Ann Goldstein on Translating Elena Ferrante’s “Neapolitan Quartet”:
I feel that’s the way I get closer to the writer is just by staying close to the text; by not trying too hard; not inserting myself. If you’re a copy editor or an editor, I think that’s part of your job in a way, right? We used to talk about this at the New Yorker, sometimes: the goal is to make a writer sound as much like him or herself as possible. Not like you. I feel like that’s a good standard, at least for me, for translation.
You shouldn’t feel like you’re reading something in English, but you also shouldn’t feel like you’re struggling over the grammar or over the structure. You should be able to read. So there’s something in-between, something like that.
Then starting with the third book, actually I didn’t even read it. I just translated it. I read it when I was working on it, but I have never read the four novels altogether.
When the TV show came out, they did speak in dialect, but it was subtitled in Italian as well as in English, so that’s the level.
One other thing I think is big is that Italian has the ability to add suffixes to words that give them a nuance that English doesn’t have. One of the obvious ones that everybody would know would be like Fortissimo: if you say Forte is “strong,” and Fortissimo is very strong.
A lot of Italians write run-on sentences; I think I heard somebody say once it was a paratactic language, which I think is true—that the clauses just lie there beside each other, and you have to sometimes put the relationship in.