No longer plagued by censors and paper shortages since the end of communism, the publishing industry in former Czechoslovakia has faced other kinds of constraints that it shares with much of the commercially-driven world in which we live. Literary scholar and critic Ivana Taranenková shares with Asymptote’s Slovak editor-at-large Julia Sherwood the findings of a survey comparing editorial practices in Czech and Slovak publishing houses before and after 1989. The survey was carried out by the web journal Platform for Literature and Research, which Taranenková runs together with her colleagues Radoslav Passia and Vladimír Barborík.
Recent publications of new literary works by Slovak authors as well as works in translation have exposed a trend that is trivial yet irksome. While the number of published books continues to grow and their visual quality is improving, pundits have increasingly noted the declining standard of manuscript editing. This is a problem not just for literary reviewers, but also for those who judge literary awards when they assess each year’s literary output.
Editorial standards are often so dismal that these poorly edited manuscripts can no longer be seen as just isolated instances of incompetence or failure on the part of individual editors (as some reviewers have suggested), but rather as a systemic issue. Other than in some major publishing houses, the profession of editor appears to be waning, a victim of the drive for “increased efficiency” in publishing, and a growing reliance on outsourcing that requires a smaller investment of time and money per book, ultimately resulting in dilettantism. The same also applies to emerging independent publishers.
The problem is that over the past thirty years many publishers have made a single person shoulder the responsibility for both the copyediting and the substantive editing of manuscripts. This person, particularly in smaller publishing houses, is typically a freelancer, often a fresh graduate in Slovak literature who sees this either as the chance to pursue a sideline career or, given how badly paid the work is, one of several such jobs. Since most publishers rely on state subsidies and subsidized books must be published within a year of the grant being received, time pressure also leaves its mark on the quality of the work. And it is the editor who feels the full impact, as she or he is forced to plough through hundreds of pages of manuscript in a short amount of time, which may well prevent them from reading it more than twice; often they don’t even get to see the final proofs.
This is in striking contrast with the editorial practice common in Czechoslovakia before 1989, a period still quite fresh in the memory of the older generation of authors and readers. Under the old system—which largely survives in renowned Czech publishing houses, but is being increasingly abandoned in Slovakia—a publisher would vouch for the quality of publications and would employ and nurture whole teams of editors and copyeditors, as well as a technical editor. Several employees could thus devote a considerable amount of time to each manuscript, as part of meeting their daily work quota. Of course, publishers had to operate in the communist time limbo and this fact, along with delays caused by paper shortages and other problems of the planned economy, was conducive to long debates over manuscripts. At the same time, as many who lived through this era have pointed out, the reverse side of the pre-1989 coin was the fact that editors had to assume the role of ideological watchdogs, censoring manuscripts or making the author exercise self-censorship. Any passages in which the regime might have detected a subversive subtext had to be expunged, often resulting in bizarre editorial decisions.
To explore the current state of the profession of editor (which has been traditionally understood as text supervision in the Slovak context), our web journal Platform for Literature and Research has recently conducted a survey. We asked nine Slovak and two Czech writers, poets, editors and literary critics, representing a range of generations, to answer four questions about the role of editor, past and present editorial practice in the Czech and Slovak Republics, and ways to improve the quality of editing.
All those who participated in the survey, regardless of their profession or age, agreed that the situation of editors is not exactly happy. Everyone—including those who remember the way the publishing industry was run before the Iron Curtain fell and are far from idealising it—admits that the approach used to be much more thorough. Czech writer and editor Ondřej Horák offers an interesting insight: “Milan Kundera once said that he had finished writing The Joke in late 1965 and the book didn’t appear until 1967 because the manuscript had been stuck in the censors’ office. It’s quite possible that nowadays this would seem to us like endless months… I often wonder, if we were told that we could not publish anything in the next ten years, how many of the books submitted today would make the cut and how many would-be authors would give up writing if they thought they couldn’t be published.”
This is how poet and translator Ján Buzássy recalls the atmosphere of cooperation in pre-1989 publishing houses: “Back then everything was different: a publisher today often has to take care of everything on his/her own (I’m talking about a small publisher who is concerned about literary quality), and recruits assistants only for specific tasks. One thing that was better in the old days is that most of the editors were distinguished writers or experienced translators. They would meet in the same building on a daily basis and, to put it simply, they could benefit from putting their heads together. They would share information and advice. One might be an expert on the Bible, another familiar with automobiles, crime fiction or westerns, and so on. There would be experts on Russian, English, Scandinavian literature… They met not just in official editorial meetings but would often discuss their work over a glass of wine, usually at a highly professional level. This intellectual focus always found a solution. A former editor with the Tatran publishing house once put it very well: I’m paid better now, but back then I would learn something new every day.”
