What's It Like to Be a Book Editor and Translator?
In this interview, Mignon Fogarty and Elisabeth Dyssegaard talked about
- The difference between fiction and nonfiction editing.
- How Elisabeth acquired the book "Tears We Cannot Stop."
- Why sometimes it's easier to write when you have another job.
- Why couples often make the best translations.
You can listen to the entire interview by clicking the player above or by finding the podcast on any podcasting app, but if you prefer to read it, we also have a complete (rough) transcript:
Mignon: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and I'm here today with Elizabeth Dyssegaard who's an executive editor at St. Martin's Press. And we're going to talk about fiction and nonfiction and the thing I'm most excited to talk about his translation. But, um, so welcome Elizabeth. Thank you for being here with me today.
Elizabeth: Thank you. Nice to be here.
Mignon: Nice to meet you too. I know. It's wonderful to get to do these in person. So first why don't you start by telling the listeners, sort of, what type of editor are you and what do you, what do you do. What does an editor like you do on a typical day? I know there's a lot of variety, but what's a typical day for you?
Elizabeth: Well, I'm the kind of editor, as are most of the editors at St. Martin's and Macmillan, who know there's kind of two parts to my job.
One is always looking for new books to acquire, new authors, and bringing those in-house. And then the other part is once we, you know, are, have someone signed up making, working the whole process from idea or a manuscript to published books and what happens after that. So every day is kind of figuring out how you somehow make time for both those things or many versions of that. And any day revolves around a book. Maybe I'm trying to buy this week. And you know a book that's coming out tomorrow, a book that's coming out in two years. So it's kind of making time for all that, but that's also to me part of what makes the job so fun and exciting is, you know, I walk in in the morning and it may be an exciting submission or a book got a nice review, or a chapter arrives from an author, and it's in great shape. Surprise.
Any of those things. You know a great conversation with an author on the phone about direction, you know, anything can happen.
Mignon: How many authors turn their work in on time?
Elizabeth: Ooh. Well, it does happen once in a while, but I would say generally, you know, writing books is really hard.
And I think generally speaking even if you have nothing else going on in your life, and in some ways I actually think that's more challenging because then you're at home, you know, at your desk with nothing else and, you know, there's always the distractions of that. In some ways, I feel like authors sometimes, some of my most on-time authors have been the ones with the most demanding other lives too, you know, a neurosurgeon. Somehow she made time in her life to also write a book. So sometimes I think it helps having that discipline of different things going on.
Mignon: I guess that's true. If you know you only have two hours to get this done, you're gonna sit down and do it, whereas if you know you have all day, suddenly the whole day can get away from you.
Elizabeth: Exactly. I think that, you know, that's a danger we all know whatever we're trying to get done, right?
Mignon: Whether it's the laundry or a book.
Elizabeth: Yes, yes. And sitting at home you can see the laundry.
Mignon: I find that when I have a deadline, I am much more inclined to clean. Suddenly I notice everything that's dirty in my house.
Elizabeth: I feel that way too when I have a book to edit, you know, and suddenly it seems much more tempting to clean the closet than, you know, it will on any other day.
Mignon: How much time do you spend with actual manuscripts? It sounds like you spent a lot of time, you know, talking to people and meeting with people and, you know, what percentage of your time do you think you spend actually with manuscripts?
Elizabeth: Well, a lot of the time I guess which you were asking about my days. You know it's tough to fit in actual editing during the daytime because, you know, there's there's responding to emails or responding to calls. There's working all parts of making sure books are getting done and and getting paid attention to and the authors are doing what they need to do, so often that kind of really focused concentrated attention can only happen at home on the weekends or at night. So I would say that's where I do the bulk of my editing and a lot of my reading too because it's just too hard during the daytime.
Mignon: Yeah, that's interesting. So I expect, you know, some people will think that an editor just sits and reads and edits on the paper, on the computer monitor, you know, all day long but...
So I guess good and bad...No, that just seems pretty bad that you have to, like, take all that work home.
Elizabeth: Well, you know, I think all of us who work in publishing got into it because we love to read.
Mignon: Yeah.
Elizabeth: So in a way it's probably what I would be doing at home anyway. I just might be reading once in a while slightly different thing.
Mignon: Yeah.
Elizabeth: But you know, it's always the excitement of, like, if I'm reading manuscripts is this going to be the book that I fall in love with? So I don't know it's still feels like after all these years, it still feels like kind of a treat.
Mignon: That's wonderful. So you're, like, dating manuscripts.
So most of the work that you've showed me that you've been working on recently is non-fiction, narrative nonfiction, right?
