Frontlist: The Extinction of Irena Rey
A group of literary translators enter a menacing Polish wood...!
When an esteemed group of translators gather to begin work on the new novel of a lauded and beloved writer, a series of strange events, including the disappearance of the author, challenge their task, as well as their devotion to the author herself. History, mystery, nature, mythology, the future of the planet and the art of storytelling converge in this remarkable debut novel.
It was our seventh pilgrimage to the village at the edge of the primeval forest where she lived. She had always lived there, five miles from the Belarusian border. She loved that forest as much as we loved her books, which, without a fraction of a second’s hesitation, we would have laid down our lives to defend. We treated her every word as sacred, even though our whole task was to replace her every word.
Author Jennifer Croft is a renowned translator herself, so she knows of what she speaks, and she seizes the opportunity to both illuminate and parody the process. She is, among others, a translator for Nobel prize winner Olga Tokarczuk, who may be the model for Irina Rey. Tokarczuk writes with passion and despair about the forces decimating the planet, and her fabulous novel, Drive My Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, takes place in a similar Polish forest.
[Croft thanks Tokarczuk in her acknowledgements.]
Despite the intensity of the story, the furtive storyline, the chilling cold of the environment, the deep dive descriptions of lichen and mushrooms, et al, and the enigma of the writer, the story is primarily a metaphor for the fascinating art of translation.
In Basque, “ama” means “mother” or “origin’ in Garo it means “mother”; in Kamayura it means “mother”; in Lolopo it meant “mother”; in Eastern Huasteca Nahuatl it meant “now”; in Sidamo it meant “mother.” In Romance languages, like my own, of course, it was the third person singular of “love.” In Old Norse – the ancestor of Freddie’s language [English] – it meant “to wound.”… In every case, it seemed to suggest a primal referent, something a human speaker literally couldn’t do without.
Croft begs the question: is it possible to decipher words in the spirit in which they were written? How does a translator reconstruct context?
We considered it bad luck to say the same thing at the same time as someone; we believed our job was to create not identical utterances, but rather complementary ones: careful, artisanal upcycling, not mechanical reproductions.
Every move, every extraordinary memento or artifact they discover at the retreat and in the surrounding forest, seems an attempt to explain who an author really is, another glimpse into the challenge for a translator. As in this magical realist passage from the supposedly new novel.
“Amalia died not when she was supposed to, when all the florists in Portugal would have found themselves suddenly stripped of their wares, and the botanical garden and even the natural history museum would have been ransacked, when roses would have flooded in from Spain, and paperwhites come from Morocco, when the populations of Lisbon would have doubled, or even tripled, as her coffin hovered over white streets soft as downs, nor did she died in childhood, like her little sister, Celeste – no, by the time Amalia finally got around to dying at the age of twenty-eight, it was in a manner befitting a goddess: not trampled petals, but the erasure of a city; not the end of one life, but the end of almost all life, and almost every way of life the earth had known since the dawn of civilizations, ever favored, ever ungrateful.”
As a subplot/subtext, the fictional Irena Rey has an obsession with Japan. Scattered throughout are references to islands and landscape, specifically what survives after forest fires or man-made disasters, which the Japanese comprehend too well. Swirling around the translators are images or memories of cataclysm, from which, through their work, and their time in this particular forest, they might emerge to the light. Or not.
…Itsukushima was an island where maple trees grew freely – no one was permitted to cut them down under any circumstances – and deer intermingled with the two thousand or so human inhabitants. Only one battle was ever fought there, in 1555; immediately afterward, the island was purified, and blood-soaked soil was removed.
The story takes strange paths, as language will do, and the cast of characters evolve in strange ways, until a surprising and unsettling end, and yet, meant to be. And always, the challenge of translation is front and center – moving through word and thought as if to penetrate a wall.
That night, as we struggled to get to page 626, where Amalia falls in love with a Turkish software engineer, and then 627, and then the bottom of 627, where Amalia falls out of love with the Turkish software engineer, the character of the air seemed to change, to grow dense as well as cold. The colder our fingers got, the harder it became to move. What had felt like a glorious high dive just two weeks earlier now felt like trying to force our way out of concrete.
Read this novel when you have time to concentrate on the complexity of the plot and the intricacy of the language. And, if you’re looking for something entirely original.
I’m going back to backlist: reading the Dominican, Jean Rhys. Stay tuned for the review. Cheers.