Posts Tagged ‘Jennifer Croft’

Editor, translator, and poet, too.

I know Boris Dralyuk as a Russian translator, scholar, and author, and also as the editor I work with at the estimable Los Angeles Review of Books. In addition, I know him  as the husband of author and translator Jennifer Croft, winner of the Man Booker prize for her translation of Nobel prizewinner Olga Tokarczuk’s Extraordinary Flights from the Polish.

But I didn’t know him as a poet … until now. Three poems have appeared in the current issue of The New Criterion.  I also didn’t know him as a native Angeleno, but all three poems are set in that legendary city. “Yes, the town is a stage set, but it’s also the stage where our lives play out — lives no less rich, no less meaningful than those playing out elsewhere,” he has written in an LARB piece on Henri Coulette, titled “…With the remote shine of dead planets”: A New Year’s Meeting in Los Angeles.”

Nazimova in 1921 (Photo: Arthur Rice)

On Boris’s blog, he wrote about the poems in The New Criterion:

“This brief sequence of poems is set in the Los Angeles neighborhood where I grew up and where Jenny and I now make our home. Hollywood is by no means underexposed, of course, yet some corners of it receive less attention than others, and some episodes of its past are gradually sinking into oblivion. In the stanzas below, I spend some time with a monument to Rudolph Valentino; imagine what one of the neighborhood’s early residents, Paul de Longpré, would have made of its current state; and consider the fates of two generations of Russian émigrés — those among whom I was raised in the 1990s, and those who, like Alla Nazimova, flocked here in the 1910s and ’20s.

I had a hard time picking one of the three to publish on the Book Haven, but … Boris is Russian, and I write a good deal about Russian culture and Russian poetry. Moreover, I remember fondly visiting the ethnic enclaves of Los Angeles (my in-laws lived in Armenian Glendale), so in the end I made a surprise choice for the sonnet remembering one of the legendary Russian stars of the early decades of the 20th century.

Congratulations to Olga Tokarczuk! She is the 2018 winner of the Nobel Prize – 2018, because the Nobel Committee was enveloped in scandal last year, and so is issuing two awards at once (the 2019 one went to playwright Peter Handke, a more controversial choice). We’ve written about Tokarczuk before, here and here and here. We didn’t predict this big win, however. The dreadlocked vegetarian is a mere 57 years old – relatively young for Nobel winners. However, she has been a leading light in the Polish firmament for years. According to The Guardian, “it has found not only a fine winner but a culturally important one.” The Nobel Committee cited “a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.” And congratulations, too, for her translators into English (vital for Nobel contenders) –American Jennifer Croft, and Britain’s Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Congratulations, too, to her phenomenal publisher (we’ve written about him here), Jacques Testard of Fitzcarraldo.

The photo above was taken during a reading at the home of Izabela Barry, in New York City (Yonkers, to be more precise). Izabela has been a mover and shaker in the world of Polish lit for years (she’s holding a glass of wine in the photo above), and her living room the setting for readings, discussions, and receptions. (We were honored to have Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard featured one evening a couple years ago – a French event, not Polish, admittedly, but we were further privileged to have the incandescent Polish scholar Irena Grudzińska Gross as interlocutor.)

The New York Times reports:

Ms. Tokarczuk is best known for her 2014 historical novel Księgi Jakubowe or The Book of Jacob, centered in the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires and focused on the life of Jacob Frank, an 18th century Polish leader of a Jewish splinter group that converted to Islam and then Catholicism. “She has in this work showed the supreme capacity of the novel to represent a case almost beyond human understanding,” Nobel officials wrote in their citation.

In 2018, she got renewed prominence after winning the Man Booker International Prize for translated fiction for “Flights,” an experimental novel based on stories of travel.

From the Guardian:

“Sometimes I wonder how my life would have worked out if my books had been translated into English sooner,” mused the 57-year-old author earlier this year, “because English is the language that’s spoken worldwide, and when a book appears in English it is made universal, it becomes a global publication.” This might not be a desirable state of affairs but for writers from many parts of the world it is a fact of life. Her Booker win, as Antonia Lloyd-Jones – one of her two English language translators – remarked, was not just a triumph for her but for the whole of Polish literature.

By then, her canny independent publisher, Fitzcarraldo, had already followed up with Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Whereas Flights was one of the glittering historical and geographical collages that Tokarczuk calls her “constellation novels”, Drive Your Plow is very different: a William Blake-infused eco-thriller which significantly extended her reputation, not least because it is much easier to read.

Postscript from NYRB Classics, via Twitter: In the photo above, one careful observer noticed another notable Polish translator, Sean Gasper Bye.  The “photobomb, if the eyes do not deceive,” would describe the man sitting on the floor, facing the camera, half-lit. Wrote the NYRB Classics: “I love his expression. Happy and rapt.”

Tokarcyk and Croft at the Man Booker awards, 2018. (Photo: Janie Airey/Man Booker Prize)

Author Olga Tokarczuk and translator Jennifer Croft (Photo: Janie Airey/Man Booker Prize)

We posted about last month’s big win for Olga Tokarczuk and Jennifer Croft, winners of the Man Booker International Prize for the Polish author’s Flights (Fitzcarraldo Editions). Croft is the translator. She also translates from the Spanish and Ukrainian and is the founding editor of the Buenos Aires Review. In a new interview in Scroll, she discusses her craft. A few excerpts:

The original Polish title of Flights, which is Beiguni (or Wanderers), gestures to the Slavic sect who have rejected settled life. I also read elsewhere that an early title for the book was Runners. Tell us about your choice for the English title – and how this captures the book’s central themes.

