Podcast Transcription: Jennifer Croft

Aug 7

Aug 7 Podcast Transcription: Jennifer Croft

This episode, we're celebrating women in translation month with translator + debut novelist Jennifer Croft, whose book The Extinction of Irena Rey came out this past March!
– Amali

Amali
Okay, today in honor of Women in Translation Month, I am joined by Jennifer Croft, long time translator of Olga Tokarczuk, with whom she won the International Booker Prize for the novel Flights.

Jennifer
Definitely.

Amali
She has translated Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, Federico Falco's A Perfect Cemetery, Romina Paula's August, and Pedro Mairal’s The Woman from Uruguay, among others. She's the author of the memoir Homesick, and her debut novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey, was published earlier this spring from Bloomsbury. Welcome, Jenny. Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast.

Jennifer
Oh my gosh, thank you so much for having me. I love Books Are Magic. It's fun to be here.

Amali
Yeah, and we are equally big fans.

So to get us started, I was wondering if you could just walk us through, briefly, how you got into the world of translating.

Jennifer
Well, let's see. I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, speaking only English. But my dad was a geographer. He was a professor of geography, and so when my sister and I were little, he would just show us globes and maps and atlases. And I think I just kind of got it into my head from an early age that going elsewhere might be a really good thing for me. My dad hadn't had the opportunity to actually travel to most of the places he was teaching about. I just started strategizing really early. I always loved reading. I wanted to be a writer since I was like, five. And I just thought, “well, I'm interested in learning languages anyway, so maybe I could combine these things and get paid to actually live abroad rather than just traveling.” And I think that would be a really enriching, in both senses, experience. Not that you get rich being a translator, but you know what I mean.

Yeah so it all kind of worked out that way. I first moved abroad in 2003. I got a full ride to go to the University of Warsaw, and it just kind of continued from there. And I was really committed at first to translating contemporary women writers. I was really interested in fiction above all, although I did also translate nonfiction and poetry. And I started working with Olga pretty early on and some other Polish authors and then expanded to Argentina, Ukraine a little bit. So that's, yeah, that's the whole story.

Amali
And so you mentioned that, you know, early on you were particularly drawn to working with women writers. And so I'm curious, as you've worked in this industry and this career over the years, what has the month of celebrating women in translation specifically, what has that come to mean for you?

Jennifer
Yeah, that's such an interesting question because I do think it has shifted a lot for me at least. Initially I just felt, and I think also growing up here in Tulsa had something to do with this, too, I felt I was often condescended to and not taken seriously as a young woman. And I saw that playing out on a much larger scale. And that has been shown statistically, right? That as tiny as the quantity of translated literature is in general, the amount of women's books, books written by women, not translated by women because the profession has historically [not] been women dominated, the percentage of women's writing that is translated into English is even tinier.

But I think one of the big things that has changed, of course, has been that we understand gender differently. Our understanding of gender is kind of constantly evolving. And so I definitely no longer think of myself as a translator of women's writing. I think there's such interesting, you know, work to be done with writers whose own genders are also kind of evolving. Like when I was on the jury for the The International Book [Awards] in 2020, we awarded the prize to Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, who was then a non-binary author who is now a trans writer, has dropped Marieke and is Lucas Rijneveld. And I think, yeah, we can do more work around that. And also just so much, there's so much stuff having to do with the identities of the translators, too, that we need to kind of be thinking about and talking about and other aspects of authors' identities. So I think Women in Translation Month is so important and it was such an essential first step, especially for those of us who are in the field or people who are in publishing and making decisions about what's getting published. Yeah, it just is an opening for us to do so much more. And obviously, booksellers play such a huge role in this too, in kind of determining what comes to the attention of the obviously interesting clientele that you're getting coming through the store.

Amali
Yeah. I mean, every August we always put together an in-store display for Women in Translation Month of, you know, books that have been written by and translated by women and non-binary folks. And so that's always just a great opportunity for us to highlight certain titles in our translated section, which really, I mean, I feel like we've seen a really interesting rise in popularity in our translated titles and that section as a whole. And so every time August rolls around, we get to kind of recreate that collection. And yeah, exactly as you said, highlight these authors and translators who may be going unread or may not be picked up by the average translated reader or general reader. And so yeah, that's what we really always look forward to. I feel like it always does really well. It's a chance for us to talk to the other folks on our staff about what they're reading, because we have a few very, very dedicated translated readers. And so it's always really cool to get to share new recommendations with them and stuff like that.

