Music Credit: “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T, from the cd, Soul Sand.

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Jennifer Croft: The thing that moved me the most--it’s the only thing I can think of that made me cry as I was translating it, was the story called God’s Own, about a Polish woman living in New Zealand, who returns to see a formerly very close friend in Poland in very dire circumstances. When I was, sort of, inhabiting the story, in order to translate it, it just crushed me. I was so devastated—which it was a great feeling too. Like I felt like I was really part of the book as that happened.

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Jo Reed: That was Jennifer Croft talking about translating Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights from the original Polish into English. And this is Art Works the weekly podcast produced by the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed.

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Flights is a distinctive work—so original, it’s difficult to classify…and I’m not sure why anyone would want to classify it. Its theme is movement, and it travels centuries and countries, set between the 17th and 21st centuries, Flights consists of 116 chapters or fragments or vignettes—take your pick, whatever you want to call them—some fictional, some factual. They range from one page ruminations on airports, hotel lobbies or Wikipedia, to stories that are as long as 31 pages—about, for example, a man’s search for his wife and child, who disappear while they were all vacationing, or Chopin’s sister smuggling her brother’s heart into Poland, or a 17th century Dutch anatomist uncovering the body’s complexities. It’s a masterpiece of imagination and wit. And Jennifer Croft translated it into English seamlessly. In fact, Jennifer Croft brought more than her artistry as a translator to the project—her persistence is central to the book’s publication in English. Flights was first published in Poland in 2008, which is when Jennifer first read it. Croft then spent ten years translating excerpts from it for small journals, while shopping it around to publishers. A grant from the National Endowment for the Arts allowed her to immerse herself in completing the translation and she finally convinced an independent British publisher to move forward with publication. The result: Flights won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize, which goes to the best work of fiction translated from any language into English. Because it’s a prize awarded to a translation of a novel, it was shared equally by the author, Olga Tokarczuk, and translator, Jennifer Croft.

Jennifer Croft is well-known for her translating skills—she’s that rare person who works with both Slavic and Romance languages, translating Polish, Ukranian, and Argentine Spanish into English. Translation itself is a such a strange alchemy—the empathy, the artistry, the intellectual acrobatics needed to move literature successfully from one language into another always seems rather mysterious to me—and so of course I’m equally mystified by people who choose to pursue it. So when I spoke with Jennifer Croft—I began with the obvious question…

So, of course, question number one, what drew you to translation?

Jennifer Croft: You know, I think it was a number of different factors. I grew up in Oklahoma and I grew up always wanting to travel. And I also always wrote travel stories, so, just kind of fantasy stories when I was a little kid about butterflies who travelled and birds that migrated and stuff like that. And when I was 13, my sister and I watched the Winter Olympics religiously for whatever reason. It just struck us at that age that we had to do that. And there were some figure skaters that we just fell in love with and they were Russian. And I started learning Russian that way, just kind of inspired by them, and I checked out some books from the public library and, because I had already been writing and reading a lot, it was kind of a natural transition over the next few years into translation.

Jo Reed: Did you know any Russians?

Jennifer Croft: Didn’t know any Russians personally.

Jo Reed: That is a hard language!

Jennifer Croft: It is. Yeah, I remember I checked out some cassette tapes and some text books and then at some point my father found a Ukrainian man to give us private lessons, which was very helpful. But it was a hard language, but we were homeschooled and I had a lot of free time and that’s how I spent it.

Jo Reed: So, then how do you begin a career as a translator? What are the steps here?

Jennifer Croft: Yeah. I think you can begin in so many different ways. I think the main thing for me has always been practice.. I did an MFA in literary translation at the University of Iowa, which was also pretty helpful in the sense that I kind of started to learn about the community of translators. And I moved to Poland as soon as I was finished with that degree, which was also helpful in different ways. I also translated from Spanish, which I learned by moving to Argentina, and although I had, at that point, I had already been translating Slavic languages for quite a while, it still took me a couple years to feel fully comfortable in proficiently translating from Spanish. So, I’ve kind of pieced it together as I’ve gone along.

