Reading the Times Literary Supplement this morning, I recalled the copy open on the desk of my brother-in-law Peter Thornton. And the London Review of Books beside the reading chair in his library. He was dying of throat cancer, had a couple of weeks left to live, and still used the lucid hours of each day to dip into high culture.
I had exercised a choice. My job as a professor in a distant land limited my freedom. Wait a couple of weeks and I could attend Peter’s funeral. Fly to see him in Chicago now and we could spend days going over the final edits of his translations of Petrarch, which I was set to publish for Barbican Press.
So I flew early, and we edited.
Earlier I had brought out Peter’s translation of Dante’s Inferno. It brought high acclaim from the top Dante scholars. Peter had a PhD in English, taught for a while, but most of his career was as a lawyer. Back home after work he would turn to his translations. This current one was a translation of Petrarch, his complete Canzoniere. Take a listen to its audio version on Spotify.)
Peter’s aim was to render the poems in vivid English for 21st century readers, and to include rhyme. As an editor, you tune your ear to the writer’s intentions, while staying alert to your ‘live’ reading experience. Does your attention wander? Does comprehension stall? With poetry so focused on meter as this, does it sometimes jar a little? You note those points, and ask the writer for remedies.
Peter’s book is a triumph. I was able to show him a draft of its cover before leaving, but it was oureditorial work together that reassured him that his book was truly seen and would be cared for and shared widely.
This past week I paused my edits of another writer’s novel to focus on edits that came in from my North American editor of my upcoming My Head for a Tree. I value and generally enjoy this process. You’re crafting your book to pass smoothly into the reader’s mind, but there are elements of guesswork. An editor is suddenly in there alongside you, primed with the attention they have to their own reading experience.
It can mean letting go of stuff you’ve valued – the editor of my first novel blithely requested a cut of its entire second chapter. Away it went. Write any book and loads of material grabs at the chance to squeeze itself into its pages. It can take an editor to point that out.
Besides the small things – repetition, typos, errors etc. – final edits come down to two things: some areas need expanding, adding detail, keeping the reader inside a scene long enough for it to fully register. And more often than not, it’s about tightening the text by suggesting passages to cut.
Something I lost to an editorial cut:
Here’s a paragraph that’s gone from the book:
There are special encounters with animals. Once I was at sea off the California coast when a young boy on deck began to shiver and then pulled hands up to his eyes and sobbed. Shortly after, the mound of a blue whale emerged through the sea’s mist and some of what had touched the boy, an infusion of wonder and contained power, touched the adults.
I used it to set up the experience of first setting eyes on a blackbuck. Of course, as the editor notes, it does take the reader away from the desert setting I was working to establish. I’m surprised it lasted through so many drafts.
What I’m reading
Émile Zola’s Earth in Brian Nelson’s translation.
When I hear myself speak of enjoying a book I fear I will soon to put it aside. It’s boring me so much I;ve stopped reading it to tlalk about it.
I was doing that recently with Perceval Everett’s Erasure. He can be very good but also tricksy. I’ve abandoned the book halfway so as not to spoil the ending of the movie version, American Fiction, which I hope has had the tricksiness edited out of it.
Zola’s Germinal is up in my top 5 novels of all time so it’s silly to have waited so long for this one. I need a deep immersive novel of vast human breadth and characters and Earth is turning out to be such a one.
A writing tip
Don’t be afraid of repeating your character’s name instead of a pronoun. It can spare the reader having to work out who the pronoun (e.g. he / she) refers to. When they go back in the text to do that, you’ve lost them. The magic pauses.
Touching thanks, and I did like meeting the whale and the boy…..