The problem with good news is that when it happens, I am so excited about and caught up with experiencing the goodness of the news happening that writing about it afterwards seems a little anti-climactic. Especially if the goodness of the news is producing much to keep one busy with.
Those who follow my goings-on, here and elsewhere, know that there has been a lot of good news that I have been accumulating, which I will list here, partly because lists are satisfying, and partly because they have indeed accumulated and I don’t want to bore you with blow-by-blow details:
- My novel But Won’t I Miss Me was published in May through June (depending where you are in the world)! It received starred reviews in Shelf Awareness, Booklist, and Library Journal, and has received solid attention and coverage of a solidly good sort. Occasionally, I find out someone has read it and feels really seen, or that their mind has been blown and they are shocked anew at the things women must endure, or that they are impressed at the craft and structure of the novel. Huzzah, I say, and pat myself on the back.
- Three of my translations of Indonesian writing were published: The Patient by Naomi Midori in May (original title: Pasien); Olenka by Budi Darma in July (original title: Olenka); and Night of a Thousand Hells by Intan Paramaditha (which I co-translated with Stephen J. Epstein) just today or yesterday, depending where you are in the world. I can hardly believe it myself. Where do I find the time? The answer: although they all came out this year, these projects were in the main, done, respectively, in mid-2024; over 2024 and the first months of 2025; and (at least my portion of it, which was my pass through/deep-dive into Stephen’s manuscript) in a crazy-marathon-late-night-every-night-squeeze-translating-into-every-crevice-possible three month period in 2025.
- In celebration of International Translation Day, Meanjin invited me to write something for them on something related to translation, or translation-adjacent. Thus invited, I wrote a short piece titled The Iceberg of Translation, mulling on how much unseen (submarine) labour and love can go into translating something without it being visible in the final ‘product’, and detailing how much loving labour went into translating Budi Darma’s Olenka for Penguin Classics.
- It has been pleasing to enjoy the fruits of my labour when I have time to take breaks and stand idle in the orchard, bite into one of them, and let the juice dribble down my chin. Olenka has received good coverage from Publishers Weekly and Words Without Borders, among other outlets. Which leads me to my next list item:
- Night of a Thousand Hells came out today in the US and Europe. And it has already been named a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature! I am feeling that my mad-translate-every-spare-moment-marathon aforementioned was not for nothing, and Intan, Stephen, and I are high-fiving virtually across the globe (Intan’s now on the US East Coast; Stephen is in New Zealand; and I am in Australia). Let us now spread a picnic blanket beneath a tree, crack open this pomegranate, and feast on the sweet ruby-red crunchy insides. In fact, pomegranates all around!
In my essay for Meanjin above, I note that ‘[r]oughly 10% of an iceberg sits above the waterline, meaning the other 90% goes unseen (at least to us surface-dwellers). Literary translation is not unlike an iceberg: only a small part of the labour involved is visible in the finished copy. The rest is not so apparent – a submerged and hidden base, upon which sits the beautiful blue craggy structure bobbing along up top.’
Similarly, I feel that, in boiling down this year’s major happenings into this list, I have performed something similar. I am not sure this list has had the pleasing or satisfying effect I intended it to have. When all the care and labour and time, time, time that is spent planting a seed, watering and tending it, nurturing it into a sapling, then into a mature tree that produces many individual fruits, and then that fruit is harvested and placed into a basket, and then the contents are put into a press to have the juice squeezed out, to be gulped down in a single thirsty go, then is that satisfying? I’m not so sure.
