Task of the Translators
In this debut novel, a motley crew searches a forest for a missing writer.
IN GIST: OH my mushrooms, “The Extinction of Irena Rey” is incredibly strange, savvy, sly and hard to classify. I also couldn’t put it down.
At length: It’s nice to start a debut novel without a clue who its author is or why her pedigree should suit her so explicitly to the book she’s written.
THE EXTINCTION OF IRENA REY
By Jennifer Croft
Bloomsbury. 309 pp. $28.99.
But when the author is Jennifer Croft, the Booker Prize-winning translator of the Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, and the novel is about translators, I think you can’t avoid having some expectations. I certainly had mine.
For instance, this novel will foreground the vital work of translation and the various polemics associated with it. Check. This novel will be rich with translator jokes, some of which I’ll get, some of which I — as a lay reader — am not meant to get. Check. Maybe, too, this novel will lampoon the process of translation alongside the translators themselves. Check.
What I did not expect was that Croft’s debut would frolic so joyfully, so rigorously, in the absurd, the inane, and stay there from start to finish. Or that I’d end up frolicking with her. Reader, if you’re looking to get your heart thrashed, this may not be the novel for you. But if you’re up for a romp through a wilderness of ideas, innuendo and ecological intrigue (who knew there even was such a thing?), stay with me.
Anyone read “Sartor Resartus” lately? Thomas Carlyle’s extremely odd novel (the title is Latin for, roughly, “The Tailor Retailored”) is narrated by an editor who’s attempting to review — but really to dismantle or, alternately, inhabit — an even stranger book by a writer he knows and feels strongly about. “The Extinction of Irena Rey” reminded me immediately of “Sartor” in part because of its recursions. Here we have a translator (Croft), who’s written a novel narrated by a translator (Emi), a novel that is itself in translation and annotated by yet another translator (Alexis). Woe to the real-life translator who will have to take on this challenge in, say, Punjabi.
It’s a complicated setup — the Translator Retranslated — that creates for this novel multiple opportunities to pit translator against author in ways that are alternately funny and compelling, but that also lay bare tensions between the original work and what a translator brings to it. After all, translation is such a fraught exercise in interpretation, transformation, fidelity and cultural approximation, it might be the trickiest literary project there is.
The novel begins with a famous Polish author gathering her eight translators to her home on the edge of Bialowieza, a primeval forest that has been the site of controversial logging by the Polish government. The author, Irena, convenes the summit to begin translating her latest epic, “Grey Eminence.” Identified at first by only their languages (funny) — English, French, German, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish and Ukrainian — the translators know the ritual well. The entourage is powered by a kind of lust for “Our Author” and a loyalty that borders on pathology. Soon, though, precedent collapses: This time, Our Author is erratic, confounding and, it turns out, missing. She vanishes, tipping the novel into a mystery that cartwheels through a series of revelations, each more implausible than the last.
Does anyone call the police? Nope. No one does anything a reasonable person might be expected to do. These are translators! Helpless, hapless, bumbling humans who run around the forest trucking in mythologies and fungi, fencing with plastic swords, shrieking and shouting, and periodically trying to have sex with one another. It’s all very droll and increasingly bizarre as the novel proceeds.
But do not be fooled: None of this craziness feels frivolous. On the contrary, the novel’s staked in anxieties about climate change, extinction and the unbalancing of nature thanks to art. That is, art in the sense of artifice — whatever we humans create that always and necessarily comes at the expense of something else. The artist is a vampire, a cannibal, a consumer of everything and everyone, especially herself. So, too, are the translators, who are compromised, implicated and out for blood — less an alliance of the faithful than a madding crowd. All of this is set against the backdrop of a wild and ancient forest, whose network of giveand-take, of violence and renewal, is under attack.
It’s no wonder everyone in this climate is dysregulated. Or that what might read as farce or parody (of the horror and thriller genres, of the sanctity of translation) here feels stirring, urgent, batty.
“The Extinction of Irena Rey” is mad with plot and language and gorgeous prose, and the result is a bacchanal, really, which is the opposite of extinction. Such is the irony of art. To quote the novel’s epigraph, which could not be more apt: “And so, they forged their duality into a oneness, thereby making a forest.” This novel’s a forest. Go explore.
The novel is staked in anxieties about climate change, extinction and the unbalancing of nature.