How Not to Get Lost in Translation

In the fall of 2021, the American writer and translator Jennifer Croft published an essay in The Guardian that provoked a spirited conversation within the English-speaking literary world. Why, she asked, were translators expected to remain coyly, politely invisible, with their names more often than not cast off from book covers by publishers? This practice, she pointed out, overlooks the labor that goes into these books: It is the translators, after all, who “choose every word they will contain.”

Now Croft, who is perhaps best known for her English translations of the Polish Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk (she also works in Spanish and Ukrainian), is again weighing in on the ethics of translation, but this time she’s approaching the subject in the form of a novel. The Extinction of Irena Rey follows eight translators on a retreat located at the edge of a remote Polish forest. These characters have gathered to translate the latest novel by the glamorous Irena Rey, a “household name” in Poland. “We were all in love with her,” claims Emi, a Spanish-language translator from Buenos Aires. “We treated her every word as sacred, even though our whole task was to replace her every word.” The plan falls apart almost immediately when Irena unexpectedly disappears, leaving the translators in search of their author. Metatextual chaos ensues.

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On its surface, The Extinction of Irena Rey is a literary whodunit, with whiffs of the kind of semiotic absurdity seen in works such as Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, in which six “unfinished” characters, abandoned by the author who created them, look for someone to complete their story. Croft is extremely good at poking fun at the conventions and excesses of the literary world without getting too deep in the weeds: An early novel of Irena’s is “hailed by critics as both ‘scorchingly real’ and ‘chillingly allegorical,’” a nod to the ways in which blurbs and book reviews can be so over-the-top as to contradict one another. Irena herself, prone in the book’s initial pages to name-dropping and bragging about her eminence, is quickly brought down to earth: Standing inside Irena’s office, Emi is dismayed to see that “Our Author—likely the greatest author in the world—had organized her books, at least in part, by color.”

Lurking beneath the jokes, though, a deeper inquiry is at play, one concerning the tyranny of the English language in this age of porous borders and digital interconnectivity. The Extinction of Irena Rey is a book within a book: The text we are reading is, in fact, a novel that was written in Polish by Croft’s translator-heroine Emi, and subsequently translated into English by another one of the book’s characters—Alexis Archer, an American translator. “This has been the hardest book I’ve ever had to translate,” Alexis confesses in a note that opens the novel. Why soon becomes apparent, as Croft reveals a professional rivalry between Alexis and Emi that plays out through Emi’s original text and the progressively caustic footnotes Alexis adds to the English edition.

In a book that, for its first 50 or so pages, refers to its translator characters by only their target languages (English, French, Swedish, and so on) rather than their given names, the rivalry between Alexis and Emi—between English and Spanish—becomes an opportunity for Croft to enact a subtle criticism of the Anglophone world’s resistance to learning other languages, and of the global dominance of English. A passage toward the middle of the book, in which the translators liken themselves to an “invasive species” in the greater literary ecosystem, is illuminating: Is the ideal translator one who leaves behind no evidence of their presence? Or is a book, as Alexis argues, a joint process, in which the translator “takes that collaboration, and makes it intercultural”? But in the context of the novel, where all of the translators, save for Alexis, speak English in addition to Polish and their target language, it is hard to believe Alexis’s assertion that translation is a cultural exchange that benefits each language mutually. The power imbalance is too great: When it comes to global prestige and readership—not to mention book sales—the English language almost always wins.

At a pivotal moment in the novel, the characters have banded together to translate into English an excerpt from Grey Eminence, Irena’s latest, under the false impression that she will soon be named a Nobel Prize winner. “I was disgusted that we were all setting aside our own translations into our own equally important target languages in the service of the already hyperprivileged English-language one,” complains Emi. “It was outrageous that Alexis even expected us to have a working knowledge of English in the first place.” Her objections are, of course, in vain: As long as English remains the global lingua franca, an English translation is almost always necessary for a non-Anglophone writer to gain international recognition and prestige.

A tension has long lurked between the roles of writer and translator; the latter is often viewed by both publishers and the public alike as decidedly lesser. Croft’s novel is the latest entry in a conversation reimagining the role of the translator that has become prominent in contemporary literary circles. Works such as Don Mee Choi’s 2020 pamphlet, Translation Is a Mode = Translation Is an Anti-neocolonial Mode, and Kate Briggs’s 2017 book-length essay, This Little Art, have reexamined the history of translation, arguing that the translator’s work can be a tool of subversion and resistance. In the realm of fiction, the French writer Brice Matthieussent's 2010 novel, Revenge of the Translator, depicts a writer and his translator engaged in furious textual battles on the page.

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In The Extinction of Irena Rey, conflicts flare between writer and translator, but also among the translators themselves. Emi’s dislike of Alexis, and indeed the influence of the country she represents, grows excessively, manifesting in a humorous compendium of American stereotypes and exaggerations: Emi disparages Halloween as “a commercial U.S. holiday”; Alexis’s Polish is, in Emi’s eyes, barely intelligible; her smile is “unbearably symmetrical.” Alexis shares a foot size with Irena and at one point begins to wear the missing author’s shoes—English threatening to take over Polish. “I knew that what she really wanted was to civilize Irena’s text,” Emi thinks at a moment in which it becomes clear that Alexis is actually altering the content of Irena’s novel, “exactly as you would expect a U.S. usurper to do.” Croft seems to be having fun ventriloquizing these complaints, even throwing her own earlier work into the arena when Emi sniffs at “a strange book called Snakes and Ladders written for some reason in Argentine Spanish by the U.S. translator of Olga Tokarczuk.” (Croft’s Spanish-language autofictional novel, Serpientes y Escaleras, was published in 2019 as a memoir, Homesick, in English.)

Eventually, Irena reappears. This time, the author, rather than the translator, is guilty of usurping stories: Irena, it turns out, has been working on a project that makes heavy use of her translators’ lives, Alexis’s in particular. Here, the translator, normally an invisible figure who works behind the scenes, has become the subject of the author’s focus.

The novel is a form that has long been fascinated by its own conventions, but these ideas are rarely explored within the context of translation. In The Extinction of Irena Rey, no role is fixed: Alexis goes from “U.S. usurper” to unwitting subject, from interpreter to muse. By using Alexis as a stand-in for the English language, Croft has constructed a canny exploration of how even English, despite its unique dominance, might be influenced by its brushes with the mysterious process that is translation.