'The Extinction of Irena Rey' asks: Can anything be truly individual and independent?
Jennifer Croft's novel, centered on a group of translators working on a book, is surprising at every turn, moving from profound observations about nature, art, and communication — to surreal events.
Jennifer Croft is likely best known for her translations from Polish, Ukrainian, and Argentine Spanish — as well as for advocating that translators be more widely acknowledged and, at the very least, have their names included on the covers of the books they've worked on. After all, translation isn't copying, nor a simple process of reading and transposing.
"Translating," writes the character Alexis Archer in Croft's new book, "is being forced to write a book again."
(An aside: As a bilingual person who has dabbled in translation myself, I have always found it incredibly bizarre that translators' names aren't already routinely included
