The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft review – eight translators lost in a forest

The International Booker-winning translator takes a deep dive into the complexities of the role in her ambitious second novel

“Translators are like ninjas,” the& Israeli author Etgar Keret wrote in 2017. “If you notice them, they’re no good.” The literary translation community must have felt& delighted at this upgrade to their image: no longer dictionary dorks, but& lithe, black-clad assassins! The thrilling story of ninja translators is yet to be told, but Jennifer Croft, an eminent translator whose English version of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights won the International Booker prize in& 2018, has put her own spin on the profession with this ambitious, fecund novel, her second after the autofictional Homesick (published in Spanish in 2014, then in English in 2019).

Croft has been fascinated by translation since she was a child, and& this novel is a deep dive into the complexities and ambiguities of the role. A translator’s job is to render the original as faithfully as possible, yet they are also creating a new work of their own with every word they type. It’s an artistic paradox, the kind that can’t be represented straightforwardly in fiction. It needs something special – and Croft does not disappoint.