Translators take over the novel

Translators take over the novel: Review of The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft

by Kasia Szymanska

In fact, the translators become the actual co-authors of the novel on so many levels…

The Extinction of Irena Rey, by Jennifer Croft. Bloomsbury, 2024, 320 pp., $26.09. ISBN 9781639731701

Disappear—you can’t do that to your translators, since what can they do in an empty house without their beloved author? As it turns out, Jennifer Croft is clearly of a different opinion. In her second novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey, she leaves, with rather ruthless cruelty, eight helpless translators to their own devices after their Polish host, celebrity author Irena Rey, goes missing from her house on the fringes of the Białowieża primaeval forest. At first completely dependent on Irena’s leading hand and their author’s monopoly on interpreting the scenery around them, these translator guinea pigs now have to make sense of what’s going on and find their own way through this elaborately designed labyrinth. And these ‘book people’ may think they’ve already cracked everything thanks to Irena’s explanation of the surrounding reality in Polish. But as they come to learn, they can’t completely take their author’s unreliable storytelling for granted. Now completely lost in the thick of events, meanings and clues in the real world, they decide to take matters into their own, rather clumsy, hands. And the best they can come up with is to find their author in a Scooby Doo-like investigation through a series of mishaps, misunderstandings, and misalliances. What can possibly go wrong here?

At first glance, The Extinction of Irena Rey reads like a hybrid of several popular genres as Croft gracefully walks a tightrope between different forms, tropes and registers. First of all, it’s a thriller full of grotesque adventures and slapstick humour as individual translators get bitten by snakes, targeted by mounted archers, paralysed by snow, and troubled by unexpected visitors and disappearing items. The novel also tends to wax melodramatic, especially in the parts following the narrator’s love affair with another translator in the stranded group and the ensuing drama of rivalry, revenge and cabin fever. But because this intimate romance unfolds in the globalised age of social media, it also verges on a mockumentary which shamelessly makes us privy to the Tinder searches, WhatsApp groups and Facebook profiles of the parties involved. On a yet different level, The Extinction of Irena Rey reads like a Gothic novel rewritten for the Polish rural scenery that is teeming with symbolic lichens, fungi and amadous while also staying haunted by Slavic ghosts and other fantastical figures or objects. Mostly located on Poland’s eastern border, the sites explored by Croft inadvertently become enmeshed in a network of ideological and environmentalist agendas (in the style of Olga Tokarczuk’s ecofiction). We hear of resistance to the government’s logging of the Białowieża forest as well as the closure of the Polish-Belarussian border to stop the unauthorised migration into the EU, with both events finding their equivalents in Poland’s contemporary politics. Finally, the book also becomes a meta-crime story about the search for lost meanings and symbols in both translation and real-life occurrences—especially the meaning of ‘amadou’, but also random hoofs, chemicals and other treasures found in Irena’s house and the Białowieża forest. This strand is particularly redolent of two ‘metaphysical’ thrillers by Witold Gombrowicz, a Polish modernist writer on whom Jennifer Croft wrote her PhD dissertation, namely Cosmos (trans. D. Borchardt) and The Possessed (trans. A. Lloyd-Jones). Both set in secluded houses in the Polish countryside, these novels feature a series of inexplicable events and bewitched objects haunting their protagonists, who try their best to make some coherent sense of them, which itself turns into a parody of various familiar tropes and forms (such as the Gothic novel, the detective novel, and romance, to mention a few). 

These thematic frames and grand narratives somehow unfold in the background, even though they would otherwise tick all the right boxes of what a ‘great novel’ is supposed to include. And it is exactly the Great Novel, the most demanded genre of all, that Irena Rey is expected to write, that will eventually lead to her receiving the Nobel Prize, and that her translators are after ‘for the sake of our careers and hers’. This quest for the great novel is, however, sidelined in the wake of Irena’s disappearance and the fact that we’re now only left with the pesky translators who take over Croft’s novel. In fact, the translators become the actual co-authors of the novel on so many levels: one of them, the Argentinian translator Emi, is cast as the book’s narrator, while it is her story allegedly written in Polish that the American translator Alexis then translates into the English version we read. In it, Alexis employs the royal ‘we’ liberally and peppers the text with hilarious footnotes, points of clarification and markers of her disagreements and further changes to Emi’s narrative that she has taken the liberty of making; at the same time, both Emi and Alexis, alongside the other translators from the gang, form the plotline and propel key events in the novel. And while a great deal of its airtime may as well be devoted to their beloved missing author, the novel revolves around the so-called ‘author’s death’ in favour of the translators taking control of its creative content.

