like, editors are awful, visitors are trying to change things to make them more American or make them more palatable to like an imaginary reading public. And what you guys all seem to be saying, and especially with you and Mario Beatin as well, because you translate all of his books that you published, right? No, no, but some of them. Yeah, is that there's the idea of developing a relationship between the editor and the translator and that that relationship continues on. And it influences how the translation is being written and what the barriers are. That it's not just a book comes in, you hack it all out and then send it off, but that there is some more interaction that way or more of like a lifetime relationship but like a relationship of sorts that goes on. The reason that that comes to mind is that there's on a panel with Jill Spulman for Archipelago and when she talked about how she likes to find translators to work with and work with them several times if they like that experience. And that is that in some ways it was like complementary to the idea of finding an author. They're gonna do several books by, she wanted to find a translator that she would do several books with. And that they like that experience, it became easier and it influenced the writing style. Yeah. Well, and just to say, I don't know, I've only worked with a handful of publishers but even with the most commercial of the fiction that I edit, a lot of which is translated, I have been really delighted to find that the translators are thrilled to be getting the feedback. And even, again, even though it's pretty commercial stuff mostly, there has been lots of space for a relationship for the translators to come back to me as the editor and explain why they're doing things or to say that I didn't want to, I wasn't the editor so I didn't want to go there. I'm so glad you did or can we talk about this? And so that makes me hope that, right, that makes me hope that at a press that's smaller or more literary minded or things that are less commercial that there's even more space for that or that this is the norm. I had been assuming that to some extent it's now the norm to have that relationship. That's actually what I have about that norm and changing the matter or changing the financial. Well, I've had translators be very, very involved with that. Involved in being the liaison to the author, making the strong suggestions, proposing their own, what the scene could look like, we're adding a scene and taking that to the author and getting a yes or no or just interpreting back and forth. But I don't know the norms, I only know, but I've seen a wide range within what I've done and maybe the publishers here can tell us what their norms are, we got a few. But I think it depends entirely on the translator and part of what you said that's interesting to me as a person who's an editor and a translator is how much editing we do, especially when it's commercial, we're thinking about American audiences more than we might for poetry or for something, right? How much we edit, we see ourselves as sort of doing a light edit in our translation, right? You were saying like you see things you want tightened up and how much we do that. I was gonna say two things, one that's to be slightly less relevant, but that might circle around, that seems to be my theme today is that one thing to consider when an editor's reading something is that an editor is also a reader and every reader's gonna perceive a book differently. So something that I may wanna cut, David may not wanna cut and Anna might not wanna cut and Chris might say, well, yeah, you're right, but I would only cut half of it. And the other thing in terms of communication, and I will use Volodyne as an example, I've never had an exchange with Volodyne. I don't think you have like Volodyne, if you can only talk to Volodyne if you are his translator or his publisher. I've had other authors where I've emailed the agents or the publisher and sort of tried to poke at it because sometimes the authors who do have a good command of the English language do wanna be more involved. It's easier for me to just email them directly, but I've had situations where I've sort of hinted at it to the publisher or the agent that that might be helpful for a translator and they'll say, oh, just send us the translator's email and the author will get in touch with them. So there are those authors who prefer to interact with their translators. And I think for the most part, and in the last couple of years that I can actually think of, any time I've had a question about something, either about content or about just an explanation of whatever, I'll ask the translator, especially if the author, if I can't talk to the author myself as the editor or if the author's English is not that great, I'll just write the translator and saying, I don't really understand this and was this intentional, was that intentional? And then the translator will say, well, I don't know, like there was something for the Bardo book where I had a question about a specific term and JT just said, well, I'll shoot an email to Volodyn and I'll let you know what he says and that's what it was. So frequently for us, the translator is that middleman. Yeah, so I don't know, I mean, that's... It does seem to come down to a question that you brought up of authority and who makes the final decisions. Which is something I'm curious how you guys react to. I know at least one person in the audience has had an experience with a different publisher in which the publisher and the editor makes all the final decisions and they don't care if the translator disagrees with them. That's the problem. Well, but the translator really should, I mean, when I edit and send things back to a translator, I really, there's still the translator, there's still the person who understands both, perhaps with the equation better than anyone else involved and I still want them coming back and saying, well, I see why