Jo Reed: So, what attracted you to Polish?

Jennifer Croft: What attracted me to Polish was the fact that it was my only option when I arrived at the University of Iowa, where I went to study Russian. There was a weird coup in the Slavic department about a month before classes began and suddenly, they were no longer offering Russian stuff that I could take. So, there was Polish and that was a Slavic language and I figured it couldn’t be that difficult to move into Polish from Russian. And I ended up having an amazing professor named Christopher Words, who just really suited my learning style perfectly. And then I started reading and, actually, Olga Tokarczuk was one of the first writers I read. I always looked for contemporary women writers that felt like part of that community that I wanted to build. And I found her and fell in love with her work. So, I really stuck with it after that.

Jo Reed: How would you differentiate Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian just in subtleties? What are some of the differences? Because Slavic languages are close, but clearly quite different, too.

Jennifer Croft: Yeah, I remember when I first started studying Polish it sounded like drunk Russian to me. There was a lot of softer sounds. Now it just sounds, obviously completely normal and I’ve forgotten a lot of Russian. But, yeah, one of the main differences is that the grammar of Polish has remained almost fully intact, so it’s a lot more regular. You know, English, for example, is an extremely irregular language. I honestly can’t understand how anyone learns English as a non-Native speaker. It must be so challenging at a more advanced level, because you just have to learn each individual thing on its own. Whereas Polish, there are a lot of rules and it’s kind of harder in the beginning, but then once you’ve mastered the rules, you kind of-- you can just switch to autopilot and it’s really nice in that way. Russian is more irregular. Even the pronunciation, you never know quite which syllable the stress is going to be on, which makes it hard to even just kind of read a page.

Jo Reed: I’d like to take a step back and talk about what goes into translating, because obviously this isn’t a word-for-word endeavor. We all know what Google Translate can do to any passage. Translation really is an interpretive art.

Jennifer Croft: Yeah, absolutely. I always think of it as a combination between the most intimate kind of reading and creative writing. So, I always try to get inside the writer’s head as much as possible without actually consulting the writer; and that’s just a personal preference of mine, but I want the text to stand on its own. So, I don't want the author to tell me the backstory of anything. I just want to read it and I want to convey what I’ve understood to be the atmosphere and the tone and the characters and the plot, and then I write a new thing. So, I think it’s a great moment for translators in the United States. We’re getting a lot more attention than we have in a while and I think that’s really important, because you are reading a mediated book when you pick up a translation and it’s essential that you remember that.

Jo Reed: Well for a long time, translators were invisible.

Jennifer Croft: Yeah, right. Well, right, until very recently it was fairly common to just omit the translator’s name entirely, which is crazy because what if someone does a bad job, for example? What if I do a bad job? What if I decide that I am going to translate a book from German, not actually speaking German? But I just do it anyway. I do a terrible job and then-- and you don’t see my name anywhere on that project and you just think it’s the author’s fault, that the author is actually terrible despite having had good reception in their native country. So, I think we have to-- we translators have to take responsibility for any mistakes we make or just not doing a very good job and we also can take credit for what we do correctly.

Jo Reed: For jobs well done.

Jennifer Croft: Yeah, of course.

Jo Reed: Well, speaking of credit, you and Olga Tokarczuk won the International Man Booker for Flights, which is a book that she wrote originally a decade ago. When and how did you first come across Flights?