Elizabeth: Mm hmm.
Mignon: But I know you've also edited fiction. Do you find that process..is it different to do the two different kinds of books?
Elizabeth: Yes, I think it's very different actually. I mean with fiction generally speaking almost always when you acquire a novel it's all you're...you've read a whole manuscript. You may think, you know, there are things that need to change, and you'll have a conversation with the author. Probably when you're when you're acquiring the book, but you're starting with, you know, say 300 pages. That doesn't mean that there isn't necessarily going to be a lot of editorial work, you know, and maybe multiple drafts, you know, one thing certainly that often happens is a book is too long. And so the process of getting it to the length that that the that I and the author thinks or at least, you know, will, will be the most effective for the novel, may take several drafts, you know, because often it's pretty hard to let go of your words, you know, and if you've lived as many writers have with a book for years before they get to this point, you know, this is a book that they've worked and worked and worked to polish, and then I come in and say, "Oh, but you know what? It could really lose 300 pages." That sometimes is a process that takes a while, you know, because it's, it's challenging psychologically, you know, and then you kind of start to see it happening, and but again it can take awhile, or you know, parts of the story need to be developed that worked or whatever. So in that sense, but with nonfiction, you know, sometimes I'm just buying an idea based on a conversation or maybe it's a proposal with a sample chapter. It's very rarely a whole manuscript, so then it's a much more involved process along the way in terms of first of all, first you know, figuring out what the book might be.
So for example, last year I published Michael Eric Dyson book "Tears We Cannot Stop." And when I bought that book it was based basically on, well, I had been an admirer of his work for a very long time, and of course he's he's someone who's written many, many books. But in this case, he'd written an incredibly powerful op-ed in The New York Times about yet another couple of instances of the shooting of unarmed black men by the police. And that's what we had. We had that and a conversation, and we had to figure out how to make that into his next book. And that process took some time, you know, because we really wanted to get it right in terms of this, this very difficult and emotional subject. And the time that the country was in at that point and what we finally settled on was making the book into a sermon, which was so powerful because Michael is a preacher first and foremost. He's many other things too, but that's a format that he has lived with for most of his adult life. And it turned the book into something very different than anything he's written before. It also became in some ways much more personal, and that's part of the exciting thing about, you know, working with incredibly talented author is kind of anchor... you know, helping them to figure out what what to focus on what to do.
Mignon: And really shape the project.
Elizabeth: Yes, yes.
Mignon: And so it sounds like a non-fiction book would take a longer sort of beginning to end at least your part of the work since the book isn't written yet, but then I can imagine that also not being true, that someone might struggle with reshaping a novel they had written. Is it does non-fiction typically take longer or does it just vary depending on the project?
Elizabeth: Well, Dr. Dyson's book we ended up publishing within months of.
Mignon: Oh, wow.
Elizabeth: Yeah, I mean, you know, we, we signed that up in early August and we published in January.
Mignon: Oh my gosh.
Elizabeth: And that was including all the time kind of agonizing about what we were going to do. So we can be very fast. But generally speaking, you know, most nonfiction projects, we give authors at least a year or two. So of that process to a deliverable acceptable manuscript. With fiction it varies. But I would say sometimes we also give, you know, a year or whatever, but yes, it's it depends and of course, when you're starting from scratch, you can also run into roadblocks like things take longer or if things come up in people's careers that they also need to deal with. You know, it's it's kind of life.
Mignon: Right.
So you find, you found him through his op-ed in The New York Times and then did you approach him after you read the op-ed.
Elizabeth: Well, I mean I already knew his work from the past, and the op-ed and he, he has an agent and, you know, she knew of my interest in his work, so that's when that happened. And certainly other publishers were very interested too.
Mignon: Yeah, yeah. It's always exciting when there's multiple people interested.
Elizabeth: Especially when you end up being the one that gets the book.
Mignon: When you're a winner.
Elizabeth: Yes.
Mignon: And there's a lot of pressure to make it work and turn it around quickly.
Elizabeth: OK, we’re going to take a quick break to thank our sponsor, Bombas, and then we’ll be right back.
How often do you think about your socks? I’m kind of weird because I really love socks, so I do think about them a lot, but you probably don’t think about them as much. But when you try Bombas socks, they’ll change the way you think about socks forever.
Bombas are the most comfortable socks in the history of feet. They’re made from super-soft, natural cotton. And, every pair comes with arch support, a seamless toe, and a cushioned foot-bed that’s comfy but not too thick. With many colors, patterns, lengths, and styles, Bombas look great in the gym, at the office, and out on the town.
