Roughly 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.
I feel this analogy to be acutely applicable to my experience translating Olenka – a novel by the Indonesian writer Budi Darma, originally published in 1983. My English translation has just come out with Penguin Classics. It is physically small: a mere 12.7 by 19.5 by 1.5 centimetres, weighing 228 grams (only 12 grams more than the apple I place afterwards on my kitchen scale for comparison).
Do not be deceived. This lightweight paperback is, as they say, merely the tip of the iceberg. To give you a sense of the loving, and admittedly obsessive, labour that went into its English-language rendering, I compile here, for your reading pleasure, a few of the pains I took to bring the Anglophone world this annotated edition of Budi Darma’s work.
Olenka itself encourages meticulousness. It keeps track of its copious literary, cinematic, and cultural allusions via 54 end notes. It includes an author’s afterword about the process of writing the novel. It enhances the factuality of its fictional narrative via clippings from real-life magazine and newspapers, captioned and interspersed throughout the text. In short, its author, Budi Darma, set a certain standard. As its translator, tasked not only with rendering it into English but also with furnishing relevant notes and an introduction, it seems only right to follow in his tracks.
My resolve begins with the first end note, which mentions Aldous Huxley, E.M. Forster, and most importantly, a story titled ‘Manu’ by a Marathi-language writer from India named P.S. Rege who also wrote under the pen name Roop Katthak (spelled also Kathak). The 2018 edition of Olenka I am translating from has misspelt Rege as Rage, which results in me finding nothing about him despite my Google Books and Google Scholar search prowess.
So I ask my agent, who is from – and based in – India. ‘It could be Rege,’ she texts. She’s right. From there, more sleuthing reveals that the story in question was included in an anthology titled Contemporary Indian Short Stories, published in New Delhi in 1959. Fortuitously, the State Library of New South Wales has a copy. I place a request and descend eagerly to the library’s bowels to peruse it.
I discover that the first few scenes of Olenka clearly take their tonal cue from Rege’s ‘Manu’ (which Rege himself translated into English). This is gold: I can, and should, use its prose to inflect my own.
From this point, there’s no turning back. I know I’ll follow every lead I can.
Olenka is set in the US’s Midwest, and one scene takes place in a bus station in Indianapolis. The narrator, stranded overnight, makes use of a kursi televisi – literally, a ‘television chair’. I’ve never seen or heard of such a thing, so I spend far too much time hunting for a picture online so I can get a sense of what it looks like. I finally discover this photo in the ‘r/nostalgia’ subreddit on Reddit, which results in me rendering it as ‘coin-operated TV’.
I read, for the first time, the short story ‘Young Goodman Brown’ by Nathaniel Hawthorne because one of Budi Darma’s characters recounts it to another. As with Rege’s ‘Manu’, I take my cues from its language in order to render its retelling.
Other literary works I read or revisit because they are alluded to or quoted include Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence, Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, and ‘The Darling’ by Anton Chekhov. One of the more obscure stories is ‘The Fish Trap’ by Peter Leach. As with ‘Manu’ I discover it housed in the State Library of NSW – in an anthology of O. Henry Memorial Award prize stories from 1974. The State Library: a treasure indeed.
The novel takes place partly on the Indiana University Bloomington campus, and I contact the Indiana University archives with queries on various matters – among them, what the approximate circulation numbers for the Indiana Daily Student newspaper were in the year 1979. (Answer, from a diligent grad student employee who went digging in ‘Collection 142’ of the School of Journalism records to answer my question: 14,000 during the school year.)
Because of a sustained reference in the novel to a scandalous Playgirl interview with Margaret Trudeau (ex-wife of Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau and mother to prime minister Justin Trudeau), and the inclusion of an Indonesian magazine clipping that provides a synopsis of said interview, I decide to track the original down. I can find back copies of the Australian edition of Playgirl in libraries here, but the interview appeared in the American one.
I ask a friend who is spending a year as a fellow at the Harvard-Yenching Institute in the US if she can request a digitised copy of the interview from the September 1979 issue of Playgirl. My friend kindly obliges. This takes a while and I get impatient, so I also ask my husband, who works at the University of Sydney, to request a digitised copy via interlibrary loan.
