Shining a light on the art of translation

NEW YORK • When Jennifer Croft talks about translating Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk's novel Flights, she sometimes affectionately refers to the book as "our love child".

"It's Olga's, but also it has all of these elements that are mine, these stylistic elements and these decisions that I made," she said in a recent interview.

Flights was a labour of love for Croft, who spent a decade trying to find it a publisher. It was finally released by Fitzcarraldo Editions in Britain in 2017 and Riverhead in the United States in 2018, and was celebrated as a masterpiece.

The novel won the International Booker Prize and became a finalist for the National Book Award for translated literature, helping Tokarczuk, who was later awarded the Nobel Prize, gain a much larger global audience.

But Croft also felt a twinge of disappointment that, after devoting years to the project, her name was not on the book's cover.

Last summer, she made a bold demand. "I'm not translating any more books without my name on the cover," she wrote on Twitter. "Not only is it disrespectful to me, but it is also a disservice to the reader, who should know who chose the words they're going to read."

Her statement drew wide support in the literary world. Croft published an open letter with novelist Mark Haddon, calling on publishers to credit translators on covers.

The letter has drawn nearly 2,600 signatures, including from writers such as Lauren Groff, Katie Kitamura, Philip Pullman, Sigrid Nunez and Neil Gaiman, as well as prominent translators, among them Robin Myers, Martin Aitken, Jen Calleja, Margaret Jull Costa and John Keene.

Her campaign prompted some publishers, such as Pan Macmillan in Britain and independent European press Lolli Editions, to begin naming all translators on book covers.

Croft's latest published translation is Tokarczuk's The Books Of Jacob, a novel about an 18th-century Eastern European cult leader named Jacob Frank, whose story unfolds through diary entries, poetry, letters and prophecies.

Critics have praised Croft's nimble rendering of Tokarczuk's sprawling epic, calling her translation "ebullient" and "wondrous". This time, Croft's name appears on the cover. Riverhead added her after she and Tokarczuk requested it.

Croft is also being paid royalties for The Books Of Jacob, which she did not receive for Flights. Tokarczuk enthusiastically supported those measures.

For Croft, the campaign to bring greater recognition to translators is not just a plea for attention and credit, although it is partly that. She also believes highlighting translators' names will bring more transparency and help readers evaluate their work, the same way they might assess an audiobook narration not just for the content, but also for the performance.

Translation is not just a technical skill, but a creative act, she argues.

Writer Jhumpa Lahiri, who also translates Italian and has translated her own work from Italian to English, said putting translators' names on the front of books should be a standard practice, and that translators ought to be treated as artists in their own right.

"It's time to address this historic omission," said the writer, who signed the open letter. "Translation requires creativity, it requires ingenuity, it requires imagination. So often, you have to radically rework the text, and if that isn't the work of imagination, I don't know what is."

That work entails much more than rendering sentences and syntax from one language to another.

Translators also find themselves in the role of literary scout, agent and publicist. Many are constantly reading in the languages they are fluent in to find new authors and books, then pitch them to publishers. When English-language versions come out, translators are often called upon to facilitate interviews and join authors on book tours, and manage their social media accounts in English.

Translated literature accounts for just a fraction of titles published in the US. Despite the success of books by international stars such as Elena Ferrante, Haruki Murakami and Karl Ove Knausgaard, many publishers still worry that US readers are put off by translations.

Ann Goldstein, who translates Ferrante and other Italian writers, said American publishers have long assumed that readers are leery of translations and often downplayed the role of translators, sometimes leaving their names out of books entirely.

"What people always said in the past was that Americans wouldn't buy a book if they knew it was translated," she said.

That belief has become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Since 2010, fewer than 9,000 English-language translations of fiction and poetry have been published, and in 2021, just 413 translations were released, according to a database of English-language translations which was compiled by Chad W. Post, publisher of Open Letter Books, and is available on Publishers Weekly's website.

In contrast, US publishers released a total of 586,060 adult fiction titles in 2021, NPD BookScan figures show.

When she is not translating, Croft writes. She has written an autobiographical novel in Spanish, titled Serpientes Y Escaleras, about her coming of age and her budding love of the intricacies of language and translation.

The English version, Homesick, which Unnamed Press released in 2019, was published as a memoir.

Croft, who spends her time between Los Angeles and Tulsa, Oklahoma, is working on a novel about translation titled Amadou, and has several new translations coming out in the next few years.

But she wonders if her campaign to credit translators on front covers will cost her opportunities.

"I'm sure that there are a number of publishers who won't want to work with me," she said. "Some people have really not been happy with the idea and I have had some difficult conversations with editors."

Still, the debate her effort sparked has been gratifying, she said. "People are at least paying a little bit more attention to language itself, and to languages and to the work of translation."

NYTIMES