A fellow poet and translator, Ján Štrasser, concurs: “In Czechoslovakia before 1989, under the totalitarian regime, all official culture was more or less unfree, ideologically constrained, which meant that many things had to be done to accommodate this or, conversely, were not allowed. Editorial work basically had to serve this doctrine although it mostly applied to senior staff in publishing houses and journals. To put it briefly: editorial work wasn’t autonomous. But, paradoxically, in purely artistic and technical terms, the quality of this work was higher than after 1989. The simple reason is that book publishing was strictly limited: though the number of publishing houses was small, those that did exist were actually book factories in the best sense of the world. They employed large numbers of qualified editors and copyeditors. An editor of an original work served, in the best-case scenario, as the author’s creative partner, capable of responding to a text competently. Editors working on literature in translation, in their turn, were experts on the literature of their linguistic area. Admittedly, the process of submitting a manuscript to the publisher until publication date took at least a year, often two years. That was bad but, on the other hand, it gave editors and copyeditors enough time to thoroughly engage with a manuscript.”
Apart from financial constraints, Štrasser sees the lack of knowledgeable editors today as a serious problem: “There are publishers who publish good books and who haven’t given up on quality editorial work. It’s true that these are mostly large publishing houses that can afford this financially. Apart from them we have many smaller publishers, often one-man or one-woman outfits, who also publish good books, but to be able to get them out they have to cut their costs to the bone. They can’t get around paying for paper and printing. So, the first thing to get cut is editorial costs (quite often, the fees are also cut or at least reduced). I don’t think you can learn editing in school or in a course. The best book editors in the past were typically language and literature graduates, with degrees in Slovak in combination with another language. If they found employment in publishing houses, they usually started as copyeditors, gradually learning the ropes from the more experienced editors. Nowadays even big publishing houses don’t have editors, only copyeditors. Editing is outsourced. And here’s the rub: the best (and almost the only good) editors are the ones who worked in ‘brick-and-mortar’ publishing houses. They are getting older, leaving this world. And I don’t see any new ones.”
Someone who has studied the literary industry after 1989 in detail is literature scholar Jaroslav Šrank, who responded to our survey with a systematic analysis of the problems in editorial practice. Like Štrasser, he sees the root causes of the decline of the profession in a lack of funding and people, but points to an additional factor, that of low social status. He is trying to come up with solutions, but can’t find them either from publishers or editors: “Individual editors may manage to choose their work and agree to schedules and, to a very limited degree, negotiate their fees. However, they won’t be able to change the status or raise the prestige of their craft on their own. And as for publishers, even if they were willing to introduce changes, they can’t get over the budget constraints. I think we’re in a stalemate situation that is unsatisfactory for all, even though from the outside everything appears to be fine—more and more books are being published.”
One solution might be found in existing foundations that support literature and arts, such as the Foundation for the Support of the Arts (Fond na podporu umenia) recently established by the Slovak Ministry of Culture and endowed with a much more generous budget compared with the previous grant system. Šrank further proposes creating a system to specifically support editorial work, whose results would be subject to systematic oversight, as well as the introduction of a “minimum remuneration for editors, guaranteed by a grant to a publisher.” He does, however, appreciate that “this takes us onto the shaky ground of interfering with free pricing, and it affects other creative professions, graphic designers, for example, not to mention the authors and translators themselves. Besides, if the amount allocated were—and it certainly ought to be—substantially higher than is the case today, it would mean that, at the current level of support grants, the publishers would be short of funds for things like good quality printing. The total amount of funding for publishing would therefore have to be increased. Which of us wouldn’t like to see something like this happen? More money for the creative professionals involved in producing individual subsidized books could also be ensured by a selective approach to allocating grants. Fewer subsidized titles—can you just imagine such a thing?”
So, the proposed solution to the problem, though a rather paternalistic one, would be to allow state institutions to get involved in the process and regulate the system of grants. This would result in a smaller number of subsidized titles, but they would be of a higher quality. One of the most interesting outcomes of our survey is that several respondents believe that publishers cannot and should not be the only ones shouldering the responsibility for improving the quality of editorial performance. It cannot be repeated often enough that the editor’s work on a book is just as important as the work of those responsible for its physical production.
Translated from the Slovak by Julia Sherwood
Ivana Taranenková is a literary historian and critic. A research fellow at the Institute of Slovak Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, she has served as editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal Slovak Literature, and as editor of the literary journal Romboid. She focuses on literary criticism, the history of Slovak literature in the nineteenth century and issues of national and cultural identity, as well as contemporary Slovak fiction and theoretical aspects of popular literature.
Julia Sherwood is Asymptote’s Slovakia Editor-at-Large. She was born and grew up in Bratislava, Slovakia, and worked for Amnesty International in London for over twenty years. She is now based in London and works as a freelance translator from and into English, Slovak, Czech, Polish and Russian. Her book-length translations include works by Balla, Hamid Ismailov, Daniela Kapitáňová, Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki, Uršuľa Kovalyk, Peter Krištúfek, and Petra Procházková.
Photo credit to Tatiana Liptakova.
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