Signing books in London.

The original title of the novel is Bieguni, which comes from a Slavic root that means “to run”. But the word in Polish is a strange one – not a word people use, though they would recognise the root. The word “runners” in English is much more prosaic, much less evocative. I chose a word I thought would accurately reflect Olga’s tendency throughout her work to create networks of associations, a tactic that is especially important in a book like this one, where fragments may appear at first glance to be disconnected from one another, yet in reality they’re linked conceptually as well as though subterranean formal bonds, including the resurgence in different sections of related words. “Flights” suggests plane travel, imagination (“flights of fancy”), fleeing (which is closer to the original Polish title), etc.

***

It’s taken a decade for the English-language version to hit the bookshelves since the book was first published in Poland. And for this reason Tokarczuk has said that while she’s pleased it has gained renewed pertinence, she also feels “conversationally jet-lagged” talking about it now. With this distance in mind, what are your thoughts on translations as the after-lives or second-lives of a book?

This is a fascinating topic that also gets at the question of what a translation is, whether it constitutes its own artwork, how independent it can be from an original, how independent an original can be from it. I’m planning to write more about this in the future.

***

You’re also translating Tokarczuk’s magnum opus, the 900-page epic The Books of Jacob, which won the “Polish Booker” [That would be the Nike – ED.], and which is slated to be released in 2019. What can readers expect?

Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob is a monumental novel that delves into the life and times of the controversial historical figure Jacob Frank, leader of a heretical Jewish splinter group that ranged the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, seeking basic safety as well as transcendence. Tokarczuk’s twelfth book, considered by many critics to be her masterpiece, The Books of Jacob is also a suspenseful and entertaining novel that remained a national bestseller for nearly a year after its November 2014 release.

Although set in the eighteenth century, The Books of Jacob invokes a decidedly twenty-first century zeitgeist. It encourages its readers to reexamine their histories and reconsider their perspectives on the shape Europe will take in coming years. It celebrates and problematises diversity in its plot and characters. It subtly participates in the debates dividing Europe – and the world – on how to protect tolerance, how to define intolerance, how to set and abide by the limits of contemporary sovereignty, and on specific issues such as how to handle an influx into Central Europe of refugees in both practical and moral terms.

Read the whole Q&A here.

Winners past and present: László Krasznahorkai and Olga Tokarczuk   (Photo: New Directions)

Now the whole world knows: Olga Tokarczuk has become the first Polish writer to win the Man Booker International Prize, for her novel Flights. The Man Booker press release called it “a novel of linked fragments from the 17th century to the present day, connected by themes of travel and human anatomy.” The prize was announced this week during a ceremony in London.

Croft ,Tokarczuk, Testard (Photo: Boris Dralyuk)

“Tokarczuk is a writer of wonderful wit, imagination and literary panache,” Lisa Appignanesi, who led the panel of judges, said in a statement.  She added that the novel “flies us through a galaxy of departures and arrivals, stories and digressions, all the while exploring matters close to the contemporary and human predicament — where only plastic escapes mortality.”

The £50,000 prize for best translated fiction from around the world will be shared with translator Jennifer Croft.

I heard the news from an unusual source: the boyfriend of Jennifer Croft is my colleague and editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Boris Dralyuk. We’ve written about him here and here. He’s over the moon, obviously and almost literally, as he’d just flown from Los Angeles when we exchanged messages, and 30,000 feet is as close as any of us will get to that chilly orb.

Wise words from Daniel

It was cheering news to others who attended the ceremony as well. Daniel Medin of the American University in Paris wrote me: “I’m delighted by the result. Flights is an original and formally adventurous novel. Great translation, too.” Daniel is associate director of the AUP’s Center for Writers and Translators and one of the editors of its Cahiers Series. He is also co-editor of Music & Literature magazine and a contributing editor to The White Review. He also tells me he’s now on the jury for the Berlin-based Haus der Kulturen der Welt  Internationaler Literaturpreis. (We’ve written about him here and here.)

He continued, “I’ve taught an earlier novel by Tokarczuk – also in a wonderful translation, in this case by Antonia Lloyd-Jones – in my course on Central European literature and history. Her fiction clearly belongs in that tradition.”

Boris at Pushkin House

But in the applause for the author (and in this case translator, too), many forget the role of the publisher. Not Daniel, who also had praise for Fitzcarraldo Editions and its founding publisher Jacques Testard, with whom he has worked closely at The White Review for many years. “He is the best thing that has happened to the anglophone literary world in years. Firstly, for co-founding The White Review, which helped launch the careers of so many compelling English-language writers in the UK and in translation. Then, for Fitzcarraldo, which has brought the work of intrepid writers like John Keene, Kate Briggs and Claire-Louise Bennett to a larger audience. These are the first three that came to mind but his list is strong across the board, and includes of course many works in translation.

“It’s extraordinary that his books have won the Nobel and Man Booker International within a few years of launching. The best part’s that this is only the beginning. Jacques is playing the long game: his first translated title was by Mathias Enard, a finalist last year who will be eligible with his forthcoming novel, Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants.

“Fitzcarraldo should be competitive next year with Esther Kinsky‘s remarkable novel, River. (Incidentally, Kinsky translated Flights into German and won a major prize for her rendering of Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night.)”

And Boris was doing double-time, too: during his week in London, he celebrated his new Ten Poems from Russia (Candlestick Press) with a reading at the Pushkin House.

Author and translator (Photo: Janie Airey/Man Booker Prize)