When the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for International Booker Prize in 2022, her translator, Jennifer Croft, relayed an intriguing observation to the committee: “Translation is a kind of apprenticeship in creative writing.” Already heralded for her accomplishments as a trilingual translator (along with Polish, she has translated texts written in Ukrainian and Spanish)—and, particularly as one of the two English translators for the now Nobel laureate Tokarczuk (the other being Antonia Lloyd-Jones)—Croft has recently garnered high praise for her efforts as a writer. The author of the 2019 memoir Homesick, she has expanded her purview into fiction, taking her first steps with a short story published in The Kenyon Review, and now fully embracing the mode with the publication of her debut novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024).
Wrought in lively prose and complemented by a dazzling suite of meta-textual hijinks set to the beat of a mystery novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey is an empathetic and comic investigation of the role of the translator within the literary project. It is particularly delightful for those with a brain for literary puzzles, Easter eggs, and books within books. Readers preferring more straightforward narratives won’t find one here.
Irena Rey is the primary character in The Extinction of Irena Rey. She is a world-renowned Polish author who is a perennial candidate for the Nobel in Literature. The publication of her newest novel, Grey Eminence, has provoked eight of her translators to travel to Irena’s house to simultaneously translate it together. But after an unsettling appearance by Irena that leaves her translators flummoxed, she disappears. Finding out why, though, is only half of Croft’s intent.
Literary translation is not an entirely uncommon motivator for a novel, but it’s not always a genre known for invention. Indeed, fiction about translation risks coming off as myopic, even fetishistic. So it’s no surprise that Croft’s premise does initially share plot similarities with other recent works of this category. There’s Ways to Disappear, a novel by Croft’s contemporary, Clarice Lispector translator Idra Novey, about a translator searching for her lost Brazilian writer; the French film Les Traducteurs, is a thriller about a group of translators also gathered to translate a writer’s work in tandem.
Were the novel to only be about Irena’s disappearance, one might call it derivative. In a nod to her “apprenticeship” translating one of contemporary literature’s more original writers, Croft has gained a talented for finding mentors. The book The Extinction of Irena Rey is most indebted to is Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire—a novel written as a scholar’s commentary to a poem and perhaps the urtext of recursive literature.
The lost writer almost feels beside the point in The Extinction of Irena Rey, which is an account by its English translator, an Arkansas-based American named Alexis Archer (in a whiff of auto-fiction, Croft is herself from nearby Oklahoma) of how the Extinction came to be written. An argument could be another way to describe the work. Archer was among the eight translators along with Rey’s Spanish translator, Emelia “Emi” Martini. The fictional Extinction of Irena Rey is written by Emilia, a chronicle of the events around that fateful translator’s summit. The pleasure of the text is where Alexis agrees and disagrees with Emilia as she translates the latter’s text, which is written not in Emelia’s native Spanish but in Polish for reasons the elude Alexis:
“The Extinction was written in Polish, but its Emilia was born and raised in South America, where she grew up in almost total ignorance of any of the languages of Central Europe. As a result… the spirit of Spanish comes whooshing through the walls of every paragraph… creating an atmosphere of wrongness. . . .”
Of course, Alexis is a character in Emelia’s Extinction, in a representation she finds displeasing: “It was uncomfortable to read a version of myself I couldn’t recognize. But translation isn’t reading. Translation is being forced to write a book again.” Alexis’s unabashed criticism extends to her author, Emilia—who also appears as the narrator of the text. Alexis feels that Emilia has used the conceit of autobiographical fiction to twist things toward injurious ends and plainly undercuts the prose itself in effort to salvage the damage she feels Emilia has done.
This fractious dynamic between Alexis and Emilia carries much of the novel’s forward motion, though part of its entertainment comes from Croft’s cheeky observations of translators and their discontents. A defender of translator visibility, the other six translators are initially referred to by the exclusively Western languages from which they translate —from Swedish, Ukrainian, French, Slovak, Serbian, and German — their real names withheld until much deeper in the novel. Their devotion to “Our Author” as they refer to Irena, is comical, slavish, and solemn: “We treated her every word as sacred, even though our whole task was to replace her every word.”
Irena is also a case study in the elusiveness of foreign authors. Her disappearance sparks a detective novel by people who are themselves literary detectives. It means that the obvious solutions to a missing person, like calling the police, are disregarded by Irena’s translators in favor of imaginative obtuseness. Maybe Russians have kidnapped her, suggests one translator. Maybe this is part of her writing process, offers another.
The daffy predicaments that ensue from eight people couped up in a small cabin without their guide, suggest a metaphor of the translation process itself: how much translators depend on direct contact with their author to achieve a pitch-perfect translation. The correspondence, the querying, the suggestions for words or concepts that have no analog in another language, this is what the translator tries to work out. Every translator will encounter a different set of problems meaning that every translation is different not just from the original, but from each other.
The search for Irena complicates and breaks down the translators’ perceptions of the mythic figure they have long revered. Their actions grow manic as they emerge, to differing levels, from their daze. They don’t just reside in Irena’s house, they subsume it, along with its a treasure trove of Chekhovian guns:
“The Czech chandelier was made of ten little skulls and too many bones for us to count. The house was filled with storied objects: dark portraits of her ancestors . . . a grand piano, never played; an old postcard in Esperanto… massive chests with cavernous keyholes… her home was our fortress, our defense against the world.”
The metaphors are lithe and continual: the translators go so far as to don Rey’s clothing, recasting the garments, like her words, over their own forms. “This is a cult,” one of the translators finally says. “Don’t any of you see that? How ridiculous this is?”
In the ensuing fracture of their unanimity, Emilia begins to assert herself. She doggedly defends “Our Author” from the increasing skepticism of the translators as they debate Irena’s motives. Particularly grating to Emilia is Alexis, who seems to thrive in direct proportion to the chaos and boldly describes sections of Irena’s new novel as “a little . . . overwritten.” Emilia compliments Alexis’s looks to an uncomfortable degree even as she portrays her as a conniving, disloyal tactician.
This is what makes the relationship between Emi and Alexis so volatile. They’re not just rivals, their differing accounts are a subjective deviation from an original objective event. As Alexis confronts and laments Emilia’s narration via her post-factum footnotes: “Here I have preserved her ridiculous word. (Trans.)” the reader must wrestle with the fact that the entire text is, in fact, Alexis’s translation. Thus, ultimate power has been hers all along. The author’s and translator’s shared desire to control the narrative becomes increasingly palpable as the text eventually describes breathtakingly untoward actions committed by both.
Just how much of Emilia’s work remains intact in this English translation? After all, Emilia notes that “[Alexis] kept calling for ‘clarifications’ as we worked [on Irena’s novel], or outright ‘improvements’: glosses, amendments, reworkings, even the occasional cut.” Without access to Emilia’s original, we are forced to draw our own conclusions from a rollicking interplay of an unreliable translation of an unreliable text.
Admittedly, some readers might find their suspension of disbelief taxed a bit too much at times: the translators’ actions are initially a bit too servile and, by the book’s close teeter toward the unbelievable. Croft has a reputation for ably juggling many literary occupations, but packing so much satirical metaphors on the niche world of translation means that some of laughter—to use another Nabokovian reference— will remain in the dark for non-practioners.
But that doesn’t mean it can’t be enjoyed by the general reader. The Extinction of Irena Rey is jarring, lush, and rife with subtextual intimations. In her consideration of the translator’s complex relationship with their source material, Croft exploration of the successes, risks—and, yes, betrayals—inherent in this crucial and underrecognized effort. It also kind of makes you want to read Irena’s novel, Grey Eminence—in Alexis’s English translation, of course.
