Here, Goldstein explains some of the sentences that gave her particular trouble. The author’s new novel, The Lying Life of Adults, tells the story of Giovanna, a teenager whose parents’ marriage crumbles when she begins spending time with her Aunt Vittoria - a wildly passionate woman, estranged from Giovanna’s father after long-ago quarrels, and intent on carving Giovanna in her image. It’s a literal Italian translation from “latrina.”) Ferrante, Goldstein reminds me, has written at length “about how she doesn’t want to have beautiful writing, she wants to tell the truth.” (One funny example from the book: Ferrante writes that when her protagonist unzips a boy’s pants, a “toilet smell” comes out. “I tend to stay closer to the text than many of my colleagues,” Goldestein says. Still, she tries to render it as near to Ferrante’s words as she can. Translating can be like lining up unruly toddlers who have their own sense of order. It’s not easy, especially since “the structure of a sentence can be a lot freer” in Italian than in English, she says. Then she begins working through synonyms and thinking about syntax, trying to arrange the English so the experience of reading it comes as close as possible as it could be to the Italian. Goldstein’s first drafts are literal renderings of the author’s words. Turnaround time was so tight while she was translating that she had to think of them piecemeal, as individual sentences and phrases to straighten out and unwind. Ann Goldstein translates Elena Ferrante’s books from Italian into English, but she has never read the author’s acclaimed Neapolitan novels all the way through.