Always reading, sometimes translating

Elena Ferrante's American translator also has a day job:

I’m head of the Copy Department—so I do a lot of organizing. Every day is different. But everything has to be done in five days.

In the past we were often able to work ahead. But now the pieces come in and we close them in the same week. So it’s a pretty fast pace. But we still read something a lot of times. The editor gets a piece, works on it and then puts it into our system, which is InCopy. We call this “putting it into type.” Of course, there’s no type. We have one set of people who, once it’s in InCopy, do the styling—who put it into The New Yorker style and put in basic punctuation and then it’s called “galley.”

And then at the next stage we have a person… There was a famous person named Miss Gould who used to read all the galleys and she was like a super-copyeditor, something between what we would now call a line-editor and a copyeditor. She questioned everything, really. She did basic things like spelling and punctuation and grammar but she also did sense and logic. Her proofs were famous. Well, she is no longer with us so some lucky people have to do that job. We still read it in that relatively early stage and then we give it to the editor. Meantime, there’s a fact checker working on it, it gets a legal read, there are art people dealing with it—they usually get to work ahead of time. And the day that a piece closes—I’m talking about regular “fact” pieces, the critics go at a much faster pace—the same person who read the galley proofs plus a second proofreader read this piece. By then things will have changed. There’s still more work to do. Then once there’s been that proof plus another checking proof it goes into what we call the “makeup department,” essentially the production department, which puts it into a layout. And then everybody reads it on paper. I forgot to say this: we work on paper, the copy people work on paper. Then it’s in a layout, which we call the “page proof.” The editor, the author, the fact checker, and the person we now call the “okayer”—that’s the copyeditor—read it and then they get together and meet…

MH: You mean you they actually physically meet?

AG: Yes, physically. And go over their final changes page by page. Then the person who is the “okayer” puts everything onto a master proof, which will have been read. The “okayer” enters all the changes. And then the proof circulates again and people can read it, let’s say one more time. Sometimes that process happens two or three more times. But at that point all the work is done on paper, and so there’s a record of it… It is a kind of amazing process.

MH: It certainly is. Are there inroads on this? You’ve worked under four different editors in your time at The New Yorker. There exists now a whole subgenre of personal writing, “The New Yorker memoir,” that laments the changes that have taken place over the years—I’m thinking, for example, of Renata Adler’s Gone.

AG: I think it’s still great in its way. It’s lost something… I think it’s less literary. I think the writing isn’t always as great as it used to be. I don’t think this is a criticism, in a way, because the times have changed. Reporting is more important; people are now reporting from all different places. It’s a different world. I know, the writer can only go out and collect the facts. But where’s the writing?