The Translator’s Voice is a monthly column from Ian J. Battaglia here at the Chicago Review of Books, dedicated to global literature and the translators who work tirelessly and too often thanklessly to bring these books to the English-reading audience. Subscribe to his newsletter to get notified of new editions as well as other notes on writing, art, and more.
Despite the fact nearly no one knows her true identity, Elena Ferrante needs perhaps no introduction. The prolific and reclusive Italian writer has been writing since 1992, but reached international fame with My Brilliant Friend, the first of the Neapolitan Quartet of novels. It was the skillful hand of translator Ann Goldstein who helped introduce the novels to an English-reading audience. Though she was an integral part of one of the most popular works of fiction in the 21st century, Goldstein tells me she became a translator “accidentally,” after having studied Italian while working in the copy editing department of the New Yorker.
While no one could’ve predicted the extent of the Neopolitan Quartet’s popularity, there is a universality to the novels that clearly resonated with a wide swath of readers. Across the work’s roughly 1,500 pages, we follow the lives of two friends, the narrator Elena and her friend Raffaella (mostly called Lila in the novel) as their lives unfold from 1950s Naples and into the 2010s. Ten years after the release of the fourth and final book, Europa Editions is releasing a new deluxe edition of the work, collected in one volume, perhaps as it was always meant to be.
I spoke with Ann Goldstein via Zoom about falling in love with a work, championing writers, and finding surprising success.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Ian J. Battaglia
Could you tell me a little bit about how you first came to the Italian language? What got you interested in Italian?
Ann Goldstein
I took a Dante class in college, and I totally fell in love with it. In fact, I took this class twice; the same class. We read a book that had a parallel text. And I had studied Latin and French, so I could work it out, but I really got interested in wanting to read Dante in Italian; that was really my spur.
I had that idea for years, but I didn’t learn Italian until I was really quite old. I was working at the New Yorker, and in those days, they used to pay for classes. You could take a class and they would pay, the company would pay, because it was going to improve your skills. I convinced some of my colleagues that they also wanted to learn Italian, and read Dante.
One of my friends was studying ancient Greek at Columbia, and one of her classmates was the daughter of a famous Dante professor at Columbia called Maristella Lorch. Actually, there were two Lorch sisters, and they came to the office and taught us.
So we spent a year studying grammar, and then we actually did read Dante. It took a few years, but we did it. I wouldn’t say in what kind of depth, but we did do it; it was amazing.
Ian J. Battaglia
You started learning with the intent to read Dante, but when did you decide to try your hand at translation?
Ann Goldstein
It was completely accidental. For many of the translators I know the way they got started translating was just accidental.
The editor of the New Yorker at that point was Bob Gottlieb. We’d been studying Italian for maybe five years or something, and he knew about this class. The artist Saul Steinberg had a friend called Aldo Buzzi. Before the war, he studied architecture in Milan. Buzzi was a classmate [of Steinberg], and they were close friends.
Buzzi did many things, but one of the things he did was write. And so [Steinberg] gave Bob Gottlieb a book by Buzzi, and Bob didn’t read Italian, so he came to me and he said, can you take a look at this, because I need to say something to Saul. So I started reading it and was very fascinated by it.
And it just occurred to me that I could translate it, just for myself. I thought, I’m studying Italian, it might be really interesting to translate it to see the language from a different point of view. I was copy editor for many years, as you probably know, so I was interested in language.
Gottlieb liked it and he published it. That was published; and that was the beginning of it. So that was really how I started, just by accidentally trying to translate something.
Ian J. Battaglia
After that, did you think this was a one-off thing? Or did the process interest you?
Ann Goldstein
The process really interested me a lot. Not just the process, but the way of reading; reading something in that kind of close way. Of course that’s what I was doing all day anyway, so I just continued it in a different language, in a way.
I didn’t think of it as a career. Because as you well know very few people can subsist on translation alone.
Then my second translation was this Pier Paolo Pasolini book called Petrolio, which was published many years after his death. It’s a great book that no one has read in Italian or English. But it was the opposite extreme. Buzzi’s writing is pretty plain and simple. The ideas are complex. And Petrolia was this completely complicated, 500 page unfinished novel that covers Italian history and politics and so on. I was really learning on the job.
That was the second thing I did, and it took me several years, but it gradually happened that I kept translating, and I liked having something to do on the side.
Ian J. Battaglia
From there, what eventually brought you to Ferrante, and the Neapolitan Quartet?
Ann Goldstein
Sandro and Sandra Ferri ran an Italian publishing house in Rome called Edizioni e/o; they had published a lot of translations from Eastern Europe actually. They had this idea they were going to open a branch of their publishing house in English, in America.