Jennifer
And that's so interesting also that, you know, like translated literature is its own genre in the US, whereas, I mean, like literary fiction or, you know, all of the other genres that get their own section are so marked. And within translated literature, you have all of that stuff and probably more. But I guess it just offers people who decide to read literature and translation a really exciting and often unexpected experience.

Amali
Yeah, I feel like horror is where we sometimes aren't sure which section to shelve the book into because there's so much really rich translated horror. Oh my gosh, there's so much inspiration from other cultures and the mythology and folktales that these writers pull from in their novels and their collections. And so I feel like, yeah, horror is kind of heavy in the translated section. And so sometimes we'll have to pull one out from that section and put it on our genre table to highlight the horror aspects of it. But that's always an interesting kind of back and forth that we're facing when having to specify a book by a certain category when it oftentimes fits into so many.

Jennifer
Yeah, that's so interesting. And of course, like translated children's literature, I'm assuming wouldn't be with the horror [books].

Amali
Right, yeah. Yeah, no, those are all in our kids' section.

So to get into your novel a little bit, just to recap really quickly for our listeners, The Extinction of Irena Rey follows eight translators who have been invited to stay at the house of world-renowned translator, Irena Rey. And chaos begins to ensue when she suddenly vanishes. As I said earlier, there's just so much in this novel. But one thing that really fascinated me is the fact that it's written as a piece of translation. So what were your thoughts behind that, your intentions behind having two narrators in a sense, one who's telling the story and the other who is translating that story to the reader?

Jennifer
Yeah, so I did-- I wanted to do a lot with the book. I kind of, like, through everything that I had been thinking about into this project, which is like the opposite of my first book, which is very neat and orderly, one of the things that I wanted to do, I'm very interested in, as we already discussed, kind of foregrounding identities of translators and reminding people or making people aware of the fact that the translator of the book is the person who decides every single word that you're reading when you read a book that has been translated. So they have– we have so much power that most people aren't thinking about as they're having their literary experience. And so I knew I wanted to have a duel between women in my book and I knew I needed the two ends of the spectrum of approaches to translation, which I think is like a broader ethical question as well. But the main narrator who has supposedly written this book in Polish is an Argentine translator into Spanish who believes in complete fidelity. And then her nemesis is the U.S. translator from Arkansas who believes in prioritizing the target audience as you're translating and doing a much freer version that will sell copies. And so sacrificing things that might not have been essential to the original text in favor of readability and/or literary greatness because she definitely has this literary confidence that Emi, the main writer, does not have.

As I was starting to work on it, I was just feeling like, “okay, they're gonna be arguing on stage or whatever.” But I also think that they, I think we need to really reinforce at every step of the way the fact that the translator has this power. So I had my main narrator decide to write her book in Polish and ask her nemesis to translate it into English. And that allowed me to have all of these conversations between them on the page. So Alexis, the translator into English, is always interjecting with these totally preposterous footnotes that, of course, you could never actually get away with, including in a translation. I mean, some of them are more academic occasionally, but most of them are like, “this is so dumb. I can't believe she's saying this.” But it just makes it so that it’s constantly bringing you out of Emi's story and making you feel like you have an unreliable narrator, you have an unreliable translator, you kind of can't really ever get your footing completely. And I wanted that fun sense of destabilization as you're reading just to kind of show all of the things that the translator is doing behind the scenes that you're not aware of when you're just reading the book.

Amali
Yeah, and I feel like there are so many disorienting elements to this story while the translators themselves are all kind of trying to figure out what's going on, where their author is, who to trust, everything like that. And so, yeah, exactly as you said, having those little interjections kind of, in a way, helps to instill that disorientation in a way, but also brings some levity to it. I found myself laughing out loud a lot while reading this novel and I'm curious, did that humor come naturally to you or to the relationship between these two translators? Were you approaching it with a really intentional awareness or did that humor and sarcasm just kind of come up naturally in a way?