Jennifer Croft: When I was still at the University of Iowa, I had found her collection of short stories and I had figured out through a little bit of internet research that there was already someone translating her into English. So, I contacted that person actually to ask if she was interested in sharing. I didn’t want to swoop in and scoop up her authors. So, we talked about it quite a bit and I started with those stories and when Flights came out, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, the other translator of Olga Tokarczuk, was unavailable for various reasons and it was also just-- it was a more experimental book than what Olga had done in the past. And I was in the middle of doing a PhD in comparative literary studies and thinking a lot about the structure of the novel. And, so, it was really exciting to me to read, and I just really wanted to do it and there it was. And, so, I met with Olga and we talked about it then and from that point forward, I started sending out excerpts, which is usually the way it works in the English-speaking world, unlike books that are being translated from English into German or Dutch or French or whatever. So, in the English-speaking world, most of my translator colleagues will write up a book report that’s between ten and twenty pages that gives an overall sense of what the book is about, what it’s like, who the author is, etc.

Jo Reed: You did that for Flights?

Jennifer Croft: I did it for-- yeah, I’ve done it for every book I’ve published.

Jo Reed: Okay, we’ll come back to that. But go ahead.

Jennifer Croft: Flights is a hard book to summarize, of course. So, in the case of Flights I did rely pretty heavily on excerpts. I don’t know if there is such a thing a representative excerpt of Flights, but my goal is to translate lots of different styles and characters and time periods and place and just start publishing them in different American magazines. And I also was meeting with editors at the time. And, of course, as you know, I got a National Endowment for the Arts grant, which was life-saving support. I don’t think I would have been able to continue-- I know I wouldn't have continued with the project had it not been for that.

Jo Reed: Could we just backtrack one second and can you just give just a bit of a sense of why Flights is unusual and the structure of it for people who might not have read it yet?

Jennifer Croft: Absolutely. So, Olga calls it a constellation novel, which the idea of that is that she has given lots of different anecdotes and stories and ideas and she leaves it to the reader to connect the dots in the same way that ancient people looked up at the sky, saw stars and imagined the shapes that might arise in between those stars.

Jo Reed: Oh, it’s the Great Dipper.

Jennifer Croft: Exactly. Yeah. So, I think one of the great things about this book, which is pretty-- you know, Olga is often very moving, but also very playful and inviting at the same time. So, it’s fun to do that for me anyway, to kind of link these people together. However, I want to do it without being forced by the author. So, it’s a different kind of plot. I mean, it can be argued that there is no overall plot in this book, but you can just decide that on your own. That’s up to you.

Jo Reed: Well, that brings me to something. So many authors are purposefully ambiguous in their writing. Translating ambiguity—it would strike me as so difficult. For me, it would be immensely challenging.

Jennifer Croft: Yeah, you really hit the nail on the head. That’s something that I’ve been thinking about so much and I want to write about that. I don’t have an answer for how we do that. I think it’s probably the most common mistake that experienced translators make and I catch myself over-explaining all the time. I mean, translation and explanation are so closely related; the word in Polish is actually the same, “tłumaczyć”. My job with a translation is to make sure that the reader in the target language has all of the information he or she needs to get the message of the book, and sometimes that means supplying cultural context. So, adding information that isn’t in the original, because the original readers already have all of the information they need--they have the historical context or the geographical context or whatever. But, this is part of why I also don’t like to consult the author with questions that I may have, because if I add in additional information that the original reader doesn't have, it just turns it into a completely different project. You can do that if you’re translating your own work. You know, like Nabokov got very involved in his translations from Russian into English or from Russian into French, or from English into French, and was essentially re-writing his novels. But that isn’t the project that I’m doing when I’m working with somebody like Olga. So, I try really hard--right now, I’m translating her newest novel, which is extremely difficult and she did ten years of research in order to write it. And I am doing research, but I’m also trying to really make sure with every sentence that I’m not adding my own research to the book.

Jo Reed: Well, when do you research? Did you research as you were translating Flights, for example? Because not only is it a constellation, but it’s a constellation that really moves through time and there’s this piece in the-- what is it, the 1650s--and it has to do with an anatomist.

Jennifer Croft: Mm-hm. That was the hardest section, for sure. I’ve always been a contemporary literature person and that is the most difficult thing for me with her work is to do the historical sections. I didn’t do as much research for Flights. The new novel, which is called The Books of Jacob is--

Jo Reed: A 900-page tomb.