They were Ferrante’s publishers in Italy, so they decided their first book would be The Days of Abandonment. Not a bad choice. They just randomly found some translators, about five, and asked them to do a sample. I think they got my name off the PEN website or something.
I won this little contest. I knew some of the people that were also in [the contest] they’re my friends, but yeah.
I had never heard of Ferrante. I didn’t know anything about her. I still don’t know anything about her.
Ian J. Battaglia
What was your first impression of Ferrante compared to other things that you’ve translated?
Ann Goldstein
I started reading The Days of Abandonment, and I basically couldn’t put it down. It’s intense and it pulls you right in, right into this woman’s mind, and it takes you along and it’s frightening. I felt like I hadn’t read anything like that.
I don’t know, somehow it was different from certainly anything in Italian that I had read. It wasn’t something that I recognized, and plus it was in Italian, so it had this element of language.
When I was doing the sample, I just thought I have to do it, I have to translate this, it would be so great, so interesting.
The biggest challenge of that book was the emotional challenge. It’s so deeply emotional… yeah, emotional I guess is the word. Sometimes it was really hard to keep going.
Ian J. Battaglia
This is certainly true of The Days of Abandonment, but Ferrante’s writing in general—so often I think the emotions are right up front.
I’ve heard people say that you’re a “highly literal translator.” What does that mean to you, and how does that relate to this emotional intensity in Ferrante’s writing?
Ann Goldstein
I’ve probably described myself that way. I’ve gotten less literal as I get older. I’ve always felt that the way to capture a writer’s style is to really stay with the text. I don’t mean word for word.
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.
And with Ferrante particularly—it sounds like magic—but that’s how you maintain that emotional intensity, by staying with her.
Ian J. Battaglia
It’s amazing when you put it like that. The emotional intensity is so high throughout the Neapolitan Quartet; there’s very few moments where you can take a breath or relax, even among hundreds and hundreds of pages. I think that contributes to just the feel of the books overall.
How do you view the work? Did you come to it book by book? Do you think of it as a singular work?
Ann Goldstein
Ferrante originally thought that it was going to be one novel; like one two thousand page novel. And her publishers were like, forget it.
However, it wasn’t that she wrote the two thousand pages and then divided them; she wrote it volume by volume. I’ve never heard her talk about how she constructed it, but from my point of view and from the reader’s point of view too, it was volume one, volume two, volume three, etc., and every year a new volume came out. It wasn’t even clear how many volumes there would be. I don’t think she even thought there would be that many; that it would be that long.
I read the first one, My Brilliant Friend, and then I translated it. Then because of the production schedule, I started the second one as soon as it was published in Italy; because she wasn’t really finished with it until it was published, practically—down to the wire. So then I read the second one, and then I translated that.
I didn’t know what was going to happen. I didn’t know what the whole plot was, of course, because it wasn’t available. 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.
So I have this odd relationship to them. I think of them of course as one story, but my translation relationship to them is book by book.
Someday, I think I should do that. I should just sit down and read them all.
Ian J. Battaglia
I was just going to ask if you have any interest in doing so.
Ann Goldstein
I do. If I had a few spare weeks.
Ian J. Battaglia
Maybe now this is your chance. Who knows?
Ann Goldstein
Yeah, I know. I’ve read parts of them again over the years, but as I said, I’ve never read them all, starting with My Brilliant Friend and then all the way through.
But would I read it in English or Italian? I guess I would read it in English. Though maybe not; even when I’ve read parts of it in English now, I always find things that I would fix. Second guessing comes with the territory.
Ian J. Battaglia
Similar to how we were talking earlier about the emotional intensity being very high throughout the work, I felt like the language and the prose shifts over time; both as Elena becomes more educated, and also I think just through the distance or closeness of Lila. Was that present in the Italian?
Ann Goldstein
That’s perhaps one of the negatives of not having read them all together.
In some ways, I can’t really judge that. But if my process, so to speak, is to stay with the text, then you’re proving that my process worked.
Ian J. Battaglia
It’s funny, I’m not a translator, but I read Japanese novels in Japanese and also in English translation. A lot of times when I read something in English translation, I’m like reverse engineering the sentence back into the Japanese sometimes. Obviously I don’t even know what decisions are being made, but I can figure out what sentence this was probably, or what word this was. I wonder why they chose what they did.
Ann Goldstein
I think that lots of times the translator doesn’t know why he or she chose something.
There’s a certain level on which you just decide that this is the right word, and then yeah. That’s one of the elements of making the decision is the unconscious.