you tightened that up, but here's why in the finish, we really need to, the author feels strongly or I feel strongly or you don't understand what finish is doing and I wanna hear that because as an editor, I'm just one reader and so I'm gonna run roughshod, especially commercial fiction, I'm thinking about popular audience. I'm gonna run roughshod only with the understanding and I say this to them a lot that the translator is gonna push back because I don't have any of that context that they have and hopefully lots of publishers and editors are asking for that and making that space for that because you have to still be in the middle of it, you're still the translator. Cause how do you, you don't read Spanish, right? Or you do? No. Not well enough. Yeah, yeah. So I guess we represent that, that you guys all translate and edit, whereas we don't. So we're sort of, do you feel that there's a difference there? Would you, do you feel like you give yourself more leeway because you're reading it only as an English book versus reading it and seeing, knowing what the Spanish would be or whatever language it might be? How does that impact you? Or do you think about that or? I let that, I let the translator mediate between the author and I'll do my reaction as if it didn't exist in Spanish in the first place and then let, assuming that Christina or whoever I'm working with will then have a conversation with Fulleria and loop me back in if necessary and that the author and then they will come to an agreement. Like I'm actually the least important for sort of a disfinal decision in that case. Like after I've made a suggestion. How do you guys feel as being translators and editing? Do you, do you, does that, how does that impact you? I guess like, do you say, does it, I would imagine that it gives you a wider breadth in understanding what the translator's role is and how the translator can act within this, but at the same time there seems to be the temptation to like be almost, I could see someone making the argument that he'd be more forgiving of the translator and not just solely as like the English reading audience. But I don't know how do you deal with that? Or how do you, do you, do you have two different mindsets when you go into translating something versus editing it or how do you manage that? I don't know if I have two different mindsets. I mean, I think they're, they're, yeah, they're a little bit different, but I think probably like, like Anna when I'm editing, you know, I really value the translator's insight and assume that, that they have more knowledge or expertise than I do in regards to the text. And I think, you know, our editorial process is a very collaborative, very, you know, conversational approach. I have this theory that, that Chad is actually the ghost translator of all of Open Letter's books. So it's funny to hear you say that. I've been, I've been looking for a ghost translator myself. Too many projects. Maybe one way to answer that, say that being a translator makes, and I don't, I don't know how to separate myself from being a translator. So I don't know if this is really helpful, but that I feel very protective of the translator and their role, and to me, the translator, as much as possible, has the final say and all of the editing is largely suggestion, unless there's major problems that the publisher is involved in, but that the translator is doing whatever negotiations they need to do and that it's their call ultimately. And that might come in part from being a translator and, you know, having that translator chip on my shoulder, knowing how, how much more in the middle of it they are than the publisher or the editor ever could be. I feel like we have one weird situation right now that we'll maybe add something to this, and I want to open this up to questions too. But our most recent book of Merce Rodereta as a Catalan author died in 1983, I believe. It's incredibly famous. We've done a number of her books and they're very successful. She's one of our best selling authors and most, most well loved. And her new book, War, So Much War, was translated by a mother and daughter team and they're gonna be writing about this for the, so there'll be more information about this later. But they've said it several times in emails, even as recently as yesterday, about how they spruced up the original because it wasn't Merce Rodereta's best written book and that they, it made it more like her other books and fixed things. I have not fucking clue as to what they changed in that and then never asked and didn't care and just let it go. It could be, I don't know how much liberty they took, but it's sort of related to what you're saying. Of like, the book reads incredibly well. It's in Harper's this month. Everyone who's read it loves it. It's fantastic. And where those, where that, what the original, what the where that was is a complete mystery to me and I have no idea. Well, I also, I don't speak Catalan either so I don't know the extent, but we were in conversations. They did also an email same multiple times, how much work they put into it. And to a point where we were joking, there was one sentence they had in one of their emails that I said that we should just scratch everything else and make that the main blur of work, which was we wanted to kill ourselves and then just like the translators and that's the blurb on the cover of the book because they just, that's how much they put into it and they sent that note to me before I started reading it and so when I started reading it, I had a similar reaction I think where I almost didn't care to what extent because knowing, knowing Rotorada's work and knowing that they know Rotorada's work, it's a beautiful translation and I think the book is, it's one of the best things I've read and I don't remember if it was, if we got it last year so I think I already put it on my like top whatever for 2015, but they have done a magnificent job and in that case, you're talking about