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Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar in for Alison Stewart. Jennifer Croft is an award-winning translator known for her work with Polish Nobel Prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk. It's fitting that her debut novel focuses on a group of translators working on the new masterpiece from a fictional Polish novelist, Irena Rey. The translators arrive from all over the world. We're talking Argentina, Sweden, Serbia, France, to meet up on the edge of a Polish forest, a real forest in Poland called the Białowieża Forest.

They meet there for what they think will be a translation session for their author's latest work, but Irena is acting strange. Then one day she disappears entirely leaving behind her new manuscript. The translators have to figure out where their author has gone, but they also can't help but work on the new translation at the same time. There is a meta element to this story. We are told that the novel we are reading was written originally in Polish by one of the book's translator characters named Emi, but that original writing was then translated into English by Alexis, the American translator character, and that is what we're reading.

Emi and Alexis, they don't like each other very much, and it shows in the writing and in the passive-aggressive translation footnotes from Alexis. The New York Times calls the novel a wondrous babble of ideas and language. The title is The Extinction of Irena Rey. Jennifer Croft, welcome to the show.

Jennifer Croft: Oh my gosh, thank you so much for having me. That was an incredible summary and amazing pronunciation of the forest.

Kousha Navidar: I practiced that for a little bit of time because it was important. How was that pronunciation?

Jennifer Croft: It was perfect. That has never happened before [unintelligible 00:01:56]

Kousha Navidar: Well, it is such a gripping novel and there's so much delicious wordage to go through. As a translator, which you are, when did you first know that translation might be something that you wanted to pursue?

Jennifer Croft: I was pretty young, I was really interested. My father was a professor of geography. I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is where I am sitting, talking to you now. We didn't really have the opportunity to travel that much, but he would sit my sister and me down, and we would just spend hours looking at maps, and atlases on a globe. I was always fascinated by words and language.

At first, that was just English. I would write little travel stories about a butterfly named Sparkle, who flew all over the world. Then I realized there are other languages out there and I started studying Russian on my own. Once I was in college, I was encouraged to combine those interests, writing in English and other languages to begin translating. It all started there.

Kousha Navidar: Wow. You said Sparkle the Butterfly, is that right?

Jennifer Croft: Yes, Sparkle the Butterfly.

Kousha Navidar: How big is the anthology of Sparkle the Butterfly?

Jennifer Croft: I really need to go through those thoughts. I now have two children who are almost two years old, I feel like they would really enjoy Sparkle's adventures.

Kousha Navidar: It sounds great. Polish plays such a big role in this book. How did you become interested in that language?

Jennifer Croft: I went to graduate school to do an MFA in literary translation. I was planning on continuing to do Russian but there was this really interesting coup that happened in the fabric department where I was going over the summer, right before I started. All of the Russian professors quit or took early retirement or whatever. The only thing that was left was Polish or Slavic languages. I guess it was meant to be because I didn't have much choice. It ended up being wonderful.

I moved to Warsaw right after my MFA and then to Kraków. I was committed to translating contemporary women's fiction. I did also a little bit of poetry, but I had this sense of mission and wanting to collaborate with women whose work I loved. There was just so much happening in Poland, not to say that there wasn't in Russia as well or in Russian-speaking countries like Ukraine, but I found Olga Tokarczuk really quickly along with a number of other people. It was an exciting discovery, for sure.

Kousha Navidar: Olga Tokarczuk is mentioned a few times in this novel when you discuss the Polish literary landscape. How much was Olga an influence for the character of Irena Rey?

Jennifer Croft: One of the things that I was interested in exploring, and I felt like this was a great space for me to just raise a lot of questions for myself, and I'm interested in celebrity and our social relationships, which I think is a term that might apply to some of the relationships between translators and writers where the translator is thinking about the writer all the time, and so deeply analyzing the types in an almost psychoanalytic way. The author may or may not even be aware of the translator's existence, so I thought that was really fascinating.

I wanted to think too about celebrity writers who are very charismatic because that's a question that remains elusive for a lot of people like, what is charisma exactly? I think the fact that it is indefinable is almost an essential part of it. The only thing that Olga Tokarczuk has in common with the very wild, potentially deranged Irena Rey is charisma. Olga is just almost magnetic. She's great at reading, she's also really wonderful at one one-on-one interactions with readers and I think that also translates into particular kind of writing where you feel like she is engaging with you on the page in this magical, personalized way.