Ian J. Battaglia
Did you feel the same way about your copy editing work? That there’s something intuitive about it, or did that feel more logical to you?
Ann Goldstein
It’s more logical. There is something intuitive about being sensitive to an author’s style, but I do think that there’s something a little bit more logical about it. At least for me, working in English.
Ian J. Battaglia
I wanted to ask about the Italian in Ferrante, and especially in the Neapolitan Quartet, where there’s a big distinction between the characters who speak in proper Italian versus the characters from the neighborhood who speak in dialect. How is that conveyed in the Italian?
Ann Goldstein
That’s one of the interesting things about Ferrante; that she doesn’t write in dialect at all.
Here and there, there’s a word or something. But when you read in the English version, “he said in dialect” it says in Italian, “detto in dialetto”; said in dialect.
I know a little bit of Neapolitan: I can read a little, I can look at words and this and that, work it out. But Northern Italians can’t understand Neapolitan dialect. 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.
So I suppose she didn’t want her book to be inaccessible. She obviously made a decision not to have people have conversations in dialect, which frankly is really a gift to the translator because how do you translate dialect? It’s not the comprehension, it’s just what do you do with it?
I don’t know if you’ve had this experience in Japanese novels…
Ian J. Battaglia
I’m a huge fan of this writer, Kawakami Mieko, who is from Osaka and writes in the local dialect. Osaka is on the west side of Japan, and there they use Kansai-ben, Kansai-dialect—the whole language is a little bit different from the Tokyo dialect. There is cross-over, it’s not quite unintelligible, but it’s definitely a different beast. And I think also due to a lot of the different perceptions of Osaka versus Tokyo, it’s sometimes translated as if somebody is speaking in a southern accent in English or something; maybe a little bit more rural, a little bit more colloquial. But how translators handle dialects I think is always really fascinating.
Or choose not to, right?
Ann Goldstein
Yeah. I generally choose not, except for a few words here and there, just so you know. Sometimes I feel that it’s better to use the word rather than explain it or something, try to find some slang word in English that’s equivalent.
So I think you’re right: perhaps being more colloquial or being a little bit more relaxed about the language is probably the only way to convey it.
Ian J. Battaglia
I’ve seen that you’ve said that you feel like you already know Ferrante just because of your experience with her writing, and because of that don’t really have any special desire to meet her or to interact with her—obviously she’s famously reclusive.
Do you still feel this way?
Ann Goldstein
Yeah. I don’t feel any need to. I don’t feel a need to know her more than I know her from her books.
The last book she published, In the Margins, I thought was really interesting about her process, about how she came to writing and how she writes, and all the various influences that she’s had. That was really helpful.
As I said, I thought it would be interesting to know how she thought of the Neapolitan novels when she was writing them, but I do feel that I know the person that wrote the books.
There are obviously a lot of similarities between all the narrators. For example, they are first person narrators, which always, at least for me, makes me feel like I know the writer better.
Ian J. Battaglia
It’s funny hearing you say that; I think especially the Neapolitan Quartet gets labeled as autofiction a lot and I think, huh?
Maybe just because Ferrante often writes about women writers in Naples.
Ann Goldstein
That’s true. In a way, because she isn’t known, I don’t really think of a difference between Ferrante as a person and Ferrante and her narrators. I don’t think of her narrators as the person Elena Ferrante or whatever, but I definitely think of her narrators as the authors of the books. Books. That’s who I feel that I know.
Ian J. Battaglia
Yeah. It’s just one of these things I’ve always found a little strange. But in a way, I think it’s only a compliment to her writing and your translation, that this first person narration is so convincing that people think, Oh, this is a real human being who’s written this.
Did you expect the Neopolitan Quartet to become this global phenomenon?
Ann Goldstein
No; no idea. I think it was really shocking to everybody. I don’t really know how to explain it, but it somehow caught people’s imaginations; or their reading needs.
Ian J. Battaglia
Did the reception to the books change the way you viewed the work at all?
Ann Goldstein
No, but I think that, again, in this hypothetical world where I’m going to read them all again, I might read them thinking about why they were so popular.
I thought, of course they should be popular; why not? But no; I thought they’re really powerful stories of the second half of the 20th century. To me it was a really powerful theme, as well as a fascination or something. They have appealed amazingly to a whole range of people, but for people like me, who are essentially of the same generation as Elena (a little younger), who lived through that same 50 years of the 20th century: it’s just such a great expression of our experience. Certainly that was one of the things I think that made it popular.
I remember somebody wrote a review—I think it was this English critic Joanna Biggs—the review started out by saying something like, “I was having a glass of wine with my friend, and then, we were talking about this, when we were talking about that, we were talking about Ferrante, but were we talking about Ferrante or were we talking about ourselves?”