trusting the translator. This is an author that Martha Tennant, one of the two has worked with for years and so I trusted her implicitly because she knows Rotorada's work and she's also a very talented translator and yeah, I mean, they're just sort of piggyback back a little bit, something David said earlier about with having a question and if the translator can explain the choice and why you as the editor should not change it or why you should keep it, that's something that came up in that book with them as well with and I think it's not a bad practice just to say, as an editor, I would change this but I do frequently say but I could be convinced to keep it if you explain to me why you wanna keep it and sometimes it's a silly explanation and I don't agree but for most of the time, in like with Martha and her daughter and Marisha, they would explain why they made a certain decision and both as an editor, as a translator, I appreciated that explanation and knowing and kept it. And it's a different panel I guess but that's a case where as a reader I would be interested in a preface like explaining why it was so far from the source material, what was going on in the source material that made it so different from her other books or what their thinking was. As a publisher, I don't want that because I know that that will scare off the general reader. An after. They can put that on a translation and they can publish that elsewhere. I don't want that. I don't want the reaction of the person picking up and being like, oh, this isn't the real thing. I feel like their fact checkbook would just be an itemized list of all the wine they drank while they translated it, so. They said that for this article they were writing, it's gonna be a conversation because they got in a lot of fights as a mother and daughter and working on this. So yeah, it should be pretty fun. Okay. Sometimes it's not concisional. You're an asthma because you lost later and you might end up here. Briar. Very true, too. Heather, you said you had a question for us. I was very asked it. Oh. But as your editing translation, does your, I mean, we all have these questions, right? Does your internal translator, not in terms of translator's rights and the right to be consulted and the right to have, but more like the kind of like. A lot. And I think that that's what makes me good at editing translated fiction in particular. I mean, you're other fiction, but I understand what the translator's doing. Sometimes I understand what the, and I mostly do things that aren't from languages I have access to, but I still frequently understand what the original must have been doing, right? If it's not always the best translator, right? And know the kind of feedback to give and what they're gonna take on Bridgette. But yeah, I don't think you can turn that off. And in the other direction, I worry about and less in poetry because I'm more in the level of the words in this kind of poetry, but in other poetry less, but not being always sure about turning off the editor when translating. Like Maria Jose Jimenez who's also here, not in the room and I were just doing a sample for a book we were bidding on and we're also both editors and translators and we were having a hard time and ended up giving something that was sort of lightly content edited and they were happy about it, but that's not what the role necessarily was. And so that's a conversation to have to have with a publisher, but I don't know about you guys. I can't turn one off. They feel, because whenever we're translating, we're editing, right? There's no, we try to be, there's no pure. I don't believe in pure. So the more you're doing both, I think the more they're overlapping. Yeah, no, I agree. I think that's, I definitely give the types of comments I would hope to receive. At the same time, I've phoned him as published translations of authors that I've translated myself. I'm saying by other translators and I feel like their translations of the same author's work are fairly different than my translation would have been, but at the same time, it's negotiating that balance. I think that's fine. And actually I think that's really fascinating and part of what I like about it. Kind of like the Lispector books that New Directions has done, which have a half dozen translators. That's really fascinating to me. And so it was important for me in editing that book to give the kind of feedback that I would want, but not to impose my own vision of the author's work. And that is a fine line I think for editing of like imposing your, how you want it to read is something that you could fall into a habit of. I know if people have done that where they are essentially reworking the book to be a book that, how they would have liked it to have been written more so than how it existed. I think what Ben did with those, Ben Moser that edited the four novels, the Lispector novels was really challenging and really interesting coming in at the same time and going through and trying to make sure that they have a coherence in the voice and in terms of like when certain particular words were used, how they were being reflected in the other books, which is crazy to think about, like really crazy to think about. Other questions, yeah. Okay, so as an editor in a publisher, how much of a problem in that there are alternative versions of chapters or short stories at that point if all the chapters of the novel are somewhere online, is that a much better outcome? Before they've been edited, is that the idea that they would be different in the published edition? They're all different. Okay. I don't have a problem with that. I don't think there's a, there's not a problem. We had one collection of short stories that actually I think every story but one had been excerpted in journals before we had published it, but at the end of the day, and that was a discussion we had with the translator, was that, one of the discussions we had with the translator was that yes, we