When the translator Ann Goldstein—who has helped to bring Elena Ferrante, Primo Levi, and Pope John Paul II to English readers—works on a project, she likes to read English books to keep the sound of the language in her head. “We all forget that when you’re translating, you have to be fluent not only in the language you’re translating from but in the language you’re translating into,” she said. She recently joined us to share a list of works that exemplify, for her, “solid English rhythms, English idioms, English locutions, English sounds—the things that I like to have somewhere in my mind, though not necessarily consciously, when I’m working.” Her comments have been edited and condensed.
The Golden Bowl
by Henry James
“The Golden Bowl” is about two couples. One is made up of an Italian prince who marries an American woman named Maggie, the daughter of an extremely wealthy man. In the other, a school friend of Maggie’s, Charlotte, who once had a fling with the Italian prince, ends up marrying Maggie’s father.
There’s almost no plot—the book is all about people talking, people thinking, people trying to control the actions of other people. It’s astonishing what James does with the psychology of his characters, how he moves them around.
James’s writing can be opaque, but in a way that mirrors human nature. People are not always clear about their own emotions, and he’s very good at describing how people are thinking or feeling or speaking when they don’t know themselves. One of the pleasures of rereading books is that, once you know what’s going to happen, you can concentrate on the language.
The Small House at Allington
by Anthony Trollope
Trollope is a more colloquial writer. His dialogue doesn’t reflect the way people speak now, but it’s still recognizable as normal human speech. In fact, I had a funny experience recently of reading, in Trollope, the expression “Tell it to the marines”—who would have thought it had been around so long!
“The Small House at Allington” is about a love triangle. At the center of the story is a young woman, Lily, who lives in the English countryside. Lily falls in love and gets engaged to a government clerk from London, Crosbie, who people think is going places. One day, Crosbie visits some fancy friends of his, and becomes entangled with the daughter of a countess, who is looking for a husband. He’s very attracted to all this nobility stuff, so he gets engaged to the countess’s daughter, breaking Lily’s heart. That’s the basic plot, but there are, typical in Trollope, numerous subplots.
Trollope’s style is very page-turning. There’s a lot of conversation. It’s rhythmic. Compared with James’s writing—which you might call opera—Trollope’s has an almost singsongy quality. It’s not simple, but it’s soothing, both emotionally and literarily. His writing is so human—his people are foolish in such human ways.
Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
I happened to reread this recently—I don’t know why, except that all of a sudden it came up in a lot of different contexts, and I realized it’s one of those books which stay in your mind.
It’s about a day in the life of a woman called Mrs. Dalloway, but it brings in many other characters, and Woolf goes from one mind to another so smoothly that you’re barely aware of the shifts. I just translated a book called “There’s No Turning Back,” which is about eight young women boarding at a convent in Rome, and it reminded me of “Mrs. Dalloway” (which I’m not certain the author would have read) in the way that the point of view—the voice—goes back and forth among the women.
Woolf’s language itself—you could pick any sentence at random—is also beautiful. For instance, here’s a sentence: “Volubly, troublously, the late clock sounded, coming in on the wake of Big Ben, with its lap full of trifles.” In the middle of the paragraph that follows, you’re not even sure whose mind you’re in. Rhythm is all. Words are all.
The Spare Room
by Helen Garner
This is a book about a woman, Helen, who decides to let her old friend, Nicola, who is dying of cancer, come and stay with her in Melbourne while Nicola sees a local quack doctor. It’s about friendship, about illness, about people accepting illness.
Told in the first person, the story explores a lot of the feelings that Helen experiences: frustration and anger and love for her friend. It’s sad, but it examines all the emotions of the situation beautifully.
What struck me about the style is something unusual in the way the words go together. I don’t mean that it’s strange—it reads fluently—but, for example, in a passage where Helen is standing in a room at the back of the house, surrounded by a lot of sounds, including a dog barking, she thinks, “We had adapted our nerves to its tedious racket and no longer thought of complaining, but maybe the wind that morning was blowing from a new direction, for the high-pitched cries floated over the fence and right into our yard, filling the sunny air with lamentation.” It’s very clear, but there are arresting images and interesting little juxtapositions.
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