Jennifer
I think probably a little bit of both. I wanted to write about such serious and enormous questions, just raise serious, enormous questions having to do with climate change and biodiversity loss and things like that and deal with some forms of violence and whatever. I felt like in order for me to be able to do that, I needed to balance it out with a lot of humor. And I think that's just the kind of book that I would want to read. And so that's the book that I wrote.

Initially the footnotes were not such a big part of the book. And then Alexis kind of took on more and more of her own voice. And I became increasingly fond of her. I mean, she is ridiculous, but I also grew to love her. There came a point in the editing process where my editor, Daniel Lodell, who's a wonderful novelist in his own right, had to finally say like, “okay, no, you're not allowed to do any more footnotes. We get it. It's fine.” Which I'm glad he did. I was definitely writing a whole other book from Alexis's perspective.

Amali
My gosh, yeah, I'll read it.

Speaking of which, did you have a favorite character in this cast? You know, aside from Alexis and her very large presence, did you have a favorite that you really enjoyed writing the most or just spending time with and developing?

Jennifer
So, the French translator who is kind of torn between Alexis and Emi – she was Emi's closest friend. But now that Emi seems to be kind of losing it, she is also friends with Alexis. She has a much more balanced approach to translation and view of what's going on around them. And I found her very soothing and stabilizing and this whole thing. And also the Serbian translator who has some kind of a shocking personal discovery early on in the book.She is one of my favorites as well. I think the two of them are like healthy influences for all of the insane people that surround them.

Amali
You always got to have that balance.

There's also an interesting aspect where for the first part of the book, all of the translators are identified by their nationality, right? So they're all referred to by French, Serbian, English. Is this kind of simultaneous personal and national representation something that you've experienced? Where did this inspiration come from?

Jennifer
Yeah, I don't think it's something that I've personally experienced. The character of Irena Rey, who is obviously like just a big black hole in the book, you don't really get to know her, but we do have a sense that she's a little bit of a diva. She's pretty self-absorbed. And so I thought it would make sense for her to see these human beings through this lens of, you are, “this is your utility to me, you speak English, so I'm just gonna refer to you as English.” And then I thought it would be fun to have them kind of shed these very limiting shells that she's put them into.

Amali
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And yeah, I mean, I feel like it's so fascinating kind of seeing, watching the, not downward spiral, I don't think that's the right term, but just devolvement into just some kind of, yeah, they're just, yeah, stripping themselves of all of these rules and regulations that their author has kind of put on them in this house and in doing so they also get to explore more of the outdoors and this forest, the Białowieża forest, this very, very ancient forest in Poland, is a huge part of this novel and almost feels like a secondary character at times with all of the secrets and the history that it holds.

While reading this, and after, I found myself thinking a lot about the ways in which nature attempts to communicate with us, the humans inhabiting it, and the consequences that occur when we fail to listen. And there's that level to it, there's [also] the level of talking about fungi and mycelium and the way that those organisms communicate with each other. There's so much there.

So I wanted to ask just kind of generally what the nature in this book means to you. And just what was on your mind when approaching it? I know you've talked about reading Merlin Sheldrake’s, Entangled Life. What were some of your inspirations and yeah, just your thought processes behind the nature in this novel?

Jennifer
I had been wanting to write something, I thought it would be nonfiction about translators' relationships with each other. Obviously translators' relationships with others can be fascinating, but I just wanted to get rid of that authority figure and explore what would happen in a situation where in theory you wouldn't have those hierarchies. At around the time that I was thinking about how to do that, I went to the Białowieża Forest. I went in 2017. I had been there before, but I went again because the Polish government had started logging in the forest. And there was a lot of outcry from environmental organizations around the world because this is the last remaining original forest in Europe, you know, whatever “original” means in this context, but it is an extraordinarily powerful place and some creatures who live there are extinct everywhere else in the world, animals and plants and fungi. It's an exceptional place and I would certainly want to protect it and not have people cutting down all of the trees in the national park on any pretext. So I went to kind of see for myself what was going on. It was a little bit hard to figure out what the scale of the damage was. And everyone was saying different things about what was happening and why.