Kousha Navidar: That charisma, we see bear out through or manifest rather through the personality traits of the translator group that we've learned about. There's a meta element to the novel. The conceit, as we talked about in the intro, is that the book we're reading has actually been translated into English by one of the characters in the book, the English translator, Alexis. How early in the process did that framework come to you?

Jennifer Croft: One of the other things that I wanted to do with this book was dramatize some of the most important issues, I think, are facing literary translators today and the publishing industry in general. I feel like there's been a lot of reticence about publishing translated fiction, whether it's because editors or publishers think that readers are not going to be interested in other places, or whether it's actually about translation in this sphere that translation basically ruins whatever is special about the original text.

I wanted to fight against that, and I also wanted to just foreground translators as interesting human beings who are also very smart, very creative but who do, in fact, have the power to do whatever they want in a translation. In addition to showing them translating and making these really important decisions about this really important book that they actually think is going to save the world and prevent further ecological catastrophe, I wanted to remind the reader constantly that when you read a translation, every single word you're reading was chosen and written by not the person whose name has traditionally been on the cover, which is the author, but by the translator.

That's why I have Alexis, the arch nemesis of our narrator, Emi, interjecting all the time and undermining her narrative and saying like, "Oh, this is so dumb. It didn't happen this way." She doesn't even really speak Polish properly, that's why I'm putting it as absurd, et cetera. I also just really came to love Alexis. She's so obnoxious that I feel like you just have to embrace her at some point. I feel like her interventions grow more frequent as the book comes to time because of that.

Kousha Navidar: The artistry that you're talking about translation is so interesting. For listeners that might think the idea of translating is, for instance, taking a word in Polish and then writing it in the English version, it sounds like you're saying, no, there's a lot more that goes into actually translating. Can you give some examples of the kinds of creative choices a translator has to make when working on a novel?

Jennifer Croft: Yes. Of course, it depends on the language of the particular project, but I would say that in general, in every case, the translator is really taking apart sentence after sentence and rebuilding. We're keeping something essential, but that essential thing-- like when we're talking about charisma, that essential thing is very hard to put your finger on. Is it a voice? Is it a tone? Is it a mood? There's something that captivates us about the original text, hopefully, if it's a good book. We want to bring that over to the target language, which is English.

Also, we have to change. We literally have to change everything else that's going on on the page in every sentence. For me, it's a whole process of immersing myself in the book, or the short story, or the poem, and really trying to feel it as fully as possible throughout the whole body. Then I come back up for air and I write this new thing. There's no question that it is a different work than the original. It's a collaborative work. It's like having a baby with someone or something like that. The child is neither the father nor the mother, whatever. It is its own creature. That's how I think of it.

Kousha Navidar: When you're dealing with idioms in a language that you have to retranslate a common phrase or a saying and it just doesn't land, or it doesn't even exist in the new language you're trying to translate to, at what point do you just go for another idiom completely or try to work within the word that was already existing? How do you approach that?

Jennifer Croft: That's such a great question. I think there are so many fun ways to work with that. This is one of the reasons why I also always insisted on living in the country that I was translating books from. I lived in Argentina, for example, for seven years and I hope to go back with my family. It's important to pick up on all of those obviously, and to know the spirit in which they are most frequently used, and to think about the ways a particular character might be using them. If there isn't an equivalent, if there isn't a similar phrase or idiom, you could do so many things.

You can put something else that has to do with that topic elsewhere in the book. I love finding other places to compensate for any type of loss like that. I think we have the luxury to do that in fiction, obviously, more than we do in poetry. Otherwise, I do like to find idioms in English. There are so many fun idioms in English too. You could almost always find something that can mean the same thing, even if it's said differently. I feel like German idioms often get translated liberally, and they can really call our attention to language itself, which can be really productive. If they should sound humorous, then that's a great way to do it. It just depends on the particular project.

Kousha Navidar: At the risk of putting you on the spot, your comment about the German idioms that are fun, but often translated literally, can you think of a specific example of that?

Jennifer Croft: I wish I could. I knew as I was saying that that you were going to ask me. We all have these long German words that don't get translated also, and I feel like that has to do with this particular relationship that English has with German, where we think that there's some kind of quasi-scientific wisdom in these lengthy and slightly odd-to-use formulations.

