Jennifer Croft is a translator of uncommon energy. In 2018 she won the International Booker Prize for her rendering of Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. In 2021, she took on Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, a great big historical epic. Now she’s written a satirical page-turner set over what one character calls ‘seven toxic, harrowing, oddly arousing, extremely fruitful weeks’.
Like members of some ancient mystery cult, eight translators fetch up in a house near a primeval forest in Poland on the Belarus border. The year is 2017. ‘Bedraggled and ecstatic’, they’ve come to translate Szara eminencja (Grey Eminence), a novel about art and mass extinction, by the Stockholm-worthy woman of letters Irena Rey – their host, their author, their Athena. Yet while they are soaking up Irena’s reflected glory, she disappears, possibly into the forest. They hasten to find her and go a bit mad; before long, their search assumes the darker character of a moral reckoning.
The book purports to have issued from two of Irena’s translators: an Argentine named Emi, who originally wrote it in Spanish-inflected Polish (each sentence ‘a tiny haunted house’ aswarm with the ghosts of her native language) and Emi’s put-upon American nemesis, Alexis, the blonde stunner tasked with translating it into English. Alexis is also the intellectual traducer in this truth-y account of metaphorical murder and mayhem, ‘the monster who seemed to want to ruin everything’.
In the beginning, the textually-loyalist Emi accuses the venturesome Alexis of violating their ‘sacred translation honour code’. By giving Alexis a double role, not to mention all the best lines and unlimited footnotes, Croft neatly undermines the narrator’s authority while making sport of the old chestnut that the best translator is an invisible one.
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