I am reading Pamuk’s short essay “When the Furniture is Talking, How Can You Sleep?” this morning and thinking, wow — this would be excellent for reading to Sylvia. So I slip into my reading-aloud mode of scanning ahead and making minor edits in vocabulary and punctuation to make the piece more naturally fit my voice — though with this work there is very little for the editor to do, Pamuk (and his superlatively gifted translator Freely) is such a close fit for me. But I did catch one word that I thought my daughter would probably not understand, “attendant” as an adjective — well there were a couple of words that are probably not in her vocabulary, but all besides this one were in positions that seem to me easy to interpolate — and wondered what I would do with it if I were actually reading the essay to her. I might just skip over it, read “the sense of responsibility”, which I think would be just about as meaningful as “the attendant sense of responsibility”; I might try to substitute another word but I don’t think I could come up with one gracefully on the spur of the moment. I might try to restructure the clause but that probably would not come off well either. Or I might of course just read the sentence as it stood on the page.

(Another strategy: when I was reading “When Rüya is Sad” last night and hit the phrase “lying on the divan”, I read it as “lying on the divan (that means sofa), …” Today when I read past “divan” she asked to see where it said that, so I pointed it out to her, and she nodded.)