Alin Croitoru is Editor-in-Chief of imprint Anansi. World Fiction, part of Trei Editorial Group. He previously was Editor-in-Chief at Editura Polirom for 9 years, working on the foreign literature collection, Biblioteca Polirom. He studied philology at the University of Bucharest. On a regular working day the reads, copy-edits, has longer or shorter conversations, creates lists, negotiates, in order to make sure that no book creates the impression that it is “generated by a dictionary, but that it is lived, that it is intricately linked to life.”
Your work supposes intermediation, that is what you said sometime back. But it also supposes reading. Like a professional. Who are the people and which books intermediated your becoming a reader?
I was lucky I started discovering books early. It started during childhood, someone else read read to me for the first time when I was five years old. I was in the countryside, where I spent holidays, and was playing with a friend in his parents’ yard. This friend’s brother joined us with a used book, Winnetou, and read to us all the time. He wasn’t good at reading, he could barely read the separate syllables, but he was distracting us from playing for tens of minutes, making us listen to him with our mouths wide open, as if we had watched TV (what he did was something extraordinary, because we usually wouldn’t stay still). Back then it was difficult to get a TV, because we were in the countryside and the sole entertainment we had was fishing and playing football near the pond. After I learned how to read, I finished reading the book alone. I think that is how it all began. Subsequently, it is true that I met people who helped me discovered new directions. This is why I still read, but now as a job.
In an interview you said you started working with Polirom in 2008, but you have also worked as a copy-editor with other publishers before that. In 2010 you became editor-in-chief of Biblioteca Polirom. How were those first years and what was the book market like then?
Indeed, a while before that I got to know Bogdan-Alexandru Stănescu and Anca Diaconu and I ended up at Polirom, where I experienced the real dimension of the job. I had come to Polirom from Hasefer Publishing House (I was collaborating with two others at the same time), where I saw how books are made. With Polirom, things jumped a few stages, many. From a relatively small number of titles we went up to almost 80 new titles a year (excluding reprints, which also require time and attention). Suddenly there was a lot of work to do, my free time became very restricted, Radu, my son, had just come around, I was starting to become the adult I am not yet. About the book market... I only know that it was a kind of chaos, bigger than now, where some books were selling, others less, where writers were, as now, successful with one title and less with another, and that there were a few more publishing houses than now.
In 2020 you moved to the Anansi. World Fiction imprint as Editor-in-Chief. How is your experience of working there compared to Polirom?
Anansi appeared at the same time as the pandemic. So I started working part-time in the office and part-time in home office. That was the first change this new beginning brought for me. Most of the tasks I tackle by e-mail: contacting freelancers, confirming files for press, corrections. This was not necessarily something new. Polirom operated all corrections and cover design in Iași and, similarly, I sent everything by e-mail from Bucharest. Apart from that, the rhythm and people are different, but everybody has the same aim of working well in the book industry.
What does your working day look like? How much time do you actually have now available for copy-editing?
I read constantly, because one of the steps in getting the book printed is the process called “imprimatur” (permission for print), and for us this means reading the entire book.
The working day of an Editor (it does not matter whether Editor-in-Chiefor not) is similar everywhere: one must read one or several books, but this is background work as, otherwise, one must do everything and anything: write or proofread blurbs, keeps insisting, allows others to insist in their turn, replies to e-mails, needs to do relatively much paperwork, wastes much time talking, makes payment lists, discusses or negotiates deadlines with the Production Director, to sum up one does many things and it is difficult not to get into too many details. Editors also read.
What is the editorial process of publishing a book once the translation is delivered?
I do not lead the editing team, Bogdan-Alexandru Stănescu, the coordinator of the imprint, does. Of course, there is a sort of hierarchy, but, for me, leadership equals mediation. I receive some texts and forward others, putting them through a complex process beforehand, clarifying certain aspects and doing project management for each individual title, depending on when they are planned for release.
If I were to look at the editorial process from a bird’s-eye view angle, the book undergoes initial copy-editing, then it is sent to the translator, so that they can see how the copy-editor intervened. This is ideally followed by a discussion, by a negotiation between the two. The text then is set into layout and it is sent back to the copy-editor for a second check. Subsequently, the book is read as part of the permission to press step. If it is the case, a proofreader also has a look once more and makes corrections. Sometimes there are occurrences, however, that pause work on a certain book, so that another one can become a priority: when prizes are awarded or on the occasion of book fairs and events. There is another detail I should mention, though: there are also more complicated books, which require more research time on the part of the translator, but also of the copy-editor who checks the translation, and this research is not limited to going to the library or looking up specialised words. There is a well-known example of a good translator who went on a hospital ward in order to see and understand what he would need to translate into Romanian and there are lists of discussions with, for example, craft beer manufacturers, of American football and baseball terms, sailing notions, piano theory or quantic mechanics concepts and so on. Such details change the course of the book’s publication, delay it, complicate its existence, but everything happens while hoping for a good outcome. The text is no longer distant, translated word by word and attention is no longer paid only to stylistic meanderings, but it becomes embedded in reality, such as it is; the text becomes dynamic and emanates warmth. One is no longer under the impression that it is generated by the dictionary, but alive, indivisible from life.