understand that those stories have been published in other journals, but we are not publishing them as a collection by open letters. So we were going to edit that collection as a full collection that we as open letter were going to publish. So there were going to be differences. And again, different readers, different editors, but it wasn't a problem. It was actually sort of sweet because it already had the promotion and the excerpts that preceded it. So. I think it's always fine. Cause I mean, those of those things are like, are truly like marketing and getting people, people aware of it. Like you could in theory with that book with Liz Harris's translation of this is the garden, which is one of the finalists for the NTA or was long listed for the NTA. And, but you're not going to, I don't think a reader is going to figure that out and then go buy all the journals or all the pieces and avoid buying our book just because of the sake of convenience. So it's more of like an entryway. Like if they see a chapter somewhere and think this sounds kind of interesting, then they can go find the full book. I think that it's helpful. The publisher usually wants that. Yeah, we definitely always, yeah. The more the, the more the merrier for the most part. And there's other stories of a... Leave us one chapter, you know. Yeah, leave us one little moment. No, I remember a story that Mary and Schwartz told about transiting Nina for Barova and how she had, there's this is, I don't know if anyone here translates Russian, but there's lots of always issues with agents and things. Like this comes up a lot in relation to Russian literature. And I think she had sold the rights to a short story that Mary was translated. And then sold the same short story to another translator to put in like, I think it was in the New Yorker in fact. It's like, isn't this great? And Mary's like, no, this is horrible. Like now we have two different people working on the same thing at the same time. And they're like, oh no, but the more the merrier. That would be a problem. But otherwise I don't think that is that, which I miss you. Yeah. We did various translations of us, a whole group of days. And they had this necessary approach to this. We're translating a new book that's getting published in Germany in a few weeks. And we're translating German to English. And we're a group of four translators with one person that's kind of reading through it and giving suggestions on how to do that. You can use a pseudonym and pretend it's one person. No, that's just one joke. I think you had something you wanted to say about this. Well, I literally met with them right before this panel. Well, tell us what your idea was. Well, my idea was just the 3% thing, or the cover letter thing, or just in general. Just in general. What I talked about. So I spoke with you just before the panel and this group of students. And the idea that we sort of had was similar to something that a former student of Chad's did in, I don't remember which, I think she was only finding Argentinian and Chilean authors and she wanted to find more South American authors to create a portfolio from. And so she basically did sort of an open call for suggestions on the 3% website and got a very good response from what I remember from other translators. And that was something that we had been talking about with this group of students was the possibility of just sort of giving them a platform to sort of explain what their project is in a little more detail, why the author wanted to have all five of them working on this. And also just sort of do a similar open call for suggestions if anyone, whatever they choose, if anyone else has been in a similar project and what their experience was, or if anyone has any suggestions of how to present it. My first initial reaction was, oh my god, five people. That makes me scared as an editor. But another suggestion was that you can take that fact and put a very positive spin on it when presenting the project to publishers. Why is it important that there are five people working on it? Why is it important to the author? What does it add to the project? Why does it, don't make it scary, make it a happy thing? And in terms of the fear factor, on a practical note, to designate someone who would be working with the editor. Because an editor does not want to work with him. No, it's terrible. Not just logistically, it can be a mess. But yeah, there's a point person that would make, that sort of relieves some of those issues. And you could still, anything the editor said to that point person could be consulted with the other translators. But so that the editor's not emailing five people and getting five different responses to attract changes, that would be terrifying. That's the moment when she was like, no, no, no. I don't want to do that. In terms of submitting it to a publisher, to see if they're interested? Like in terms of the quality or the, we want it to be, OK, so there's two different ways to answer this. Let me see if this maybe makes sense. If you're doing the whole book and the whole book is, you're going to do before you submit it to anyone, then that as good and as finished a form as possible as you can make it, is perfect. If you're going to try and find a publisher or editor before you're done with the project, then you can make it clear that it was a first draft. With Guillermo Sacramento, what we got from you was the beginning, like the first 50 pages of the 750 page book, which is amazing, but it's 750 pages. So knowing the first 50 pages, we made a decision that we wanted to publish it based on that, knowing that you're probably going to edit and change, that it wasn't a finished product at the moment in time. So if you're doing it under the, and saying, this is the sample, this is the first draft, this is to get you interested and to see if you want to publish it, that can be fine. If it's something where you're like, we're doing this whole book and now we're going to