Column_SOMETHING FROM AN AUTHOR ( IT STARTS WITH “T”)
An author, let’s remind you, is someone who has dominated the keyboard, though he does not necessarily have control over the tongue (his own as well as language in general). An editor in turn is the author’s lord and master. This relationship, although it may seem trivial, is in fact an extraordinary one and worth analysing. Let’s, for example, notice that this relation shows that also the editor does not necessarily have control over the language – the language of the author. And the language in general, but this results from the fact that nobody cannot have a total control over the language even if he clearly wished and wishing this licked freshly laid asphalt.
I would like, however, to write a few words about the editors and the author, and not about the language.
Let’s clarify that the editor is the author’s lord and master in the author’s textual aspect. What does it mean? One can say metaphorically that during the process of writing the author’s body becomes a text, the body and the text over which the editor has a control. If it does not speak to someone’s mind, one can, trivializing it, clarify this issue stating that the author differs from other people because he owns the part of the body, named text, which is easy to edit.
Having control over the author, the editor examines, in the process of editing - appropriate to his age, capabilities, abilities, and sensitivity – the textual body of the author or the part of the author’s body . By the way, he does it with the use of the language, over which he does not have control and which results in more or less funny misunderstandings.
Why does he do it? First of all, let’s reject the widely spread myth: editors do not exist in order to publish the author’s text or not. The editor exists to harass the author in a much more refined way.
In other words, the agony called “will they take it or not?” is essentially a caress; the silence of the editors to whom the text has been sent is a symphony of spheres (indeed, occasionally spiced up by impatient author’s roar), and the oral or written refusals, with or without justification, make the eyes sting respectively by shampoo, branded, toilette and soft soap. As a matter of fact, the author’s agony starts in a moment when the editorial section takes the text. Because one never knows why the text has been taken.
The author’s efforts made to learn why the editors actually took the text became a source of many anecdotes. The more deafening the silence on this issue is, the more nervous the author becomes and the more he is convinced that the text was taken because there was nothing better. Even more, there was nothing at all.
And this happens most often.
But also the remarks addressed to the author that either praise or reproof (if somebody comes down to it) are usually only to hide this unpleasant fact that also in the future there won’t be anything better. So let the author give again what he’s got because he can write- may it be better, robust.
Since the peak of refinement to harass the author is publishing all his texts, whatever comes, in extreme cases, when the editors demonstrate sadistic-suicidal tendencies, even without having his text proofread.
There are people who claim that in this way poets are born. That’s not true. In this way journalists are born, the kind of authors who always receive the author’s fee for the publication of their rubbishy writing.
Time to answer the question: why does the editor edit?
The shortest answer is: because he can and is able to do it.
Please do not believe authors who claims that the editor edits because he can’t and is not able to do it. Those who state that are for sure the hapless envious ones who after numerous proofreadings lost the willingness to be active.
Cezary Konrad Kęder
Translated by Anna Liberska
Proofread by Kinga Witowska