Sometimes I get comments from readers of a story or novel I’ve translated, along the lines of, “I had to remind myself it was a translation.” This is meant as a high compliment, and I take it as such. Yet there’s something about it that makes me feel uneasy. It feels like being praised for denaturing the work of its originality, for taking a nice smelly Italian cheese and turning it into…Monterrey Jack. Ok, my version of someone else’s story didn’t slap the reader in the face and announce that it was a translation, but did it also convey the excitement, the wit, the tension of the original? Or does it avoid translatedness by reflecting all the pat phrases and cliches that have wormed themselves into my brain over a lifetime of reading good, bad, and (too often) indifferent English-language literature? Some of the anxiety comes from the nuts and bolts of the process. For example, if the author uses a word that appears strange, or mismatched to its context, is it because the author intends a strange or disorienting effect? Or is it just because the translator isn’t familiar with that particular usage? Am I supposed to aim for a strange and disorienting effect, or is the work better served if I find an alternative in English that “makes sense?”
These are some of the thoughts I had while reading Jennifer Croft’s hilarious new novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey, which is a novel within a terrible translation within a novel. As I read it, I had the giddy feeling one gets after starting a book and realizing that they’ve come across something entertaining, original, and new—the feeling I had in the past reading books with a unique voice, such as Wolf Hall, All the Pretty Horses, and Pale Fire (which I see as the closest thing to an ancestor of Croft’s book), works which bear both an exciting story and their own distinctive language.
The conceit of the novel is that it is a translation of a novel, written in the form of a first-person memoir, about a group of translators from eight countries, who are gathered in the home of the Polish author they both idolize (literally) and depend upon for their living. They are there for a “summit” during which they are to translate into their eight native languages the latest masterpiece of the mysterious and dictatorial Irena, or “Our Author” (as they often refer to her), who may be on the verge of winning the Nobel Prize for literature.
The debacle of this summit is the heart of the story. And it often reads like a ludicrously bad translation, full of non-sequiturs and nonsensical descriptions. For example, a character who’s just been bitten by a snake “leaped back with a gruff and provocative howl.” Now, I don’t know what a gruff and provocative howl could possibly sound like, and it had me wondering what the words might have been in the original language. Wondering absurdly, since, firstly, I don’t know Polish, and secondly, Croft’s novel was actually written (I assume) in English.
But if this is (fictionally) a bad translation, it may be a willfully bad translation. The novel-within-the-novel is a thinly disguised memoir by one of the translators, Emi, Our Author’s Spanish translator. One of its main characters is Alexis, Our Author’s English translator. Emi tells us that Alexis is “the person I hated more than anyone in the world.” And Alexis is the translator of Emi’s novel, which we are reading.
Or perhaps it is an accurate translation of a terrible novel. After all, we are told that Emi has written the novel in Polish, not her native Spanish. Why exactly she wrote the novel in Polish and why she selected Alexis to translate it, or whether Alexis for some reason swiped it, is not clear. (The novel is prefaced by a brief “WARNING” from Alexis which I had to refer back to, to regain my readerly bearings.) As some of Alexis’ footnotes, dutifully marked “(Trans.),” make clear, she has no great affection for Emi, either.
The Extinction of Irena Rey functions in several ways at once. It is an effective satire of cozy ensemble mysteries of the “Ten Little Indians” variety; it is parody of bad writing in general, and especially of the omniscient, over-explaining style. (“Chloe opened her door to find us in this quasi-embrace, and I could feel her fighting not to raise her eyebrows….”) It deals with environmental degradation and the critical role of fungi in repairing and maintaining forest ecosystems. Its narrator Emi is an insecure, libidinous drama queen for the ages. Her antagonism towards Alexis is largely due to Alexis’ perceived attractiveness: “’Emi’s right,’ Alexis said and grinned at me. Her white glinting teeth were among my least favorite of her perfect features. It was terrible, too, when she agreed with me. It made it impossible for me to trust my own thoughts.”
Most interestingly for me, it examines the contradictory nature of literary translation, whose duty it is both to spread an author’s work into a new language and culture, while, in a way, obliterating the author’s identity. At one point Emi accuses Alexis of something like colonialist translation: “I knew that what she really wanted was to civilize Irena’s text, exactly as you would expect a U.S. usurper to do. She wanted to tidy it up by eviscerating it, make it essentially her own.” An ironic statement, since Croft herself is a highly gifted (American) translator of Polish, Ukrainian, and Spanish-language literature.
Above all, one has the feeling of reading something by a writer who loves language, words, and wordplay, and got a kick out of devising every sentence. Those sentences are packed with surprises, reversals, little jokes, and just plain information. Here are two of them, referring to a journal which has just pirated part of the unpublished novel that Emi and others are supposed to translate:
“The Bucharest Review was an achingly hip website without a print magazine that consisted of 70 percent white space, 25 percent prose in Akzidenz-Grotesk by authors without vowels in their names, and, now, 5 percent an extremely long excerpt from the magnum opus of Irena Rey. To reach it, you had to click on a photograph of a cast-iron skillet containing nine tiny critically endangered Macaya breast-spot frogs.”
Yes, Akzidenz-Grotesk is a font. Yes, Macaya breast-spot frogs are real, and really endangered. I couldn’t find a Bucharest Review. Croft’s story is crowded with tidbits that seem too fantastic to be true but on further (Wikipedial) inspection…like the species of mushroom that is poisonous, but only if consumed along with alcohol.
I recommend downloading the sample of this novel and checking it out. (If you can get past the “WARNING” without reading the rest, you’re stronger than I am.) I think it will be discussed and analyzed for a long time to come, but more importantly, it’s terribly funny, and written by someone who cares about writing.
The Garden of Eaton 