Posts filed under 'sisters'

All That Makes a Life: Jennifer Croft on Writing Her Memoir

September 2, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Sohini Basak

Translation requires striking a balance between two people’s voices that can be very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.

From being the co-winner of the 2018 Man Booker International Prize alongside the writer Olga Tokarczuk, Jennifer Croft has just been announced as a judge of the 2020 International Booker Prize. Croft works across Polish, Ukrainian, and Argentine Spanish, and is currently translating The Book of Jacob, a nine-hundred-page epic by Olga Tokarczuk. She is the recipient of Fulbright, PEN, and National Endowment for the Arts grants, as well as the Michael Henry Heim Prize.

In Homesick, Croft’s memoir, words and their meanings shift and shine through in unusual, tender, and life-transforming ways as the subject moves from a family home, to being the youngest person to be enrolled in her undergraduate class, to going through tragic heartbreaks. A most engaging read, the memoir itself has shape-shifted in interesting ways, having started as a Spanish novel and as a blog. The English-language version (Unnamed Press, September 2019) too is accompanied by photographs, which operate as their own language system, bringing, by turns, softness and sharpness to the storytelling. On the occasion of the release of Homesick, poet and previous Social Media Manager of Asymptote, Sohini Basak, spoke to Jennifer Croft over email.

Sohini Basak (SB): I want to start with the photographs. Could you tell us a bit more about the role of photography in childhood and consequently in your memoir?

Jennifer Croft (JLC): Although photography played an enormous role in my childhood and adolescence, I didn’t really remember that until I started writing Homesick. Because I was living in Buenos Aires, Argentina when I wrote the book, I wrote it in my strange Spanish, which is both foreign (since I started learning Spanish only in my late twenties) and very local (since I’ve only ever studied and spoken porteño Spanish in Buenos Aires). In that first Spanish-language version (called Serpientes y escaleras, coming out next year with Entropía), that language provided a sense of suspense about where this character from Tulsa, Oklahoma was going to go next, and how she was going to end up speaking the way she did. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: ‘So Long, Adolescence!’ by Réka Mán-Várhegyi

July 17, 2018  |  in Translations  |  by Owen Good and Réka Mán-Várhegyi

We’ll leave our mum and dad behind, we’ll leave their poverty and their slothfulness, their gestures and their misery all behind.

Full of dark humor and vibrant details, today’s Translation Tuesday, by Réka Mán-Várhegyi and translated by Owen Good, shows the inner workings of a Hungarian family. Dealing with obesity, sibling relationships, and emerging sexuality, this gripping story captures that uncomfortably liminal time known as adolescence.

‘It’ll be beach weather at the weekend,’ our mum squeaked. ‘Get your swimming costumes ready, we’re going to the lake. Dad, have you checked the batteries in the cooler bag? Does it still work? We’ll not miss it if we don’t buy a new one. No point in wasting money.’

Panni was staring at her hand. I was counting the strips in the rotting wainscot on the dining room wall. We didn’t put up any protest but we didn’t want to go to the lake and they knew it. We didn’t want to lie in the sun in swimsuits, we didn’t want to soak in the water, and, most of all, we didn’t want to gawp at jet-skis. Every summer, jet-skis tore up and down the puddle-sized lake with pornstar-esque girls and boys on them, our classmates, but at least in school they didn’t shriek all day long.

I was born into a fat, hemorrhoidal family as the younger member of fraternal twins. By our teenage years, Panni and I had turned into sluggish potato sacks, we’d become our own parents one size smaller. Later on it became clear that our features weren’t overly similar, but the differences between us were hidden by the fat, just like our parents. When I was seventeen the spare pounds didn’t hurt so much as the fact that I didn’t have any distinguishing features. After class Panni and I often went to the wood, we sat on our coats at the foot of a tree, smoked a cigarette each and scratched our faces with thorns. We both wanted a proper scar. But these were just pathetic thin scratches. They healed in half a day. Especially on my skin—which was positively brown compared to Panni’s milky white—when I wiped the blood off you couldn’t even see them.

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