In addition to Tokarczuk, she began translating works by the Polish writer Wioletta Greg and the Argentine writers Romina Paula, Pedro Mairal and Federico Falco, whom Croft described as “extremely sensitive to the most subtle variations in the speech of different characters, to their feelings, their moods, their silence.”
Croft has a somewhat unconventional approach to translation. She begins to read the book in its entirety, then returns to the beginning and tries, as much as she can, to mimic the author’s writing process.
While working on Mairal’s novel “The Woman from Uruguay,” which is structured like a letter from a man to his wife and which Mairal wrote quickly, Croft translated it as quickly as she could to mimic its frantic pace and frenzied confessional prose. mimic.
“She managed to maintain the intimate tone,” Mairal said in an email. “The translation feels like someone is talking to you, which is exactly what I wanted to do.”
Croft focuses more on conveying tone, style, and meaning than word-for-word accuracy. She described her process as “completely dismantling a book and then completely rebuilding it.”
When she’s not translating, Croft writes. She wrote an autobiographical novel in Spanish entitled ‘Serpientes y Escaleras’ about her coming of age and her burgeoning love for the intricacies of language and translation. She didn’t initially plan to release it in English, but began translating chapters to share with her sister, whose illness is a recurring motif in the book. As she rewrote it, Croft found herself completely rewriting it as illustrated nonfiction, and the English version, “Homesick,” which Unnamed Press released in 2019, was published as a memoir.
Croft, who lives between Los Angeles and Tulsa, is now working on a novel about translation entitled “Amadou.” The story is set in the primeval forests of Poland, where a group of translators have gathered to collaborate on the latest work by a celebrated female Polish novelist. The translators are stunned when the author undergoes an alien transformation and disappears into the forest, leaving them alone to puzzle over what her new novel means.