And while I was there, I was going through the strict reserve, which is the most protected part of the National Park, with a National Park worker who pointed out this thing on a tree trunk to me and it looked like a severed horse's hoof. And I was fascinated by the thing he started telling me about its history. So it was this almost universally used tool until the, I guess the end of the 19th/beginning of the 20th century. People used it to start fires. It can also be used to replace leather. Now it's being investigated as a potential replacement for certain construction materials and plastics. So I was like, “wow, what an amazing, incredible, versatile creature that I had never heard of before.” The product, like once you harvest the fungus, it's called Amadou, which was my original title for the book and which is the fictional title of the book within the book, Emi's original title. I also just think it's such a beautiful word, “amadou”. It sounds like it has a maternal feeling to it with “ama”.

In any case, so I loved the word. I loved the fact that there was this thing that was once so common and basically went extinct as a human tool and concept once matches were invented, basically. The fungus itself was over-harvested to near extinction. And then the fungus itself was interesting to me because it starts out as a parasite and it preys upon kind of sick trees. It kills them and then it's, the fungus becomes the decomposer, so it enriches the soil for the rest of the forest. It makes the ecosystem possible. And I thought that's an interesting metaphor for translation because it's not exclusively like “rah rah translators are saving the world, we're wonderful, everything we do is so noble.” I wanted to also reckon with this idea that we are also taking the place of other languages, other voices. When I translate, I have a Word Document open with the original sentences that I just kind of type over. So I'm like the parasite initially, but then I hope that obviously in this case the original texts are still there, but just not in my document. But hopefully the end result is that the literary and cultural ecosystem is enriched.

So anyway, that was how the combination of the translators and the forest happened. And that was how the fungal influence began and then, yeah, in 2020 Merlin Sheldrake's book came out. I loved it. Would recommend it to anyone listening to this podcast who hasn't read it, although I suspect most people already have. Also, he reads the audiobook himself and it is so lovely. Yeah.

Amali
So we can’t celebrate this fantastic literary month without giving our listeners some great reading recommendations!

I’ll start us off with the novel Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto. This novel is such a touching, earnest story of connections through tragedy and the love of found family. It’s full of melancholy and compassion and the most beautifully simplistic language. It’s perfect for anyone just dipping their toes in the world of translated literature.

Up next, here’s Alexa with her recommendation!

Alexa
My recommendation would be Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri. She talks about what it is to have many languages you speak and what is a “mother tongue” and what languages feel like home and languages treat you like you’re home.

Tiffany
Hey it’s Tiff and I’m here to tell you that you should read Tenderloin by Joy Sorman. This book is simply a meat fever-dream. You need to read it.

Amali
What were some of the other literary inspirations or other pieces of media, books, movies that you were consuming while writing this novel?

Jennifer
Yeah, so it also is, I don't know what the word is exactly, it's kind of an homage to a Polish- Argentine writer named Witold Gombrowicz, who has recently been re-translated in his entirety. So I figured, he's an author I'm really fascinated by, a very weird and very wonderful imagination. And I figured I'm not going to get to translate him anytime soon, so I'm just going to write a novel that is like in conversation with him somehow. He died many decades ago, so he's not going to be able to respond. But yeah, so it has to do with him. And of course, he is the embodiment of this Polish-Argentine cross that I do in my book.

Alexis Archer, the translator from Arkansas, is somewhat based on Alexis from Schitt’s Creek, the wonderful Canadian television show.

Amali
That makes so much sense, I just have to say.

Jennifer
She's just such a wonderful character. I feel like she could be in everything.

Amali
Yeah.

Jennifer
All of the books that I've ever translated have influenced the way that I write and the way that I think about literature to Federico Falco as an Argentine writer whose writing I really am in love with. And I think especially like his character development. He also is very committed to writing about landscape and nature and kind of human distortions of the Earth, which I think is a really interesting subject.

Amali
Yeah!

I just have a few short final questions to wrap this up. First off, what are some of your go-to translated literature recommendations for new readers or for folks who are trying to make their way into the world of translated literature?

