EDITORIAL DIRECTOR: KAIJA STRAUMANIS

Hailing from the state of Minnesota, Kaija Straumanis is the Editorial Director of Open Letter Books. She is also a translator of Latvian and German literature and her photography has appeared in Scientific American MIND, among other publications. 

Small and independent publishers all work in ways unique to themselves. Given that and the especially amorphous role of editor (or Editorial Director, in this case), what are your specific duties and responsibilities at Open Letter?

As the job title implies, my main duties revolve around the editorial process—acquiring manuscripts, editing them and working with the translators, correspondence with translators, authors and publishers, etc. But since Open Letter is such a small outfit, we all have responsibilities above and beyond our “titles.” I’m also the one who deals with contracts, permissions, some finances… Some days you’ll find me in the mail room packing up book orders; other days you’ll find me substitute-teaching for Chad [our publisher] when he’s out of town for a conference or trade show.

How does your work as a photographer and translator inform your work with Open Letter? How have you tried to shape or what shape have you attempted to give to Open Letter’s catalog?

Short of being another notch in my Creativity Belt, my photography work seems (to me, at least) to have little effect on my work with Open Letter. In the past I’ve helped take photos at events, or with some basic design elements and objects, but not so much anymore. Though my photography has given me a pretty solid collection of headshots to use when needed for a conference or similar.

My own work as a translator has been far more influential in my editing career. I largely try to edit in the way I would like to be edited: I ask lots and lots and lots of questions, sometimes questions within questions, if there is something in the translation that I don’t understand or that seems off to me. Sometimes it’s the case that the translator has only to explain to me what I’m missing, or how I’m misreading the sentence or paragraph, and then everything is clear and I’m happy. Other times it’s because the translator missed a word, or autocorrect played its dirty tricks. And other times still it’s because there’s a better way the text in question can be written, and we just have to find it. I really don’t like ravaging and ripping apart a paragraph if it’s not reading well to me—where the wording is awkward, I want the translator to be the one to go back and dig in and see what they can do to improve it. This is not only because I trust our translators, but because I trust the original text. What if I think I understand what the translator/author was going for, but instead change the meaning entirely, or sacrifice some stylistic nuance that was necessary to the reading experience? That would be the worst! And I would hate it if an editor took such liberties with a text I’d worked on without spit-balling with me about the issues first. That’s not to say that I don’t do any of my own thinking or changes where I see fit for the best for the book—I do plenty of that! I just think there are times where a translator should be allowed to go back, revisit a section of the text, and change it into something better that is theirs, not mine.

In terms of Open Letter’s catalog… I’ve never really thought about myself as having a hand in “shaping” our list—but I’m also not so precious as to say “the list has shaped me.” I’ve mostly just worked to continue building on the press’s foundational aesthetic (though OLB’s aesthetic trajectory is not easily categorizable), and to continue to publish books that people will be reading for the next 100 years and beyond, and books that we at OLB have just really, really fallen in love with. What I do want to shape is the number of countries and languages represented in our catalog and backlist! I’d like to get more Baltic literature on our shelves—a personal bias, naturally.

Working for a publisher dedicated to works in translation, how does this change or focus the job of editing a manuscript? Does it become the task of finetuning and making the language consistent? And does the method of editing a manuscript change with the approaches of different translators, i.e. if the translation is more strictly tied to the sequencing and cadence of the original?

As mentioned earlier, I ask a lot of questions of our translators (and authors, when I can) in order to understand the text as much as possible. That’s not a wildly different approach to editing in general, but you are working with three (author, translator, editor) sets of knowledge, experience, lexicon, instead of two. I think it’s important that each book be edited as its own entity, even when working with the same authors again and again. One of the things we are very conscious of at OLB is letting the book breathe, exist as it was meant to exist. If we were to take drastic measures and gloss the language of every book we were going to publish to make it as “approachable” and “readable” as possible, we would be doing a disservice to the author, likely to the translator, possibly the respective nation’s literature, and also to OLB’s own mission statement. Also, our jobs would get super boring. 

That said, an important part of being a good editor is also being a good reader. You need to be able to get a feel for what the book/author is doing very early on, and be willing to go along for that ride. If there’s something off in the translation, you can hear it—be it turns of phrase, the register of the language, the voice of the narrator or characters, even a single word choice—even if you don’t quite yet know what the proper (or better) solution will be. Then you talk to the translator, who a) is, most times, the expert on the source language in this case and b) is the most acquainted with the text and the author’s intent. Then you go from there to improve the translation. The method of editing stays the same: work with the translator to make the English-language edition of the book the best it can be. The approach and process through which this is achieved is what varies.