Jennifer Croft: Exactly!

<laughter>

Jennifer Croft: Exactly. The 900-page tomb is set in the 18th century and it’s set all over the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Hapsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire. So, it’s just all research. Yeah, but a lot of--it’s about a cult leader, essentially. It’s about a man named Jacob Frank, who led a Jewish heretical sect that converted to Christianity and then Islam. And it is really all about the mystery of faith and despair, of course, but also this mysterious appeal that any cult leader has. And by choosing the wrong adjective, you could give away too much about Jacob Frank. So, it’s very subtle work to maintain the mystery.

Jo Reed: So, what would you research or what did you research, for example, on Flights, since that’s already been out, if you don’t want to talk about what hasn't been published yet.

Jennifer Croft: That section that you mentioned was really the only one where I had to look up any kind of terms. Terminology is not so present in Flights. So, with Flights I just translated in the way that I always translate, which is to double-check the meanings of some words and kind of, see in what context they tend to appear. That’s always helpful in gauging the strength of a certain word, like, how emphatic is a given adjective and just, like, look it up in articles or whatever. If I did have questions, I would ask other native speakers. It’s rare at this point, with the Internet, to have things that you really can’t solve. I mean—and especially with a writer like Olga who doesn’t particularly use neologisms or difficult language. She doesn’t use difficult language. She uses very beautiful language, but it’s not inaccessible in any way.

Jo Reed: And getting the narrative voice of any book—I mean, I know as a reader it can take me some time to do that—depending on the writer. How long does it take you as a translator to feel like, “Okay, I have this narrative voice,”?

Jennifer Croft: Yeah, I think for me it’s depended a lot on—from project to project. I have been fortunate in that I have mostly translated books that I just have read and fallen in love with. So, there’s already some connection there. I feel very connected to Olga, also since I’ve been working with her for such a long time. So, it doesn’t take as long when I start a new thing. Olga is incredibly prolific. So, I’m always starting a new thing of Olga’s. And she’s also very—not experimental exactly overall, I wouldn’t say, but very exploratory. She is very willing—very open. So, her latest publication is a collection of science-fiction stories, and I didn’t have any trouble getting into any of those—kind of, from the first word, I felt things click.

Jo Reed: Flights—that had to have been a challenging book in some ways. I mean, it’s so distinctive.

Jennifer Croft: Yeah.

Jo Reed: I mean, the structure of it.

Jennifer Croft: Yeah. In a way, that made it less challenging for me, because I mean, also my life was kind of somehow mirroring the structure of the book. I was living in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for the most part, but also traveling always and it was a really convenient book to do as I went from place to place, because I could translate one self-contained 20-page story over a period of a couple weeks in Berlin, which is actually where I started the book. And then I could take a break, do something else. I mean, obviously, because it took ten years to find a publisher, I was obviously doing other projects in the interim. So, it was a nice thing to be able to dip in and out of. And I think that applies to the reading of it as well. You can sit down and just read it for a few days—or you can read it occasionally over the course of a year. And, I think both of those scenarios are really good ones.

Jo Reed: Can you compare translating expository text versus dialog? Is there a difference?