Kousha Navidar: Listeners, if you have a German word that you think, "Oh, this idiom is something that I love," you can send it to us on Instagram or on X. We're @allofitwnyc. We'd love to see what you come up with. This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar, in for Alison Stewart. We're talking to Jennifer Croft, the author of The Extinction of Irena Rey. It'd be great to go into the devotion to the author of the author character in this book. A lot of the translators, like you mentioned, Jennifer, are incredibly devoted to her. They're even reverential.

At one point, they built a shrine to her. They follow whatever bizarre rules she sets like not talking about the weather. What's something you really wanted to satirize about the process of translation or the relationship between translators and their authors through this novel?

Jennifer Croft: I think I wanted to satirize our relationships in general with celebrities. Certainly, there are these highly cultural celebrities like, I don't know, opera singers, painters, and writers, for sure fall into the category who are very, very pampered at a certain point in their career. That may also be influencing what they're capable of writing as their circumstances change and everyone around them constantly [unintelligible 00:14:11] them, which may be happening in the case of Irena Rey. I was hoping also by setting all of these events in this very, very wild place, which is the last remaining primeval forest in Europe, that we could also think about those types of relationships in other environmental contexts, and think about how we privilege these almost arbitrarily-selected single figures over networks and communities and teamwork. That would actually be so much more sustainable and so much healthier for all involved, whether in the arts or having to do with the planet.

Kousha Navidar: How unusual is it for translators of all the different languages to come together to work on a book at the same time? Have you ever worked in a setting like that?

Jennifer Croft: I haven't actually worked in a setting like that. It's not so common. It has happened. Whether it's organized by the authors themselves. Günter Grass, a German author did that. It can also be organized by publishers, or it can be organized by the translators, which happens with Haruki Murakami translators who get together very regularly to work on his new books, but he's not dead. That's an important decision that they made and that they couldn't enforce.

I have met Olga Tokarczuk's other translators, a number of them anyway, and have really benefited from being in touch with them as I'm working on her books, especially The Books of Jacob, which is a 1,000-page historical epic that contains a lot of really rich research. It was so wonderful to talk to some of the other people who are a little further along than I was and find those sources with them, or have them help with translating particular historical idioms like you asked about, et cetera. I have benefited from those connections, although I haven't actually sat down in a house with other translators before.

Kousha Navidar: Have you thought about the fact that this book, which is based on a translator being translated by a translator, is then going to be translated itself into many other languages? What do you make of that? Is your work as a translator informing how you want that process to work out?

Jennifer Croft: Probably, yes. I do think about that pretty carefully. I do think some of the works that we think of first when we talk about world literature, like Murakami, for instance, there is this interesting balance of universality with the hyperlocal, but there is this way in which really popular world writers may not be so precious about their language, which may lend itself to translation a bit more. I think that for so many reasons, I have created a text that is impossible to translate in a traditional process. It is being translated, for example, into Spanish and Polish, which are obviously, two of the most important languages in the book.

Our narrator, Emi, is from Argentina, which is a very different kind of Spanish from Spain, which is the Spanish of the translator. I think that's going to be really fascinating. I'm glad it's a different kind of Spanish because that adds another layer to everything. She will probably have to write her own frame narrative about how we ended up with this text in a totally different-- Why did Emi not just write a new version [unintelligible 00:17:58] in her native language? There has to be some additional mystery that I won't control. I will be so happy and excited to see what she does with that.

Kousha Navidar: Wow. You had mentioned the forest a little earlier. Irena has decided to live very close to this large Polish forest and is very concerned about the fate of the forest. It's a real forest, as we said at the top of the interview. The forest's name is Białowieża Forest. It's a real forest in Poland. You mentioned the word primeval. What's so special about this forest?

Jennifer Croft: The forest is really special. I do want to think about that term, primeval or original. The idea is that this is the only remaining place in Europe that hasn't really been tampered with by humans, although in fact, human beings have been living there for thousands and thousands of years. We have been interacting with the forest, we just haven't completely cut it down and replanted or not. Because it has been mostly left intact, it is host to so many species of plants and animals, and fungi that no longer exist anywhere else. Just that density, I think, makes it really, really powerful.

You step into this forest and-- I don't know. I always just feel wilder there. I feel completely out of control. I feel like such a tiny part of such a huge and wonderful ecosystem. It's really humbling and a little bit frightening and also just really exhilarating. I knew I wanted to write about the forest, also to allow the translators themselves to go wild, but just to let people know about the existence of the forest, which is unfortunately, not as guaranteed as one would hope.

