JENNIFER CROFT
Jennifer Croft is a writer and translator. In 2018, her translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights won the International Man Booker Prize, with Tokarczuk being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature the same year. Croft’s novel Homesick (Unnamed Press, 2019) will be published as Snakes and Ladders by Charco Press in 2022 in the UK. She was a founding editor of the Buenos Aires Review and is a visiting professor at the University of Arkansas. Her translation of Tokarczuk’s 900-page magnum opus The Books of Jacob – a sprawling historical novel set in Enlightenment Europe – has just been published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Interview by Louis RogersPortrait by Nathan Jeffers
Louis Rogers You grew up in an English-speaking family in Oklahoma and now work in Ukrainian, Spanish, and Polish. How did you come to translation?
Jennifer Croft I have always loved language. When I found out that there were other languages besides English, I was absolutely thrilled. I started teaching myself Russian, then took an undergraduate degree in English and Russian with a minor in creative writing. The University of Iowa had an MFA in literary translation, and my family had just moved to Iowa City, so I applied there. I was planning on doing Russian, but when I arrived there had been some sort of coup in the Slavic department: all of the Russian professors had left about three weeks before I started classes. So I was left with Polish, which I knew nothing about. I don’t think I could have even found Poland on the map at that point, but it was the only Slavic language they had. It turned out well, because at the time I was exclusively interested in translating contemporary women writers, as an act of solidarity, and almost immediately I found Olga Tokarczuk and other writers I loved.
LR Translation is around us all the time, whether in news reports or instruction manuals or great novels. But it’s also one of these things that we routinely ignore, out of convenience or habit. It’s work that gets disappeared. What’s your experience of this systematic invisibility?
JC It doesn’t make sense to hide the identity of the translator of a literary text. It‘s hard, if not impossible, to speak about Dostoevsky’s style in English without considering the person who created that style. I really like thinking about texts as living creatures, and the translator as a living individual, who brings a lot of specific experiences to the work of translation. It would be so much more exciting to view a translated text as what it is, which is a collaborative creation. I don’t think it exceeds our capacity as readers to conceive of two different people working on one thing. The translator may bring all kinds of different perspectives and innovative ideas. On the other hand, they may be terrible, and in that case we also need to know who they are. If my book is translated really badly into Chinese, I want the translator’s name very visible so that people can also be reminded that I’m only half responsible for the book. When Olga and I went on tour for the publication of Flights, we talked about it like a child, half of whose great qualities and half of whose terrible qualities are also attributable to me. I’m the one who chose the title, even, which is totally different from the Polish title. It’s not logical to hide the identity of the translator, and from a marketing standpoint, it’s outmoded. Publishers would do well to recognise readers’ hunger for more information, and that also has to do with a need in the literary world for greater transparency in general. Translation is a very white field, for instance. Once you start putting translators’ names on covers then you start thinking about which translators are being given these opportunities and why that is the case. It’s also more respectful toward the other languages that are involved: if we’re allowing people to assume that all books are written in English and that everyone in the world speaks English, that is enabling the continuation of a really unfortunate, unfounded sense of universality.
LR You’ve just translated Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob. How did you approach it? Coming in at over 900 pages, it seems relevant to ask this in physical terms.
JC Olga sent it to me by email in the fall of 2014, before it came out in Polish, and asked if I would consider translating it. That was before Flights had been accepted for publication. I was living in Argentina at the time. I read it over a three-day weekend. I just devoured it; it’s such a gripping book. Because it was a Word document, I had no real sense of its size, so I immediately said yes. And then, months later, I got the hard copy. It came all the way from Poland to Argentina. Then I thought, wow, I’ve really committed myself to spending the next few years on this project. I am not really a historical fiction person. Like many people, when I’m reading books that were written in the past, I sometimes gloss over words that I don’t know. I can glean from context more or less what they mean and move on. But when you’re translating, you obviously can’t do that. You have to translate every single word. You’re not allowed to leave out sentences because you’re not quite sure what kind of hat that is, or what kind of carriage that is. There was a lot of stuff that I had to learn. At first, I wasn’t really in a hurry because I had no reason to believe that anyone would even publish it. Then Olga won the Nobel Prize, and I really had to stop doing other things and start focusing on it exclusively. It took me about four years to do the first half and then four months to do the second.
LR You mentioned thinking of books as living creatures. Your own book, Homesick, seems a good example of this. Can you explain the lives it’s had so far and what will come next?