Bogdan-Alexandru Stănescu reminded in the interview I conducted recently, that the Anansi team also includes Ruxandra Câmpeanu and Mădălina Marinache . The publication rhythm at Anansi is quite alert. Do you also work with external partners?
I have been working with Bogdan for a long time now. Ruxandra and Mădălina joined rather recently and I am lucky to work with them (I have many reasons to praise them). Mădălina amazes me because she knows her work well and is mature in her thinking, while Ruxandra is experienced, patient and wise.
We also work with external partners, who sometimes help us get over crisis. Time is sometimes impatient. It can happen that we need a copy-editor for a specific language and, while there is no one on our team who knows that language, we know someone else who knows… Spanish, Korean… We sometimes do not have the time to finalize all releases for book fairs, so we work with external copy-editors (if we are lucky to find them).
You work with several translators. How do you choose the right translator for the right book?
Whether we like it or not, we have to share our translators with other publishing houses. It is debatable whether we always have a choice, because what matters is the quality of the translation (and the human quality of the one who creates it, as it is very important to get along with the respective translator), the tariff, the possibility of external funding (every penny helps immensely), the deadline… should I continue? There is an ongoing negotiation with (most) translators with regard to the publisher’s needs, how much and for how long we can work on a specific book (as our team is small), an ongoing negotiation with (impatient) time and, ultimately, with our own propensity towards making mistakes.
I heard from some copy-editors and proofreaders whom I’ve interviewed terrible things about translations which could hardly be published the way they were delivered and which were either rejected, or mended by copy-editors who suddenly had to turn into translators. Have you had such experiences so far? How did you get past them?
I think this will be the shortest answer I provide in this interview: yes, it happens, it cannot be wholly avoided. Generally, working with a new translator is also a test. But it can happen that you are sometimes wrong. You could say that, after several years of work in the book industry, you cannot choose wrong, but no one is infallible. When something happens you mend the book, publish it and, if the gods grant you that, you no longer have to work with that person again.
At Polirom, but also Anansi, you published books which were not translated before, but also ne editions of previous translations. I can only imagine that finding the former translators and finding out who had the publishing rights, in order to obtain them, has sometimes been quite an adventure. Which were the longest, most complicated and funny searches so far?
Regarding translators and translation rights, I have nothing funny to tell. But I can tell you about something else. When you take over a book from another publishing house, you have to regard it as a new book, and to copy-edit it. Many books which were translated before 1989 have a… free approach to vocabulary (despite what the situation was like politically back then). Translators back then were imaginative, and their method made reading much easier. I can give the example of a translation from Russian which sounded absolutely… delicious, original, amazing, simply fantastic. Our copy-editor who knows Russian very well found out that a poem (which sounded as wonderful as the rest of the text) which in Romanian has five stanzas was, in the original version, only three stanzas long. The two previous translators lengthened it, so that they could obtain the perfect rhyme. The book was on the market for tens of years, published in who knows how many editions. This is not something new, there are translators full of genius who translated books we used to read when we were young and formed us and which, intentionally or not, added or omitted certain words, sometimes even whole pages.
One of the hallmarks of the Anansi imprint is the cover artwork by Andrei Gamarț. How much and how do you get involved in the way the covers look, from the color combination, illustrations to the accompanying text, paper specifications and so on?
Very little, I'm the most discreet, in the sense that I do at most a description by which Andrei might be guided. And that's rare, because here Andrei is working with Bogdan. He knows the books before he buys them and has good options. And Andrei works... happily, in the sense that he feels what the book in question is about and gets it right the first time. He usually comes up with several options and it's hard to choose.
What do you expect of young colleagues or other people who want to work as copy-editors or proofreaders? What would be your advice for them?
I don’t have any advice or I couldn’t really add to what is generally said, and I don’t need to have expectations, because when someone starts working in a publishing house, after one or two months they know exactly what they got into.
But…I would say anyone who wants to work in editing must read a lot, as if everything depended on reading. In this job, reading is essential. Even if you don’t have the information itself, over time reading makes you improve, you know what and where to look up. You start recognizing contexts, allusions, you can approach a difficult text differently, you have a different feeling for the characters, know how to use language, vocabulary becomes your friend (even if you still constantly have the dictionary next to you). This is actually how you can become a good book copy-editor.
What are your greatest professional satisfactions so far?
The professional satisfactions are actually small: a copy-editor is happy when a sentence comes out, when he finds a happy word/synonym. He is sad when someone tells him that he has read the book he has worked on and found no typos in it, so it is well copy-edited.
Which books that you have recently read outside working hours you like and would recommend to friends, and which books inspired you to try new recipes?
Books and cooking… I will respond directly: Radu Anton Roman, Bucate, vinuri și obiceiuri românești. It is an impressive book from all points of view, which I bought using the last money I received while working for Polirom (I purchased it compulsively, it was expensive). I would recommend it as stylistic practice in the kitchen. If you are patient and manage to cook properly any of the recipes, you are truly astounding.
[The photos are part of Alin Croitoru’s personal archive.] [Translated into English by Luciana Crăciun.]
