Jennifer Croft

Like, you know, again, going back to this link between creative writing and translation.

So like, you know, like Jen Gayeha, Jennifer Croft, like, you know, so many big literary translators go on to share their own work as well.

Yeah, exactly.

This is one of the things I admire most about Anton Herr, who calls himself the Beyonce of translation, which is, like, so iconic.

I think there's an emotional thing at play here too, where authors and by proxy their agents have this sort of unbreakable attachment to their prose and a very specific vision of what it should look like.

Jennifer Croft, who's a very prominent translator, she told me that in her view, translation is really a kind of strange mixture of reading and writing, and writing being the key word here, where The translator isn't just... transferring he or she is actually creating too and and choosing every single word that's going to be read by the person in the translated language and so there there has to be that space for the translator to have um decision making power and uh he or she will always make decisions that aren't necessarily the the perfect ones for the author um the author you know in in most cases has labored over those words and chosen them for a specific purpose and and and arrange the syntax in their own way.

And that just doesn't work when you're taking it from Arabic to English or Russian to English.

You just can't make the kind of literal jump.

Quote, By contrast, our least successful videos on encounters with Polish literature might draw 160 views in the first month.

Our most successful, like the Olga Tokarczuk episode, which features her two translators, Jennifer Croft and Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Olga is not even herself on that video, can attract more than 5,800 views over a period of a few years and they're always increasing, he said.

Additionally, these videos perform better and are more cost-effective than a series of book trailers produced by the Polish Book Institute.

Short videos that require the hiring of entire production crews, filming with the authors on location, traveling there and back, utilizing lighting crews, generators, trucks, audio technicians, hair and makeup artists, and others.