Jennifer Croft: Yeah. I think that’s a really good question that no one has ever asked me before. I actually really love translating dialog. I, not too long ago, translated my first play and I just thought it was so much fun. Obviously, the register is different usually when you’re translating dialog versus just the narrative, the narrator’s—usually Olga has an omniscient narrator, who has a more neutral style, whatever “neutral” means. But, yeah, translating dialog is really fun right now. I’m doing The Books of Jacob, which has so many characters and they’re all from such different class backgrounds and religious backgrounds. And Jacob Frank, the main character, doesn’t talk that much, but he was famously, almost unintelligible in any language. Although people who never heard him in person, he certainly developed a reputation for being extremely eloquent. But when you get up close to him in the book, it’s really hard to understand what he’s talking about and, so, I’m currently trying to figure out how to render—this is another question similar to rendering ambiguity or maintain ambiguity. How do you render things that are bad without it sounding just like a bad translation? So, if someone sounds silly, it’s a very fine line: You want them to sound equally silly in English without making it look like a mistake. My partner is also a translator, named Boris Dralyuk, and he just translated a really wonderful book called, Sentimental Tales by a Russian writer named Mikhail Zoshchenko. And the whole game of that short story collection is that the narrator is a little bit of an idiot. He’s dabbling in literature and doesn’t really know what he’s talking about, go on these tangents. And, so, Boris was always—I mean, I think he did an amazing job in the end, but he was always struggling to figure out how exactly to pinpoint that particular brand of nonsense without it sounds like it was just poor English.

Jo Reed: You know, I’m thinking about Jack Cade in the Henry plays, Shakespeare and he was a populist who just is talking complete and utter gibberish. I was just thinking, “Poor translator who had to—”

Jennifer Croft: Yeah.

Jo Reed: —who would turn that into another language.

Jennifer Croft: Exactly.

Jo Reed: I want to hear about winning the International Man Booker. Tell me everything.

<laughter>

Jennifer Croft: I can tell you that the best part about it was that they gave us a full bottle of champagne to split between the two of us as soon as they announced that we had won.

<laughter>

Jo Reed: So, where were you when you found out?

Jennifer Croft: Well, so, they do it kind of like the Oscars. They have you dress up in your fanciest gown and they bring you to a dinner, where I was just praying that I didn’t spill red wine all over my body, which I was sure was going to happen. And I was wearing heels and I was praying I didn’t trip over—

<laughter>

Jennifer Croft: You have to go up onto the stage whether you win or not. So, there were six finalists and they were really, really good. I read all of the other five. I was sure that the French writer, Virginie Despentes, translated by Frank Wynne, was going to win. In fact, I had actually written a piece—I had interviewed her, she had already been translated by four people into English, and I had interviewed all of them. I had pitched it to Lit Hub and the headline was going to be something about this year’s Man Booker International Winner and her translators. It was already all lined up. I was a hundred percent sure. And there were other really good books in the running, too. But, instead, we had our dinner and they announced that we had won, and they whisked us backstage for some champagne and immediately, some interviews and then we did, like, a full week of just non-stop interviews. And Olga was such a trooper; doing that in your non-native language is so exhausting and she was just amazing. And it was—we had spent some time together before that, but we really solidified the team and it prepared us really well for the book tour that we did here in the U.S. in the fall.

Jo Reed: A bonding experience.

Jennifer Croft: It was, yeah.

Jo Reed: Now, you and Olga are friends, correct?

Jennifer Croft: Yes.

Jo Reed: Now, so, you don’t consult her while you’re translating. But I assume she sees it when you’re done.

Jennifer Croft: She can see it whenever she wants. In general, what I do is send people the draft. When I’m done with it, just the first draft so that they can get involved if they want to. Everybody speaks some English, right? So, some people really want to get involved and want to suggest alternatives and maybe even re-write some things I’ll add in a book of. And Olga, as I mentioned, she’s so prolific and she’s so daring in the sense that she’s always wanting to explore new territory, once she’s finished with the book, she’s on to the next thing. I think she really trusts her translators. We all kind of know each other and have met a few times in Poland and it’s important for her to have good relationships with us. But she’s always writing a new book and she doesn’t want to get bogged down in what she’s already done.

Jo Reed: You translate Polish, Ukrainian, and Argentian Spanish-- Argentine Spanish. First, why Argentine Spanish?

Jennifer Croft: Only because, as of right now, I have only lived in Argentina. So, I spent seven years there. I’m going to be going back next year for a while. And it’s very possible that, at some point, I would add another variant of Spanish. I just feel like in order for me to feel fully comfortable with the tone—conveying a tone—I think it’s really important to have had the experience of daily life, like to know what the person at the cash register says at the grocery store and what kind of small talk people make in return. Those rhythms. I don’t have that for any other Spanish-speaking country yet.