In underscoring the translator’s agency in the co-writing and rewriting process, The Extinction of Irena Rey situates itself on the map of contemporary novels about translators and creative works thematising the transformative power of translation. Among many others, I can think of Idra Novey’s well-received Ways to Disappear, which traced American translator Emma’s quest for her Brazilian author in the scorching heat of Rio de Janeiro, and Rebecca Kuang’s best-selling Babel, or the Necessity of Violence, which followed a fictitious group of translator outcasts and revolutionaries at Oxford in the midst of rampant British imperialism. In the same vein, a few ‘translator memoirs’ have brought to the table riveting stories about intersections between emotional aspects of language learning and translation process: in particular, Croft’s first novel Homesick and Daniel Hahn’s Catching Fire. In this sense, The Extinction of Irena Rey follows some of the trends in an English-language literary scene that recently seems to have reconsidered the position of translation by embracing its creative potential.

At the same time, by casting translators in leading rather than supporting roles, Jennifer Croft also practises as she preaches. Her postulates from the 2021 campaign to #NameTheTranslator become tangibly real throughout the course of the novel. First referred to only by the languages into which they translate from Polish (e.g. Spanish, Swedish, Serbian, Czech, etc.), the translators are eventually made known by their real names and become body and flesh. No longer presented like a dropdown list of languages powering Google Translate, the translators can now reveal their true names and also true colours. And as we learn these new names, we also start seeing their completely different personalities, backstories, opinions and erotic desires, as well as their inconsistencies and lies. This little trick shifts the entire reading perspective and is also quite symptomatic of Croft’s overall strategy in The Extinction of Irena Rey. What I feel Croft’s novel does skilfully is to smuggle quite serious and in-depth reflections on the nature of translation into a seemingly lightweight page-turner disguised as a farcical comedy of errors. It is truly fascinating to observe how some aspects of translation which I myself normally teach to students or write about to a relatively narrow (mostly academic) audience have found their way into this book. The Extinction of Irena Rey taps into several familiar areas such as translation activism, collaborative translation (here also ‘translator communities’), pseudo-translation (an original work of writing framed as a translation or, in other words, a ‘fake translation’ with no original) and eco-translation (environmentally-oriented reflection on translation). It is promising to think that the monolingual English-language readers who may otherwise have no interest in other languages or cultures will reach for this book and have such an enjoyable intensive course in literary translation. Unless, of course, they will not, and I’m being too optimistic in the first place as the book is already preaching to the converted?

But even if that’s the case, there are so many other takeaways for translation practitioners, scholars and aficionados alike. Translation may still seem to some a solitary activity, a belief that Croft’s novel wants to debunk by foregrounding the idea of ‘translator communities’ (inspired by Olga Tokarczuk’s practice of hosting her own translators at home and supporting them through her foundation as well as her translators’ collaborations and joint events). In her forest home, Irena is known to host translation summits to make her translators work together at a table for ten for six days a week and then read out respective passages over dinner. The ritual of Irena presiding over those translation summits is also interpreted by some as her urge to have full control over the existing translations of her novel (like other authoritative writers such as Günter Grass, Haruki Murakami or Milan Kundera). However, this order is clearly overturned when she disappears and leaves behind her lengthy magnum opus Grey Eminence, potentially a Great Polish Novel which is very much in demand (just like Tokarczuk’s Books of Jacob, casually mentioned as the final example in a footnote on page 19, and which Croft has incidentally translated). Still, the ingrained sense of community is what drives the translators to continue working together on the novel, first ‘reading it between the eight of us’ and then even helping Alexis to produce the English translation as fast as possible.

That the translators act together, even though not always in perfectly harmonious coordination, is underscored many times in the novel. Irena’s translators write letters calling for her release from arrest in their respective countries, they rescue one another and try to survive in her abandoned house, and they act in solidarity for common causes and against shared enemies. As the novel claims, translators ‘would always have these networks’, which is clearly something that distinguishes them from writers, who prefer to compete. On some level, this idealistic vision of translator communities could be taken with a pinch of salt (translators do tend to compete as well, even if it’s over a handsome guy as in this novel!), but it also jibes very well with the novel’s other themes. The extinction of Irena Rey as well as that of other species from minor cultures may be prevented only thanks to translation. By helping books to be reused and recycled into other languages, translation salvages those books from being read only by a narrow group of monolingual readers. In preventing wastefulness and exclusion, translation provides service to the cultural ecosystem as it instead fosters vegetative growth, just like mycelium in the Białowieża forest. The biodiversity of this otherwise barren and sterile landscape can be saved only by translator communities working together. I’m sure many readers will find themselves drawn to this little microcosm and will be tempted to join the charming translator commune in Irena Rey’s house. And I myself don’t have anything against following the translator’s lead this time round in the hope that this will somehow help us keep endangered languages, forms and species alive and kicking.

Kasia Szymanska is a translation scholar, critic and (occasionally) practitioner, who teaches literary translation at the University of Manchester. Her book Translation Multiples is forthcoming with Princeton University Press in 2025 and she has written about translation for Contemporary Literature, PMLA, Review of Democracy and Words Without Borders. She’s also a huge fan of forests and languages, as well as the crossroads of their meandering paths.

Originally published on Hopscotch Translation
Tuesday, March 12, 2024