Out of the Shadows
The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft (Bloomsbury, 2024)
Reviewed by Sarah Selden
The late American novelist Paul Auster once said, “Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another, who have enabled us to understand that we all, from every part of the world, live in one world.”
A work of literature is rarely, if ever, remembered for its translator. And translators are rarely famous. Yet translation is nearly as labor-intensive as writing the original piece. And it is an art that cannot be replicated by AI. Translators are not just “shadow heroes,” their work casts a long shadow on the reception of a work, and even the creation of culture. How much of the English-speaking world’s perception of Russian literature was shaped by the translating work of one person, Constance Garnett?
In 2017, University of Pennsylvania classical studies professor Emily Wilson published her translation of The Odyssey. She was the first woman to translate the epic. One of her tasks was to correct what she felt to be unfaithful translations of the female characters. In a New Yorker article reflecting on her project, she shares part of this process:
“In one of the most upsetting and beautiful passages of the poem, Penelope cries so desperately that her very being seems to dissolve. In my translation, it reads:
Her face was melting, like the snow that Zephyr
scatters across the mountain peaks; then Eurus
thaws it, and as it melts, the rivers swell
and flow again. So were her lovely cheeks
dissolved in tears.
Other translations of this passage say that her tears “melted” or “streamed” down her cheeks, or that (in the English cliché) her “heart” melted. But Homer’s original text says that her chros—her “skin” or “flesh”—melted, and that her cheeks themselves dissolved (teketo kala pareia). Penelope experiences her marriage in terms of grief, abandonment, and the loss of identity—a loss that, disturbingly, Homer presents as a necessary and natural process, like the coming of spring on the mountain. In translating this passage, I wanted to bring out both the beauty and the precision of the imagery, and the horror—a common, relatable horror—of being a woman who experiences her attachment to her husband as the destruction of her self. I wanted the reader of my English to feel as I do in reading the Greek: for Penelope, and with her pain, rather than prettifying or trivializing her grief.”
Through the words they choose, translators can influence how a culture perceives an author’s original work. And, in the case of someone as ubiquitous as Homer, their translations can impact how societal structures develop. Previous English translations of Penelope’s femininity, completed by men like Alexander Pope, William Morris, Samuel Butler, and Robert Fitzgerald may well have influenced how femininity is defined in English-speaking cultures, and Wilson’s work does much to correct their interpretations.
Literary translators take center stage in Booker Prize-winning-translator-turned-novelist Jennifer Croft’s 2024 novel The Extinction of Irena Rey. The novel follows the story of eight translators who travel to Poland to translate the internationally famous novelist Irena Rey’s latest work, Grey Eminence. Croft satirizes the role of authorial genius through the character of Irena Rey. She is eccentric, lives reclusively in a large house in a remote Polish town on the edges of Bialowieza, a forest on the border of Poland and Belarus, and she’s developed a cult-like following among her translators. Every time she finishes a novel, she invites her favorite translators to her home for a “retreat,” where they all live together for weeks and translate the work into their respective languages. Despite her personal relationships with her translators, Irena does everything she can to keep their lives outside of the retreats as “invisible” to the rest of the group as possible. She doesn’t allow the translators to call each other by (or even know) their real names. Instead, they go by the language in which they translate—“English,” “Spanish,” “Slovenian,” etc.
Irena’s latest novel, Grey Eminence, is reported to be her best. The eight translators arrive at her estate full of excitement. The new work is also rumored to be her most political, as it supposedly stands against the upcoming deforestation threats levied toward Bialowieza. It is rumored that this may be the work that finally wins Irena her much sought-after Nobel Prize, and the translators feel the added pressure as they prepare to jockey for Irena’s attention during the retreat.
This time, when they arrive, things are different. Normally, Irena greets them with a lavish dinner prepared by her husband, Bogdan. The meal then concludes with the ceremonial distribution of her new novel. This time, Bogdan is nowhere to be seen and there is very little food in the house. The group cobbles together a dinner of pantry scraps as best they can, attempting to replicate the ritual they are all used to, but it is clear Irena’s mind is elsewhere. The dinner ends with no presentation of Irena’s supposed magnum opus, and the group goes to bed confused and worried about the future of their work. Around 2am, they all receive the new work in an email with explicit instructions NOT to read it. When they wake up, Irena is nowhere to be found.
The novel follows the translators’ struggles to figure out what to do. They alternately look for Irena, attempt to navigate the political situation regarding the surrounding forest, and argue about whether she will return. Croft’s novel is often funny and always suspenseful—the reader is never sure what absurd scenario is coming next.
What makes this novel especially intriguing is that it is presented through the perspective of one of the translators, Spanish, writing her own novel about what happened. However, since most of Croft’s readership is English-speaking, Spanish’s “novel” is presented as a work in translation by English. Despite this collaboration, Spanish and English do not particularly like each other. This dynamic often adds to the humor of the novel. For example, one evening, Petra, the Slovenian translator, shares that she is pregnant. Spanish (who we learn is Emilia) recounts English (Alexis)’s response: “‘Are you going to name it Irena?’ said Alexis, but from her tone I couldn’t tell if she was being ironic for some reason or not” (153). As the translator, Alexis adds a footnote to this comment that reads “I was, as would have been obvious to anyone but this author (Trans).” (153).