find someone, I think that that, I would expect something a little bit more polished and done. And I know having done a translation MFA and various recent things like that, it's a collaborative project and you're doing the whole thing as a group, as part of your program, and so I understand why you're doing the whole thing, but also as someone who did a handful of novels at various points, that then the agents changed and they wanted to bring in a different translator, like don't, after this project or in general, maybe make a habit of doing chapters and samples and finding a publisher first. Because I think a lot of us make that mistake early on that we get excited about a novel and we do it or something long and we do it and then find out the rights aren't available. Or whatever the case may be, right? So as a learning project, this sounds great, but publishers are gonna be interested in a sample mostly. They're not gonna say you have to have the whole thing finished before we. Yeah, that's true for you guys too, right? Chris, you'd prefer, because you're starting to do more and more Spanish language literature. Yeah, I mean I think that mostly right now I'm more contact with publishers than with translators in the first place. So, I mean, well now it's being hilarious multiple books, but I think since then I've been working through, or agents, contacting me about brand new books. And so that's, then I have someone read it or they might do a sample or, yeah. But yeah, if I was gonna do it the other way, yeah, I would do a sample and a synopsis, for sure. And to know the rights. Yeah, that's important, that's very important. Yeah. This idea of internalizing the editors at their own shoulder reminds me of the relationship between the editor board and the writer Gary Lutz, where they should help Lutz develop this very adiocincratic voice. And I wonder to what degree your interventions as editors kind of go beyond questions of acceptability or adequacy and go into like actually helping to translate or bind their voice or develop that sort of adiocincratic crap. Who's the crypto Gordon Lisch out there? I mean, kind of sounds like her. Should I keep everyone's gonna have nightmares? Hey, it's Halloween. I don't know that there's ever been, I don't know that there's ever been an actual situation in one of the books that I've edited where there's been a problem with voice. There may be once in a while a situation where you can tell from the way like a chapter or a section is paced that the translator was maybe rushing to do something and they didn't quite spend as much time. If those are generally, I feel pretty easy to identify. And then I just highlight it and say like something sounds a little off or it sounds like you rushed this, could you look at it and rework it? And generally that works perfectly and the translator will look at it and go back and do what they need to do. And then it's exactly what I would have wanted it to be. But that's something we talk about in our workshops very frequently, especially in terms of the most common issue is with dialogue in terms of tonality and register. And those are things that we discuss very often in the workshops we do at Rochester where you can sort of, I guess there's kind of a feeling. I don't know how you guys, everyone else feels in terms of that, but I think there's a feeling when you're reading it you can sense that it's a little off or something's missing and sometimes it's as simple as just saying consider introducing contractions, consider what the register of the character is in the original, because right now your character sounds like an academic but it's a 13 year old girl. So just things like that and I mean. And I think that there's two ways that happens in an editorial letter or that happens in the margins and it just has everything to do with what the project is and who the publisher is and I mean I do a heavy revising of like I just put in the contractions if it's the kind of commercial project where I'm just supposed to, the translator has mostly done their work, is mostly not looking for lots more hours to keep their hourly respectable at all and it's my job as the developmental person to do that and then to listen if they say no really there's a reason and I'll take it out every time but to actually be looking at the fact that these are teenage characters and they don't use that diction and somehow that was missed and I'll ask the translator is this something you've really done intentionally and unless they have, I'll just rewrite it. But that again is, are you doing commercial work? Are you doing? Yeah and sometimes there's actually a case with a book that we've been working on not as a print version but as an e-version. This is the Rosa book where the translator was a former student and the initial translation that he was doing was in one register and then one of his professors had had him writing a lot of essays on a weekly basis so by the time he had written academic essays every single week and he started re-looking at the translation it was a different product and you could tell that he hadn't really made a shift from his academic essay voice to his book and so we were like, you don't talk like this on a regular basis, this is wildly different from the first draft that we saw because the register had this sort of feel to it where, I don't know. I think that it's largely with the wish and editorial voice thing. I mean, it's all about its consent essentially. I mean that's what, consent. And you have, there's different ways that you're going about editing. So for me, my former boss, Alan Cornblum, who died last year, was authoritative and intrusive but he would say always, it's your book, I think. But that's a little bit, I took a step back where I'm not authoritative at all. Like it's more, I constantly am backing up, it's just your call or consider contractions and I think that's the way that I talk to our editors on staff, like that's how I want you to