Found in Translation.

It was my birthday this week—yesterday, in fact—so you're a bit late sending a card if you haven't already done so. But your gift to me can be to indulge me. I had chocolate birthday cake for breakfast this morning, and I’ll probably have chocolate birthday cake for lunch later today. It would please me if nothing were to disturb the agreeable harmony of this situation, so, for a change, I don't propose to take a fistful of angry pills before writing my column this week.

Instead, I’d prefer to have a quiet morning, drinking tea, possibly eating a little more cake, and thinking about words.

Yesterday, my birthday treat was to take my dogs for a walk and dictate a chapter for my next novel. It was quite a long walk, and when I arrived home, I discovered I had dictated over 4,000 words of my first draft, an excellent result that required more cake.

I find myself in a mood to ponder less the sorrows of the world than those pleasant things, which occupied more of my thoughts this week. Words and cake. Admittedly, I don’t have much to say about cake. Although I am a champion at buying and consuming it, I'm rather hopeless at cooking it, so I have nothing practical to offer.

On words, however, on words I have some thoughts.

I'm currently reading two translated novels. One lives by my bedside, the other keeps me company at lunch. I doubt I could swap them without knocking something loose inside my brain. One is a gentle, peculiar little time-travel story set in a Tokyo café; the other is a densely emotional account of young womanhood and friendship in postwar Naples. The first whispers to me at the end of the day, while the other grabs me by the collar just after noon and shouts: “Dude! No napping! Pay attention.”

My bedtime book is Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, translated from Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot. I grabbed it on a whim, after seeing the paperback in Harry Hartog at Bondi Junction, lured in by the premise; a Japanese time travel story.

Take my money! I thought-screamed, lunging for the shelf. Maybe they’re going to flip The Final Countdown and send a couple of Mogami-class heavy missile frigates back to help Admiral Yamamoto.

Not so much, as it turns out.

Kawaguchi’s premise is a chair in a quiet café that lets you travel back in time, provided you return before the coffee gets cold. Plus, you can’t leave the chair, so you probably won’t be messing around with the Battle of Midway timeline.

Okay, fine. It’s still time travel, so I picked it up. But the writing struck me at first as... well, to be honest, aggressively simplistic. Not merely straightforward, but stripped down to the point of near abstraction. It felt like being handed an emotional instruction manual written by a ghost. The militant simplicity struck me as so strange that I started poking around online, asking whether anybody else was having trouble with the writing style.

And yes, other readers had also found the style jarring. The translation is faithful, but much of the subtle cultural resonance that would register with a Japanese reader doesn’t quite make it across to our big dumb lingua franca. Once I understood that, it was as though the book began to relax in my hands. Or maybe I just relaxed around it. I started reading it in bed, when my capacity for complexity is low, but my appetite for meaning could still enjoy a little snack. (Also, I found it an excellent alternative to scrolling through Bluesky and Substack Notes.)

The prose, still spare, started to feel meditative. The simplicity no longer grated. Rather, it soothed.

Half a day before I climb into bed with my time-travelling coffee, however, I’ve been spending my lunchtimes with The Story of a New Name, the second novel in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein. It’s not a gentle book, and it does not whisper. After a morning of writing my own books—novels which, I will admit, improve with altitude—Ferrante arrives fully amped. She puts the zap on my head like a live wire dropped into the bath of my workday thoughts.

Reading her quartet is like tunnelling into the undergrowth of another human being’s life. It’s not always comfortable to go crawling through there. She writes with a ferocity that feels entirely uninterested in whether I, the reader, am comfortable or even keeping up. And yet it’s that same intensity—emotional, psychological, linguistic—that makes the work so bracing.

Where Before the Coffee Gets Cold offers its brand of narrative minimalism, Ferrante floods the page. Her sentences stretch and coil and double back on themselves. Characters contradict themselves within a breath. Love, resentment, jealousy, and fear all slosh together in the same paragraph. You don’t read her so much as submit to her. Even in translation, her writing retains a sense of fury and velocity. I’m not equipped to judge how close the English version gets to the original Italian, but the sense I get reading it is that of something barely contained by language, as if something beneath the story is trying to spill out through the seams of the words. It feels completely alive and sometimes a little scary.

It’s low-key interesting to me that both of these books—so radically different in style and emotional register—are translations. I didn’t set out to read translated literature this month. I picked up one book because I had a time-travel jones, and the other because I loved the first of Ferrante’s quartet, My Brilliant Friend. But I wonder whether their power lies, at least in part, in that act of translation.

A good translator isn’t just a technician; they’re a kind of composer. They don’t merely replicate the original artwork; they faithfully reimagine it for another audience, living in a different cultural universe.

Maybe I’m not reading Before the Coffee Gets Cold or The Story of a New Name as they were originally meant to be read. But I am reading them as they now exist, for me, through the creative filters of Geoffrey Trousselot and Ann Goldstein. And those versions—the Japanese ghost story in plain English, Ferrante’s modern Italian epic—have become exactly the books I needed.

I even have data. The screentime stats for my iPhone and iPad show a collapse in my social media addiction, which coincides with starting these two books. I’m only reading them for an hour a day, but my exposure to the endless scroll is down by more than five hours a day.

I don’t know if I can ask for more from a book than that.

Kawaguchi’s spare, meditative prose knows when to leave me alone. Ferrante absolutely does not. And I’m grateful for both.

So I’ll keep reading them—one at night, one at noon—letting their translated voices thread through the untranslatable moods of my day. And on a birthday week, with two good dogs and all the cake, that feels like a great present.