JC I wrote it in Spanish in 2014. I was starting to translate from Spanish at that point, but was feeling like my professional life was disconnected from my personal life. I had moved to Argentina in 2010, after going to visit because of the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, who accidentally emigrated there in 1939. I just fell in love with it, and I continue to be in love with it. One of the things that I really loved about the writers I was translating from in Argentina was how intimate their writing felt and how vulnerable they made themselves. So I decided to write something that was inspired by my childhood in Oklahoma. That took the form of these little vignettes, like Polaroid snapshots, which together formed a narrative that went from early childhood through adolescence and talked about the relationship that I had with my sister. The manuscript was accepted for publication by Penguin Random House Argentina. I worked with them for a while, then my editor ended up leaving, so I took it to an independent house that I had always liked. They ended up postponing the publication until this year. In that time, I also wrote a version in English. I decided to add actual photographs to the English-language version, I think because the Spanish had something that the English could never have, which was this subtle, immediate suspense based on the tension between the story and the way it was being told. My Spanish is definitely foreign. It sounds non-native, but it also sounds very local, because I’ve only studied it in Buenos Aires. It was published as a memoir in 2019 in the US. Now it’s coming out in the UK as a novel, which is what I originally intended it to be. I think the black-and-white pictures will still be there, but I’m removing the colour photos.
LR As well as the images, there are striking passages in the book about taking photographs. How does photography shape your thinking?
JC The book presents photography as a bit of a danger for this particular character, who has an impulse to control. I excessively took photographs when I was younger. It was also really clarifying to work with images. It helped me edit down the prose and identify exactly what it was I wanted to get across. The process of writing in Spanish forced me to identify what I wanted to say before I started writing. I was finding that my writing in English was meandering or circular, and unsatisfying to read. But in Spanish, I had to identify point A and point B, and then get between them. Photography allowed me to discover not only what I wanted to say but also how I wanted to make the reader feel, which is a delicate thing to try to manage. I’m now writing a book about postcards, which is going to include images as well.
LR What did you draw from the particular literary culture of Buenos Aires when you lived and worked there?
JC I love to make sweeping generalisations, so I’ll just dive right in. Everything about Buenos Aires really works for me. When I first moved there, I got the opportunity to teach a couple of classes with Santiago Llach, who’s locally renowned for his creative-writing school. He teaches these wonderful workshops which are quasi-therapeutic; Buenos Aires is the psychoanalytic capital of the world, with more therapists and psychoanalysts per capita than anywhere else. People from all walks of life sign up for the workshops. A lot of my friends had taken writing workshops, just for six months; they weren’t going to become writers, they just enjoyed the experience. I also took dance classes and learned how to play the flute. It has to do with a very specific kind of privileging of the amateur – amateur in the sense of someone who loves a pursuit. In the year that I lived in New York while working on The Books of Jacob, I found everything so numbingly professionalised. Fiction is so commercialised and that takes so much of the fun and the desire to experiment out of it. I just spoke about the intimacy of writing in Argentina; there are so many layers in between the text and the reader in the United States.
LR I’m interested in what you said about needing to have a sense of what you’re going to write before you write it in Spanish. In translation, sometimes this ghostly presence comes up – the “pre-verbal”, whatever it is that is the same between two alien texts. Does your work bring you into contact with this? Has it changed your sense of language on a more day-to-day level?
JC My husband, Boris Dralyuk, is also a translator. He emigrated to the US at the age of eight. You would never know from talking to him that he isn’t a native speaker of English; he has absolutely no trace of an accent. But he thinks about words so much more than I do, and not a day goes by that he doesn’t ask me about some word that he’s said to someone or wrote in an email. He’s always turning over in his mind the way that one is allowed to use words. Whenever I spend a long period in another language and then come back to English, I feel so entitled. I feel like I can use English however I please; I can distort things in whatever way I want. I wouldn’t have the temerity to do that in Spanish. If I made a mistake in Spanish, it would shame me in a way that it wouldn’t if I made a mistake in English. I feel something is lost when I’m just cheating language, using it as this transparent medium, which of course it’s not. I’m currently back in the part of the country where I grew up, in the central southern part of the USA, and reverting to old phrases that I haven’t used in years. It feels too easy. But that’s why we have poetry and experimental fiction and certainly translation. Whether the translator wants to or not, translation always sheds some light on that ghostly, looming presence that you referred to, somewhere in between the two texts and in between all of the other languages that text has been translated into. It’s powerful when you come across it. ◉