I think that being an editor, someone who works with words, is very good training for being a translator because it trains you to be attentive to words in a very specific, very concrete, very literal way.

I tend to be kind of literal about translation. I think it's important to present the writer as closely as possible.

I have very strict rules in my head that seem to me to be the way things should sound.

That's a huge subject - a writer refusing to do publicity but writing about publicity.

It's one of the hardest things to translate anything that's not standard.

The Neapolitan novels have a lot of references to things outside, to things of the world, to culture, politics, the city of Naples. People have mentioned that Naples is like a character in the novels.

I think that if you are sticking to the text, essentially, you're not trying to write your own version of it. I mean, of course, it is your own version of it. And every translator would probably have a different version. But I think that that's what keeps the writers from being individual in English. They may be my English, but I don't think that Ferrante sounds like Levi.