Episode 73: Jennifer Croft (Translation Series Ep. 3)

In this episode Jennifer Croft speaks to Commonplace host Rachel Zucker about her childhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, falling in love with Russian language and Slavic grammar, the accidental way she ended up becoming a translator of Polish (rather than Russian), and how her study of Polish led her to Argentina, the place she feels most herself. Croft describes translating Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights (Riverhead, 2018) for which Croft and Tokarczuk won the Man Booker International Prize, her relationship with Tokarczuk, and the pleasures and challenges of her current translation project: translating Tokarcuzk’s thousand-page historical novel, The Books of Jacob, about 18th century figure Jacob Frank. Croft also speaks about the connection between translation and creative writing and her newly-released illustrated novel-memoir, Homesick (Unnamed Press, 2019) which she wrote in Spanish and then again in English. Croft touches on existential questions about being oneself in a place where one has no history and how one’s life is a mysterious interplay of destiny, accident, choice and perseverance.