While these moments are often humorous, they also draw attention to the gravity of translation work—what Wilson describes in her New Yorker piece. Croft addresses much of this in a fictional translator’s note at the beginning of the novel, written by Alexis. Alexis writes, “translation isn’t reading. Translation is being forced to write a book again. The Extinction of Irena Rey required me to re-create myself as the worst person the narrator’s world, the monster who seems to want to ruin everything” (2). However, this perspective doesn’t really pan out in the novel—Emilia’s small jabs at Alexis are not as noticeable to the reader as the translator’s note would make it seem. Even the translator’s perspective—the perspective of someone intimate enough with the text to “write the book again”—is not a fully reliable perspective on the story at the plot level.
Croft also questions the reliability of translations through this translator’s note. Alexis tells the reader that Emilia originally wrote her novel in Polish, as an homage to Irena. However, she demeans Emilia for her efforts, saying that because she is from South America, she “grew up almost in total ignorance of any of the languages of Central Europe. As a result, each of these book’s original sentences is like a tiny haunted house. Angered by her efforts to forget it, the spirit of Spanish comes whooshing through the walls of every paragraph, breaking plates and continually flicking the light switch, creating an atmosphere of wrongness and scaring the shit out of everyone’s dog” (2). Because of the characters’ relationships with each other, it is difficult to know just how much we can trust Alexis’s perspective here, and how much we can then trust the integrity of her translation in general.
Further nuancing this question is the multitude of perspectives on translation that the eight translators bring. In Alexis’s translated text, Emilia is committed to translating Irena’s work with fidelity—she deifies her by consistently referring to her as “Our Author.” Alexis, on the other hand, views translation as an act of authorship—she often adds her own sentences and even cuts full chapters of Grey Eminence as they translate it. “Swedish,” later revealed to be named “Freddie,” also considers himself an author as much as he is a translator, and he uses his attractiveness to cultivate a following similar to Irena’s (but on a smaller scale).
These different theories of translation point toward one of Croft’s central questions in the novel: what does “authorship” entail, particularly for works in translation? As the translators work through more and more of Grey Eminence without the usual oversight of Irena, this question casts a longer shadow. To Alexis, the fictional Extinction of Irena Rey (written by Emilia, not Croft) argues that “translation blur[s] the boundaries of selfhood,” and this novel asks the real-life reader to continually explore the liminal space between original work, translation, reality, and fiction (2).
The novel’s answer to its questions is, as might be expected, ambiguous. As the translators search for Irena and translate Grey Eminence, they also leave Irena’s home unrecognizable, and whether any of their actions are justified or righteous is up to the reader to decide. Part of what contributes to this ambiguity is the fact that it is unclear which parts of the story are “true” and which parts were novelized by Emilia and then translated by Alexis. Alexis writes in her translator’s note, “part of the plot is inspired by true events, and then although I can’t say which part, I can say that my partner is a lawyer—an excellent lawyer, with extensive experience in criminal defense—and that we live in Mongolia, which has no extradition treaty with Poland, or, for that matter, the United States” (1). Croft’s humor reads much like a Tom Stoppard play—much of what happens in this novel is absurd, but the layers underneath the absurdism cause the reader to ask bigger questions about authorship, translation, and the purpose of fiction in general.
These layers also remind the reader just how many people are involved in creating a work of fiction. From Irena’s husband’s supportive role to the many translators visiting the estate to the publicists promoting the novel to the meta-layers telling us about the process in The Extinction of Irena Rey—it is clear that Irena is not solely responsible for the success of her work. Irena’s translators can no longer be “shadow heroes.” By the end of the novel, especially, they are too involved in her public identity to remain hidden, and their vastly different approaches to their craft will yield vastly different versions of Grey Eminence. Croft’s novel reminds us that the translator’s role in producing a text is much larger than the publishing industry would have us believe.
Adding to the meta-experience of reading this novel is the fact that Jennifer Croft is herself a renowned translator working from both Spanish and Polish. Some of her most notable translations are International Booker Prize-winner and Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob and Flights. Since its inaugural prize in 2016, the International Booker Prize has drawn renewed attention toward works in translation. For Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, the 2022 winner, the prize increased sales from 500 copies to over $25,000. And the popularity of works in translation continues to improve. In 2022, overall sales of translated works increased 22%, in part due to Tomb of Sand and The Books of Jacob (which was shortlisted that year). This increased interest in translated works demonstrates that the International Booker Prize is achieving its goal. As prize administrator Fiammetta Rocco noted in an interview with The Guardian, it has helped “writers [in translation] become more part of the mainstream” and corrected the common assumption regarding translated works as “kind of being difficult.”
Croft, too, seeks to undo common assumptions made about works in translation in The Extinction of Irena Rey. Through the layers of Emilia and Alexis’s translations, and even through their unreliability and the ethical questions surrounding their actions, she reminds readers of the humanness of translation work—Alexis is every bit as involved in the creation of the translated text as Emilia is by writing it. Like the International Booker Prize, which equally divides the monetary prize between author and translator, Croft also rebalances the credit ascribed to authors and translators through the layers in her novel. In doing so, she moves toward answering the rallying cry she issued in her own 2021 essay in The Guardian entitled “Why Translators Should Be Named on Book Covers.” The Extinction of Irena Rey has not yet been translated from English, so whether she can convince her publishers to equally give credit where credit is due remains to be seen.
Sarah Selden earned her bachelor's in English and secondary education at Palm Beach Atlantic University and her master's in English and American studies at the University of Oxford. She has taught English in Palm Beach County, in Spain on a Fulbright grant, and currently teaches in Littleton, Colorado.
