La consegna — Delivery

Delivering a translation

Delivering the first full draft of a book-length translation is a milestone but not the end. In most publishing houses the text then goes to an editor, who reads it against the original or on its own terms and sends back queries and suggestions; a copyeditor and proofreaders follow. Translators often describe the moment of delivery the way Alex does — relief mixed with the odd sense of no longer owning the text. The saying Giorgio quotes, that a work is never finished but only abandoned, is usually attributed to the French poet Paul Valéry, who said something similar about poems; translators have adopted it as their own, since there is always another comma to move. This lesson closes Block B, il testo. The vocabulary of the block — names, puns, alterati, swearing, poetry, questions to the author, the border, Slovene, the deadline and the block — has been the vocabulary of reading a novel closely enough to rewrite it in another language.