Kousha Navidar: What a perfect word to describe that, to let the translators go wild. I think that was very precise. Is that also where your interest in writing about climate change and ecological justice, in general, came from for this novel, or was that before you decided this is the forest for the setting?

Jennifer Croft: I'm not sure. I happened to go there at a time when the government was logging in the national park for regions that are contested. I think to be there and to see that happening allows for a much more visceral and immediate--

I live in Oklahoma where temperatures are very obviously rising. I teach undergraduate creative writing. Right now I'm teaching a nature writing class, and my students very fascinatingly, will not address climate change in their work. [unintelligible 00:20:52] it feels like it's just almost a survival necessity for them that they just can't acknowledge that they are-- They tell me that they're just not aware of it on a day-to-day basis. They're not feeling it.

I think that can happen to a lot of us. I feel like I am constantly thinking about this, but maybe not. Maybe I walk out the door and I think like, "Oh, how great. It feels like summer, even though it's early March." I see a lot of flowers in my yard. Wonderful. Whereas when I was in the forest seeing all these beautiful trees crashing to the ground and just imagining that these trees were the homes of so many beautiful birds and so many interesting insects and so many fungi that maybe even have yet to be fully identified. Is really heartbreaking and hard to, while impossible not to acknowledge.

Kousha Navidar: That reminds me of a part of the book that I think listeners would be super interested in. It's with Irena's disappearance, even when it becomes clear that she is missing, this group really does not want to call the police. It's almost like trying to push away the reality, like what we're talking about with climate change. Can you go more into why you made that choice in the plot, for them to not pursue the police?

Jennifer Croft: Yes. I think that has to do also with another topic that I'm interested in, which is what is the difference between a visitor and an invasive species? What is the difference between a non-native species and an invasive species? At what point also does the translator pose a threat to the language or the culture being translated from? I wanted them to be a very isolated foreign group in this very particular village, which is adjacent to the forest, which is also a really fascinating mix of different cultures.

Tata influences and Jewish influences. Ukrainian and Belarusian, very active influences almost doesn't really feel fully Polish to me. There was always this question of, could they rely on local human support networks? They seem to consistently come to the conclusion that they can't also, because there is some xenophobia in the air in 2017, and they are frightened of the reactions of some of the villagers to their presence.

Kousha Navidar: The two minutes that we have left, I thought it'd be great to end this with a text that actually we just received during our conversation from a listener. The text says, "I'm reading Irena Rey now, and I'm so blown away. Can't put it down. I wasn't aware that the author was a translator for Olga Tokarczuk of whom I'm also a huge fan. It makes even more sense and will be a richer read." When you hear texts like that, do you have any sense of what you would hope readers of this novel walk away with understanding about translation?

Jennifer Croft: That already is the biggest part of it. The fact that this reader didn't know that I had translated these books that they already really love. Now they do know that, and maybe now when they read another author, they're going to maybe pay attention to who that collaboration is with. That was the main goal.

Kousha Navidar: Wonderful. Readers that you've interacted with so far, have they taken anything away from the novel that surprised you or delighted you that you weren't expecting?

Jennifer Croft: There have been so many fascinating reviews that put this book in conversation with so many wonderful novels and plays. I haven't really read any of them. Basically, I have just been beginning to assemble them from my local bookstore. I'm just going to spend the next few months doing a class on my own novel. It's been such an incredible luxury to just be thinking about this as part of a literary ecosystem.

Kousha Navidar: In that ecosystem being the person now who has brought it forth from the origin versus translation, how has that experience been different for you, if at all?

Jennifer Croft: It is different. Although I think the experience of publishing a number of translations has really prepared me well emotionally for things like this conversation, which can be nerve-wracking, I feel like I am just part of a much larger and really important conversation. That's an important perspective to maintain.

Kousha Navidar: To wrap it all up as you think about that ecosystem with having translators and original authors, what do you hope that that symbiotic relationship would look like?

Jennifer Croft: I hope that in general, in the arts and also elsewhere, we begin to really reevaluate our relationship with collaboration as opposed to searching for an individual genius that we need to venerate, which I think is toxic in so many ways.

Kousha Navidar: We've been talking to Jennifer Croft, the book, The Extinction of Irena Rey. It's about translations, translators a beautiful forest in Poland, and a cast of characters that have a lot to say. Jennifer, thank you so much for joining us.

Jennifer Croft: Thank you so much for having me.