be because I don't want an author to ever feel pushed around or that they're being bullied into something because that's not the role of the editor. But I think that there can be a relationship between an author and editor where an author can, and I know this is a little bit different with translation but can invite someone to be as intrusive as they want to be. I mean, this is tiny bit different but like there's another person on my staff who is a very good writer and has a different approach to a lot of things than I do. And she is an extremely good editor of me and I let her do anything she wants to my text because it's like, I know that she's making it better and it's like, but she doesn't ever have to say, oh, Chris, do you think we could change this? She's just like, change it, you know? I don't know, that's... I think there's a great book called The Delighted States by Adam Thurwell in which he talks a lot about translation practices and the old like, you know, retaining St. Closet, the original versus like making more American Balboa and how you judge all that. And the thing that comes out of that book the most I think is really useful in approaching what you're talking about is the idea that the thing that gets conveyed in translation is the style, is the original style of that book. And whatever style might mean becomes a little bit cryptic and a little bit slippery. Like it's the type of the word choices, it's the structure, it's the all the press that make that book a unique and important book. And I think for anyone that's doing, I mean, for any publisher, the books you're choosing are ones that you think they have something unique and special and amazing about them. And with translation, this becomes almost doubly so that you know that the book itself is amazing and has something unique and a style that you want then to make available to English readers and the translation has to sort of do that too. So in forms of like being intrusive, I think that the layer that I want to be intrusive to a text I'm editing is to get that style right. And that it's not the same between different books. Each book has its own particular uniqueness and voice and the reason that I'm attracted to it and to make sure that that's working as to the best that it can. So rather than like imposing myself making sure that book is getting out there. And that is a trend like when we do the workshops and working with students is like, a lot of people here are very experienced and have gone beyond this. But working with students at the beginning of their term translating, a lot of times it's like encountering texts where it's like, yes, your translation is conveying the meaning. You've got the meaning, you know the words, you understand what the words in Spanish mean and what the words in English mean and they're equivalent so to speak but there's no spark there. You're missing what is important about the book and trying to get them to feel free enough that they're not just trying to kind of rote translate but to feel the book and to be creating that book is something that I think is really important. I think it revolves. The way that I always talk about it sometimes trying to revolve it around the style and figuring out what it is that that, how that book functions as a reader and how you can then as a translator slash writer make that function as well, if that makes sense. So for Valeria for instance, her translator is English, lives in England. And but Valeria likes to talk a lot about the difference between official publishing Spanish in Spain versus Latin American Spanish or Mexican Spanish and so she wants to highlight that so Christina is translating, she's doing another step where she's translating and she's trying to make an American sounding English and she does very good but that's the other thing that I'm interacting with Christina's version of what she thinks in American versus English it is. Very complicated. I'd like to add something to Jeff's question about that relationship between the editor and translator which is just to say there, I've definitely had experiences and I welcome them when a translator wants more feedback. I'm willing to give that feedback. I certainly am no leash on anyone's shoulder but I think if that's something you're looking for as a translator, most editors are gonna be receptive to that. And I think people have, well, I imagine that translators also have a real sense of how worked something already is by the time they're bringing it to an editor and if it's something that hasn't gone through a lot of stages and they're doing it to pay the rent and they're going to be receptive, they're gonna be looking hopefully for lots of editing and if someone is bringing something like I worked, I edited a poetry collection for phonemes, sister press, unnamed press, Uyghur land and it was clearly the product of many, many years of work and already so polished and worked that I was just looking, I mean it wasn't a proofreader or a copy editor but I was still mostly just looking for an internal consistency. I wasn't gonna try to go back, what do I know about Uyghur language in the whole context of the whole thing? The translator was the authority and so something that comes, maybe like diorama that comes from a place that's so much more labored over already, you're just looking for an editor to bounce back some questions to say this is what you meant to be doing right, this is what the text is, what I see the text doing, are you looking for more feedback or are we just gonna say, you seem to be changing the way you're using commas, maybe think about that here or do I need to get in there and start tearing apart lines? Is everything to do with what stage the translation is at when it comes to you? Uyghur language is available in the bookstore if you'd like to see it as handiwork. Yeah, yeah, nothing. Any last questions from anyone? Well, thank you guys for doing this and thank you guys for coming out. Yeah. Yeah.