Jo Reed: Is there a difference between translating Slavic languages and a romance language? Stylistically, culturally, I’m just curious about that.

Jennifer Croft: Yeah, I mean, although Argentina and Poland are both Catholic countries, obviously, I feel like they’re really poles apart. No pun intended. It’s nice to have that balance. And, again, of course, like, it depends on the individual writer. And I don’t want to make any sweeping generalizations, but their literary histories are completely different. Argentina is a new country; Poland is a country with such an important tradition—cultural tradition; and, specifically in the case of Poland, a literary tradition. Since Poland was wiped off the map for a hundred and fifty years, their cultural identity kind of rested on their language and their literature. It’s definitely a different attitude to literature. That is one generalization that I’m willing to make, even though—I mean, the reason I ended up living in Argentina is because people take literature also very seriously and the cultural life in Buenos Aires is amazing and absolutely wonderful and worth checking out if anyone listening has been curious about Argentina. But translating them, for me, the difference is mainly in the grammar. So, Slavic languages, for example, have grammatical case, which means that the endings of nouns change in the same way that verbs change in English. So, if I were to say, “Jenny eats a sandwich,” or “a sandwich eats Jenny,” in Polish you would still know that the thing being consumed was the sandwich just because of the ending on the word, which means that the word order is much freer, so you’re often having to kind of re-arrange things more actively in a Slavic language, like Polish than you are in a romance language, like Spanish; which can also be misleading, because I find that sometimes when I’m translating Spanish, I leave things more or less as they are and then I go back and I read it again and I think, “Oh, that doesn’t sound natural in English at all. I actually do need to kind of re-work the whole sentence,” but that’s kind of a main difference.

Jo Reed: What do you think is the most important trait for a translator, knowledge of language to one side?

<laughter>

Jennifer Croft: I think people, who are still studying languages have done really wonderful translations. I learned-- I mean, as I say, I didn’t grow up with any other language. So, I don’t know exactly what—I think there’s a certain kind of receptivity that you have to have. There are all these different metaphors. There’s the musical performance metaphor and the acting metaphor. I, having lived in Argentina, think a little bit in terms of the tango metaphor. So, if you’ve ever danced tango as the follower, which is often the lady’s position, you know that following is actually a lot more active than it sounds. You have to really actively, kind of, lean into your partner and be so in-tune with your partner that you an almost predict their next move, and therefore respond instantaneously to it. And that’s definitely a skill that can be cultivated. I took tango lessons and that’s what those are for. But, there may also be some innate thing about just being able to be empathetic and open and your ego is there and that’s part of this thing about recognizing the translator’s work that I mentioned. There’s no way for a human being to completely dispose of ego, nor should she. But maybe just to also just allow for the presence of the author. I think that’s almost like a--this mystical relationship between author and translator, that you have to be open to, maybe.

Jo Reed: Not to get too personal, but supporting yourself as a translator would seem to me to be a sort of hard row to hoe. How do you--

<laughter>

Jennifer Croft: Well-put.

Jo Reed: How do you manage to do that?