It was like this is why it grips. It’s so gripping because it’s right: it’s about your own life. Even though, of course, we don’t live in Naples, we didn’t grow up in this kind of situation. But what Elena Ferrante creates in Elena Greco is something that is both familiar and gripping and illuminating to people.
Ian J. Battaglia
In some sense, I guess it’s no surprise that this two-thousand-page work is so wide-ranging, but I think there’s such an interesting balance because the moment to moment experience of the work is almost always so intimate. It’s so close to Elena and her inner interpersonal struggles and things like that, but it also touches on such a huge range of topics: the latter half of the 20th century, the rise of organized crime, class, education, feminism.
Even just as a male reader, to read about this kind of close female friendship, this kind of love-hate relationship was so fascinating. It was something I just never considered, from my own lived experience.
Ann Goldstein
One of the things you said that I also think is brilliant about Ferrante’s writing is that she does touch on all these actual events, changes in society and all that—without forcing it on you.
It’s there in the background of your reading in the way that a lot of these things are in the background of your life. I think that’s one of the things that’s really great about the Neapolitan novels.
Ian J. Battaglia
I was wondering if you would talk about some of the particulars of Italian. What makes it interesting or different from English?
Ann Goldstein
I think there are two main things. One is gender. And the other is that the verbs are conjugated and they don’t require pronouns. So when you say Sono, you’re saying I am; you don’t have to say Io sono.
So for example, if you have a series of sentences in which a person is doing a whole bunch of different things, you don’t have to repeat he or she; it gets rid of a lot of things like that. There are certain things that you don’t have to deal with, and that you have to figure out how to deal with in English.
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.
In Italian you can use -issmo, let’s say three times in two pages and you don’t notice it really. But if you have to say very this, extremely this every time it gets a little boring, a little heavy.
I think those are three of the biggest things that are the hardest to translate, because for obvious reasons it also means that the sentence structures are much more flexible. The fact of the verbs and the presence of gender means that the sentence structure is much more flexible.
Ian J. Battaglia
Were there any particular challenges about Ferrante’s Italian?
Ann Goldstein
I think the main thing I found hard is that she writes a lot of run-on sentences.
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.
In particular with Ferrante, these run-on sentences serve a purpose. They usually have to do with that emotional intensity: getting to the truth of some emotion when somebody’s going through something. That was hard to maintain, to keep that kind of intensity, but also, to make it readable in English.
I think one of the hard parts was trying to contain those sentences. I probably used more semicolons when I got to the end because I was tired of the run-on sentences (laughs).
Ian J. Battaglia
What are you working on now?
Ann Goldstein
Speaking of dialect, I’m working on a book by a writer called Louisa Adorno—who also uses a pseudonym, by the way, (although it was known who she was)—she’s a writer from Pisa.
I think this book was written in the sixties. She married into a Sicilian family, and so it’s all about her in-laws, basically. It’s funny. It’s very funny—that’s the other thing that’s just as hard as dialect: humor.
There’s a lot of Sicilian things in it, and then there’s an amount of humor; sort of irony. She makes fun of these people, but she clearly is fond of them. She didn’t want to use her name or their name when she published the book, so she used a pseudonym.
I’m starting to specialize in the precursors of Ferrante.
Ian J. Battaglia
That’s funny. Do you feel like in your career as a translator, that Ferrante stands out as what you’ll be known for, or a trademark of your work?
Ann Goldstein
I think there’s two things, or maybe three.
One thing that I think was also a big thing for me was Primo Levi. That was a magnum opus of both editing and translating. Then I think Ferrante, of course: that’s really the biggest thing.
But also I’ve been translating these other writers, like Elsa Morante; she doesn’t really need more introduction—but maybe she does, or a reintroduction. And then this writer Alba de Céspedes.
These women of the mid-century: there’s a lot of them. There’s some other ones that haven’t even, there’s some others that that I would like to translate. I—not I alone, but I and some other of my colleagues—have been trying to resurrect these women.
I think that would be something that would be good for people to remember.
Ian J. Battaglia
I think that brings us back to your initial point of getting the excerpt from The Days of Abandonment and just thinking, “I have to translate this”; that level of passion for a work I think is so important. Among translators I’ve spoken to, I think that’s a common thread: you fall in love with this book, and you just want other people to be able to appreciate it as much as you do.
Ann Goldstein
It’s very true. Yeah, that was really lucky, The Days of Abandonment—as I said, I didn’t know anything about it, and that set off this whole chain of events. I was lucky.