Both copies arrive by email at around the same time, and I use them to confirm some details that were a little unclear from the Indonesian rendering. I also derive great amusement from the ads – one of which is for a subscription to the Fredrick’s of Hollywood catalogue. There is a photo of a man’s underwear-clad torso, and a woman hugging his hips and looking at the camera. Her face is at groin level and she has an enthusiastic expression on her face. The man’s stomach and legs are carpeted in dark hair. The underwear is white, but has a drawing of an apple over the groin. The apple has a bite taken out of it and text superimposed across it. The text reads ‘Love at First Bite’.
Speaking of images, from the moment I embark on the project, I’m thinking about how to best render the included newspaper and magazine clippings if they can’t be reproduced for the English edition. My editor at Penguin Classics confirms: alas, we can’t include them. So I hit upon a solution, which she agrees is ingenious: boxes of descriptive text will appear where the images appear in the original version of the text (along the lines of my description of the ad, above).
I watch the movie Breaking Away, which is mentioned in the novel, and which is also set in Bloomington, Indiana, where most of the novel takes place. My husband and my oldest son watch with me. We enjoy it very much. My son especially loves the bicycle race scenes. I think that the name of the pizza restaurant mentioned in the novel, Pagliani, must be inspired by the real-life pizza place featured in the movie, called Pagliai’s. The internet tells me that it is now called Opie Taylor’s.
To write the introduction, I drive to the National Library of Australia in Canberra. I spend two and a half days in the library, scouring every issue of Horison and Basis – the premier Indonesian literary and culture magazines, respectively, of their day. I request all issues from 1970 to 1987, scanning for references to Olenka and pieces written by or mentioning Budi Darma. (I get distracted by many things, like authors feuding back and forth over multiple issues, and photos of famous authors in their prime who are either now old or with us no more.)
I discover in the July 1984 issue of Horison an essay by Budi Darma in which he mentions a review of Olenka by the writer and journalist Satyagraha Hoerip. This is not one of the reviews I already know about. There is no mention of the outlet in which it appeared, nor a date. Nothing but the title. As Indonesian newspapers from this era are generally not digitised, their text is not searchable. Once again, I deploy my detective skills: I know that Satyagraha Hoerip was an editor at Sinar Harapan, so I search there. The National Library, thankfully, holds copies from the period I need (most of 1983 through the first half of 1984).
The newspapers arrive in plastic-wrapped bundles, and I begin combing through, focusing on the literary and arts and culture sections. I hit pay dirt relatively quickly, in the issue published on 2 March 1983. I’m so proud of this achievement that I share the good news with the high-school students at the table with me, who are studying for a maths exam. I also reward myself with a walk outside.
I write my own set of translator’s end notes for the novel, to complement Budi Darma’s end notes. Some are notes on his end notes. This seems somehow eminently in the spirit of the work.
During my translation of Olenka, a writer friend checks in on me every now and then: ‘How goeth things, young Tiff?’ she asks. I, and she, are both 41 years old.
My replies are always the same. ‘I feel like my brain is steeped in Olenka.’ ‘I feel I am wandering the maze that is Olenka.’ ‘I feel I am submerged in water, and the water is Olenka.’ And so it goes, until I finally turn in the translation manuscript and accompanying introduction to my editor on 10 February 2025.
Again, these are just several, not all, of the rabbit holes I went down and the puzzles I encountered while translating Olenka. As mentioned, my English translation weighs only 228 grams. Extrapolating from the proportions above, if the finished copy of Olenka were the tip of a literal iceberg, then the remainder of its bulk – my herculean behind-the-scenes submarine labours – would amount to a little over two kilos: 2,052 grams, to be exact.
Objectively speaking, this is not much. More ice cube than -berg. Still, I console myself. The human brain weighs, on average, only 1.3 kilograms. But look at what it can do.
…
Tiffany Tsao is a translator of Indonesian literature and the author of the novel But Won’t I Miss Me. She holds a PhD in English from UC-Berkeley and is Deputy Editor at Sydney Review of Books.
The cover artwork featured from this Penguin Classic edition of Olenka is by Tom Gauld.