Jennifer
One book that I really love, and I think everyone I've recommended it to has also loved it, is called Vernon Subutex [1]. It's by a French writer named Virginie Despentes. It's translated into English by Frank Wynne. It is so brilliant, and I feel like it has something for everyone. It's written in this extremely manic prose in so many different voices set in Paris, and it kind of covers like all of the socioeconomic levels of Paris, races, genders, interests. It has a lot to do with music. But it's really like, it's a virtuoso performance on the part of Despentes and Wynne. And it's just absolutely spectacular. And I feel like it really should have received more attention than it got when it came out in 2018. So that is always my first recommendation.

In general, Frank Wynne is such a wonderful translator from French. Emma Ramadan is such a wonderful translator from French. Anton Hur is really single-handedly, he's not actually single-handedly, there are a number of very talented Korean translators, but he has an amazing output lately of translations into English from Korean. Jeremy Tiang is a wonderful translator from Chinese [to English]. My husband, so I'm not biased at all, Boris Dralyuk is an amazing translator, particularly of poetry from Russian [to English], which I feel like is less celebrated. I feel like translated poetry is not getting the same attention boost that translated prose has been getting.

Amali
Yeah, my gosh, we hosted Olga Ravn last week and it was really fascinating to hear her talk about the process of finding a translator for My Work, specifically because it had all of these various genres within it, you know, essays, poetry, hospital logs, all of these different things. So she talked about how she was really adamant that her translator needed to know how to translate poetry specifically because it has such specific, not necessarily rules, but just limits and constraints in terms of its form and how it reads in one language to the next. So that was, yeah, really fascinating to hear her talk about.

Jennifer
Yeah, I think those constraints are really interesting. And I think those of us who focus on prose are spoiled because if we lose something on one page, we can compensate for it elsewhere in the book, and you can't really do that within a poem in the same way. And my husband, Boris, is incredible at translating rhymed verse. And I am just totally bewildered by his ability to do that, even by people's ability to write that, it's just sort of baffling to me. But yeah, so he is great at that.

I think I would just recommend that people start with something that looks interesting. And then if you do like the translation, just stick with that translator, because oftentimes the translator is also kind of curating their own ideal reading list by choosing the books that they translate. So it's a good way to choose.

Amali
Yeah.

And the last thing I have to ask, of course, is what's next? What project are you working on now or are you planning to embark on in the future?

Jennifer
So I just finished translating a book by Federico Falco, whom I just mentioned, called The Plains. It's a novel. And I think it's coming out later this year. It may come out early next year.

(Editor’s note: It comes out October 15th, 2024!)

And I am working on my own book, which is about postcards and pregnancy, sort of like postcards from a difficult pregnancy. I had twins two years ago. And I actually started thinking about postcards a lot during the pandemic for similar reasons, like in both situations I was very confined and isolated and postcards, which I've always loved, were my one remaining tangible connection to the world. So I started going through my– at the time in 2020, I had like a non-collection, it was just old postcards I had sent to my grandparents. And since then I've started picking things up at flea markets and investigating the history of the postcard and it's really fascinating. So I'm excited to be doing that. I do have two-year-old twins, so let's keep our expectations low for when that gets finished, but I'm trying!

Amali
Well, this is so lovely to sit down and chat with you about all things Irena Rey and translated literature. We can't wait for what's coming up next. So again, thank you so much, Jennifer, and we'll look forward to seeing you for the next one.

Jennifer
Thank you!

You can get your copy of The Extinction of Irena Rey over on our website!

Sources Mentioned:
Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft
A Perfect Cemetery by Federico Falco, translated by Jennifer Croft
August by Romina Paula, translated by Jennifer Croft
The Woman from Uruguay by Pedro Mairal
Homesick by Jennifer Croft
The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft
The International Book Awards
Author Lucas Rijneveld
Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri
Tenderloin by Joy Sorman
Author Witold Gombrowicz
The sitcom Schitt’s Creek
Vernon Subutex 1 by Virginie Despentes, translated by Frank Wynne
Translator Emma Ramadan
Translator Anton Hur
Translator Jeremy Tiang
Translator Boris Dralyuk
Author Olga Ravn
My Work by Olga Ravn
The Plains by Federico Falco