by Jennifer Croft
A beloved and bestselling author, the titular Irena Rey, has the habit
of gathering and sequestering all her translators at her house in
Poland, where they all work on the translations of her current works
together. This time, they gather to translate the work Grey Eminence,
a novel warning about the dangers of human intelligence putting the
world on the road to extinction. Specifically, Rey is known for fighting
against the culling of her beloved Bialowieza, a primeval forest that
has been the site of logging by the government. However, something is
awry — Our Author (as the besotted narrator of the book styles her, in
deistic caps) is missing, and the translators, who initially only know
each other by their target languages rather than names, are left to
their own devices. Should they go ahead with their work without her?
Rifle through her belongings for a clue to her whereabouts and identity?
Go get a drink at the local bar? Hunt down her family? As her absence
continues, things get stranger with each new development, and the
various translators form alliances and enmities, until the atmosphere is
something along the lines of a surreal bacchanal.
Croft is
herself a Booker Prize-winning translator of the Polish Nobel laureate
Olga Tokarczuk, as well as of Argentinian authors, so her reflections
on, and parodies of, the art of translation are incisive and shrewd. One
of the conceits of the book is that is is written by Rey's Spanish
translator Emi, but what we are reading is the English translation of
that book by Alexis, who was also there, and gives a few insights or
corrections of her own in footnotes. (I wonder what they do in the
Spanish translation of this novel?) Emi speaks for all the translators
as a collective, but at some point it seems clear that Emi's slavish
adoration is not the norm among her peers. The novel has several motifs
and recurring themes. It touches on stewardship, veneration, fungi,
parasites, love, amadou, and more. It's not a novel for everyone, having
more in common with the French absurdists, and Tokarczuk's flights of
mixed-genre imagination, than any straightforward narrative. It plays
with language, throwing out ideas and innuendo and genuine anxieties
about political concerns with abandon. Some stick, and some don't. Some
scenes lag or fall flat. But this is such a vivacious and original novel
that I generally forgive its misfires. If it's taken as an absurdist
play, full of inane, bumbling characters caught in a situation they
don't understand, rather than some sort of real-world mystery, it works.
three stars