Bombas are what feet daydream about! And if my feet were to daydream, they’d be dreaming about Bombas’s lightweight quarter socks because I like a sock that comes up a bit over my shoe and the lightweight sock is the prefect weight for spring. They’re stylish and comfortable. But Bombas also has all kinds of styles and weights, so if your feet daydream about something else, Bombas probably has you covered.
And best of all, for every Bombas purchase you make, Bombas donates a pair of socks to someone in need.
Buy your Bombas at BOMBAS dot com slash GRAMMAR today and get twenty percent off your first purchase. That’s B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash GRAMMAR for twenty percent off. BOMBAS dot com slash GRAMMAR.
And now, back to Elizabeth Dyssegaard talking about translating books.
Mignon: So I'm also especially interested in your profile. You said that you do translation, and so that brings to my mind a lot of interesting issues about word choice and, you know, capturing the essence of what a novel is or a book is when you're doing translation and it sounds like you've done that for a lot of years.
So can you talk a little bit about your work as a translator and the the interesting language issues that come up when you're doing that kind of work?
Elizabeth: Yes. So I'm originally from Denmark, so I translate from Danish to English, and I actually started as an editor of translated books. I mean, I had done some translation before I went into publishing.
But when I began in publishing many years ago, one of one of the things I've always done is books in translation. I believe very much that it's important for American readers to be exposed to voices from all over the world.
Mignon: Yes.
Elizabeth: I think literature is a really powerful way to begin to understand something about the world we live in. And America, because we have a very, there's very big language here. You know sometimes we can be very insular. We have so much of our own. So it's really important to bring in those voices to make us see what life is like outside.
Mignon: Yeah.
Elizabeth: So I had done that and of course because I am Danish and I read the Scandinavian languages I had done lots of our, a lot of publishing like that. But then an author I had published suddenly was without a translator and at that point I had moved on, so I was no longer her editor. And so I stepped in, and and I began work as a translator too. And it's a very, it's challenging and really rewarding kind of thinking work because as you said, you know, it forces you as you're working to think about...there's, there's so many times when there are different ways that, you know, you can translate something. There are words and phrases that exist in one language and not in another, whole ways of saying things that can kind of change the meaning. It's funny as an editor, some of the most successful translated books I've worked on are ones where they were actually translated by a couple. So one person's native language was one thing and the other the other.
Often it was like a man and wife or whatever. And now that I've become a translator myself also, I find myself thinking that is kind of the perfect way to do it because when I'm sitting at my desk, you know, right at that moment, wow, would be great to turn to someone and say, "Well what do you think. Should it be this way or should be that way?"
Mignon: Yeah yeah.
Are there are there any sayings that come to mind that you've had especially hard time translating or is there a pun that you translated that you're particularly proud of having done a good job with it?
Mm hmm. I don't have an example off the top of my head, but I will say some of it is what one of the things that's also interesting is how language changes over time, right?
And so this is also a way to, kind of, for me to keep kind of current with with how Danish is spoken because it's, you know, there's suddenly like whole expressions and whole ways of doing things that, that didn't exist 10 years or 20 years ago.
Mignon: Yeah, I was reminded a few weeks ago maybe a couple months ago now I did a little segment on people in Norway are using the word "Texas" to mean crazy because of the whole the Wild West idea and sort of the, some of the wild stories that come out of Texas, and so I learned that people, like, they use "Texas" as a word to mean, like "Oh, that's so Texas." And it just made me, it was so interesting and it made me laugh and, you know, that how people can, you know, we interpret each other's languages or borrow words from other languages that make sense to us that might not be used the same way in the original country.
Elizabeth: Interesting, although I would imagine so for the translator of that book would it remain "Texas"? And probably because I think all of us might still...
Mignon: You can get it from the context.
Elizabeth: And get it from the context.
Mignon: Yeah.
Elizabeth: But it is interesting. English is such a large and powerful language in the world now because so much of our culture I think in terms of music and film and everything else is exported that, you know,
Yeah. Every language borrows.
Mignon: Right. Yeah. English is known being an aggressive borrower.
Elizabeth: Yeah. English has all over the years but but, you know, certainly looking at just my tiny little language Danish, you know, lots of English going on. No curse words is a big one, but it's not just that.
Mignon: Fun.
Excellent. Well, thank you so much for being here with me today. I love talking with you and hearing about your work. That was Elizabeth Dyssegaard who's an executive editor at St. Martin's Press. And I'm Mignon Fogarty better known as Grammar Girl. That's all. Thanks for listening.