Q&A
The brilliant translator behind
My Brilliant
Friend
Maplewood native Ann Goldstein helps bring the bestseller to HBO
WRITTEN BY CINDY SCHWEICH HANDLER
A
nn Goldstein has been
called a publishing
celebrity whose “name
on a book is now
gold.” Praise like that
would thrill any writer
— which makes the accolades even
more impressive, since, as readers of
Primo Levi, Pope John Paul II, Pier
Paulo Pasolini and Elena Ferrante
know, Goldstein is not an author,
but a translator of Italian.
The Maplewood native’s name has
become even more well-known since
her English translation of Ferrante’s
international bestseller, My Brilliant
Friend, has sold more than 2 million
copies in the
U.S. to date. The
novel, which is
the first of four
in the so-called
Neapolitan
Quartet, tells the
story of child-
hood friends
Elena and Lila,
whose inter-
twined lives
unfold in Naples
against a backdrop of violence and
intrigue. Now that a filmed version
premieres 9 p.m., Nov. 18 on HBO,
we spoke to Goldstein about how she
conveys the thoughts of great artists
— including Ferrante, who is famous-
ly anonymous, and whom she’s never
met — to their devoted readers.
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HOLIDAY 2018 MILLBURN & SHORT HILLS MAGAZINE
WHAT ATTRACTED YOU TO
LEARNING FOREIGN LANGUAGES,
AND WHICH WAS THE FIRST ONE
YOU STUDIED?
The first foreign
language I stud-
ied was French.
A woman taught
it in her house
in Maplewood,
and I went with
my sister and
a friend. I took
Ann Goldstein
Latin in grade
school at Far
Brook [a private school in Short
Hills], and took a class in Dante.
I took the same college class on
Dante twice because I wanted to
read him in Italian.
WHAT ATTRACTED YOU TO THE
ITALIAN LANGUAGE IN PARTICULAR?
It’s a combination of Latin and
French, and it appealed to me
because of Dante. On one level, you
can read him as a poem about search-
ing, and in my 20’s, I was at an age
when you’re searching and trying to
understand life. The teacher I had
emphasized that reading Dante is a
way of looking into yourself and
taking a journey.
YOU WERE A SENIOR EDITOR AT
THE NEW YORKER, AND RAN ITS
COPY DESK FOR THREE DECADES.
IS IT TRUE THAT YOU AND YOUR
COLLEAGUES TOOK ITALIAN
LESSONS IN THE OFFICE?
Yes. My friend, the comma queen
[Mary Norris, author of Between You
and Me: Confessions of a Comma
Queen], was studying Greek at
Columbia University, and her class-
mate was a daughter of an Italian
professor there. In those days, com-
panies often paid for classes, espe-
cially language classes, with the idea
that anything else you did was good
for you as a worker. For seven years
in a weekly after-work class that was
about an hour long, seven or eight of
us learned to read the whole Divine
Comedy together.
WHAT QUALITIES ARE MOST
IMPORTANT IN AN EFFECTIVE
TRANSLATOR, ESPECIALLY
OF FICTION?
One thing people often neglect is
that you have to be a good writer in
your own language, too. There are
similarities between translating and
copyediting: You need a close reading
in a language sense.
DO YOU SEE A TREND TOWARDS
PUBLISHING MORE EUROPEAN
WORKS WORLDWIDE, AND IF
SO, WHAT DO YOU THINK
THIS IS DUE TO?
I think that in the past few years,
there’s been more interest in translat-
ed books. But the Ferrante phenome-
non is a combination of the books and