A novel about translations becomes a thrilling cross between Lost and Agatha Christie.

Imagine a forest, and then imagine a house in that forest. The forest is a forest in Poland, and the house belongs to a very famous writer. The kind of writer who's in the running for the Nobel Prize every year. Her name? Irena Rey . But what's happening in that isolated house, in an equally isolated forest? Eight translators have come from different parts of the world to translate her latest novel at the same time. Translators are just "languages." when they arrive—they call each other English, German, French, Ukrainian, Serbian, Slovenian, Swedish, and Spanish—but as the confinement progresses—the meeting is the author's idea, a kind of summit —they begin to emerge as what they also are when they translate: creators. Thus, The Extinction of Irena Rey (Anagrama), by Jennifer Croft (Oklahoma, United States, 44 years old), is a kind of exorcism that places the profession of the transformer or interpreter of literary works at the center of a very curious hurricane that explores a blind spot of the artistic, that of recreation subject, inevitably, to the self of each recreator, or translator.

The idea for such a crossover between Lost and an Agatha Christie mystery—everything in the forest tends toward the psychedelic and toward disappearance, or change; not in vain, mushrooms are a central part of the plot, that which transforms death into a kind of life, or rather, that transforms certain things into others—came to Croft from her own encounters with the Polish Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk , for whom she translates. “I knew she invited her translators to these kinds of retreats, and I was about to participate in the last one, but it was held two weeks before my children were born—Croft is the mother of twins—and I didn't want to risk it,” she explains.

He's at home in Oklahoma, it's morning. He's just picked up the video call. "I didn't go to that summit, but I did go to the place where he wrote The Books of Jacob . I remember reading it, thinking it was the first time I'd ever done that, and that it was a masterpiece, and that only I and a few others had had access to it at the time. The privilege of this job is enormous," he says.

It is always the case if you experience it as holistically as the protagonists of The Extinction of Irena Rey and its author, for whom reflection on the profession of translator revolves around how close you can get to the author. “When I think about myself as a writer, I ask myself, why did I choose those words at that moment? I don't even know. We are someone different all the time, and the translator is trying to connect with that someone you were when you wrote that. Translating is about getting as close as possible to that person without becoming them,” notes Croft, who has maintained a fight for the visibility of the translator—she is the author of the essay Why Translators Should Appear on the Covers of Books and the driving force behind the #TranslatorOnTheCover campaign, which has managed to show the collaborative nature of translated literature—and who, in a playful way, asked her own Spanish translator, Regina López Muñoz , to write a Translator's Note that functions as a post-prologue to the novel.

“In 15 years of experience, this is the first time I've been contacted to interview the author at the same time. What Jennifer Croft does with her novel is take the translators off the wings and place us on the front stage. And she does so with admirable mastery, against the backdrop of the climate crisis, establishing a parallel with the invisible life of forests. And, of course, stretching that 'too much passion for what's ours' that characterizes us to the point of parody,” says López Muñoz herself when asked about this nod and the importance of Croft's novel. And she gives an example of what a translator like herself does to get closer to the author she's translating: "One of the protagonists of The Extinction of Irene Rey says that translating means having to rewrite a book; how can you not give it your all, with such a huge responsibility? In the case of this novel, during the weeks I spent translating it, I kept a work diary and, at the same time, I pored over everything that might have even a passing reference to the book."

For example? “The other two works Croft has written (identifying favorite themes, stylistic traits), I read Tokarczuk, Gombrowicz , essays on mushrooms, mycelium, and forest life, reports and documentaries about Białowieża [a nature reserve in Poland], the old Tempelhof Airport, Polish tango in the 1930s, traditional beekeeping in trees… Croft introduces a bewildering variety of topics, and in order to translate something, you first have to be sure you've understood it,” she answers. And it's curious, because after that mirage of control, the desire to start from the same point as the author, begins what Croft's novel develops: the total loss of control that must occur for the translation to also be, in its own way, a unique work, as irrational and dependent on the moment its translator is going through, as on that of the author herself. A crossing of souls. “Sometimes I wonder what Regina thinks of me. A translator can know you better than your psychoanalyst ,” Croft jokes, quite seriously. And he admits: “It's true that you have to lose control to create something authentic.”

In part, that's what happens to the novel's translators. Each one finds their own path within the same path that is supposedly the last novel of the late Irena Rey. It all works as an allegory of how organic the relationship between an author and their regular translator ultimately becomes. "In Olga's case, I already foresee how she might construct a sentence, or how she'll explain a part of the story," he emphasizes. As if a part of their brain were shared. In this regard, Croft and López Muñoz were supposed to have met at a residency for translators in Switzerland. But it was March 2020, "and life had other plans."

She does, however, recall a very enriching experience. “Recently, an Italian friend and I simultaneously translated the same French novel, each into her own language. It was fascinating to see how different the reading, interpretation, and processing of the same literary work can be for two people with such similar cultural and generational backgrounds,” she adds, confirming everything that, aside from the highly entertaining mystery, informs Croft’s essential metaliterary—and militant—work.