In the fall of 2021, the American writer and translator Jennifer Croft published an essay in The Guardian that provoked a spirited conversation within the English-speaking literary world. Why, she asked, were translators expected to remain coyly, politely invisible, with their names more often than not cast off from book covers by publishers? This practice, she pointed out, overlooks the labor that goes into these books: It is the translators, after all, who “choose every word they will contain.” Now Croft, who is perhaps best known for her English translations of the Polish Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk (she also works in Spanish and Ukrainian), is again weighing in on the ethics of translation, but this time she’s approaching the subject in the form of a novel. The Extinction of Irena Rey follows eight translators on a retreat located at the edge of a remote Polish forest. These characters have gathered to translate the latest novel by the glamorous Irena Rey, a “household name” in Poland. “We were all in love with her,” claims Emi, a …