Jennifer Croft: Yeah, I think that is such an important thing to consider, especially for people who are thinking about becoming translators. I don’t really think that it’s possible to live in the United States and be a full-time literary translator. I’m sure there is an exception to that. I think that we are really lucky in the U.S., because we do have programs like the National Endowments for the Arts. As I say, I would not have been able to translate Flights or write my first book, which is coming out in the fall, called Homesick, without that support. But I was also living in Argentina, so I was playing with exchange rates and making the dollar go a lot farther there than it would have here. This year I have a fellowship, a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, which is allowing me to translate The Books of Jacob, because a lot of times I’m working with independent presses, like, The Books of Jacob, being a 900-page tome, that’s a lot of work, and if I were to do as I did with Flights, other work as I was going along, in order to pay the bills, it would never be finished. But the publisher isn’t in a position to give me a huge advance either. So, what they do is pay me when I’m finished based on how much The Book Institute in Poland is willing to reimburse them. So, I think this without the grants and fellowships, it would be probably impossible to sustain myself. I’ve done a lot of other work that is, kind of, adjacent to literary translation, most of which has been academic translation. So, translating people’s literary criticism or art criticism or articles about history. Those are really interesting and I really enjoy it. It ends up being quite a bit of work for what it pays. But there’s a lot of that to be done. So, especially if you’re working with a language like Polish that doesn’t quite have as many translators available.

Jo Reed: Okay let’s talk about what’s coming next. You mentioned The Books of Jacob. Do you think it will be ready in 2019?

Jennifer Croft: No, oh my gosh.

<laughter>

Jennifer Croft: It’s supposed to come out in the U.K. with Fitzcarraldo Editions in the Fall of 2020, of next year. And then with Riverhead in the Spring of 2021. That’s the current plan.

Jo Reed: And what else are you translating right now?

Jennifer Croft: I’m just about to finish a wonderful collection of short stories by an Argentine writer named, Federico Falco, which is called, A Perfect Cemetery, which I just love those stories. They’re so beautiful. He’s just an amazing writer. He reminds me a lot of Chekov. If you’ve ever read Chekov’s short stories, they’re just such moving portraits of people and of communities.

Jo Reed: Tell me about the memoir that’s coming out and when is that coming out?

Jennifer Croft: So, the memoir, Homesick, is coming out in September—I believe it's September 10th with Unnamed Press. I wrote it as a novel when I was living in Argentina. I wrote it in Spanish and then I tried to re-imagine it for an English-speaking audience, having specifically conceived of it, for an Argentine audience. And I ended up adding lots of photographs, which are intended to make the contents of the prose a little bit more ambiguous, constantly going back to this ambiguity idea. Because the prose is very simple. It’s really about my childhood and my relationship with my sister, who develops very early on some serious illnesses and with whom I was very close.

Jo Reed: You said that this started as a novel that you wrote in Spanish. Do you think about crossing over and taking on the mantel of novelist?

Jennifer Croft: Yeah, absolutely. My next project is a novel—it is about a translator, but it is a novel called Fidelity set in Argentina. And, in fact, the book, Homesick is coming out as a novel in Argentina next year called, Serpientes y escaleras, which means “snakes and ladders,” like the children’s game “Shoots and Ladders,” it’s mostly called here. I don’t know. I guess calling it a memoir, partly had to do with those photographs, that makes it hard to think of as a novel, just because it’s so obvious that I’m directly involved in what’s happening. The line is fine though, auto-fiction and memoir and semi-autobiographical novel, which is what I used to call it when I was studying literature. So, my editor suggested memoir as the genre. And it’s not something that I would have thought of or my agent would have thought, but I kind of like not being too attached to a genre. I like doing the project and focusing on the overall quality of the project and then let people call it whatever they want.

Jo Reed: Yeah, that’s up to the publisher. Yeah. You name it, I’ll just write it.

Jennifer Croft: Exactly. Yeah.

<laughter>

Jo Reed: Well, Jennifer, thank you so much.

Jennifer Croft: Thank you so much, Jo.

Jo Reed: It was really such a pleasure to speak with you. The book is amazing. Both of you, you and Olga, it’s a great match.

Jennifer Croft: Aw, thank you.

Jo Reed: And congratulations on the International Man Booker.

Jennifer Croft: Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

Jo Reed: My pleasure. Thank you.

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Jo Reed: That was Jennifer Croft. She has translated, among other works, Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights. Both Jennifer and Olga were awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize

You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. You can subscribe to Art Works where ever you get your podcasts—so please do and leave us a rating on Apple, because it helps people to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

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