This Changes Everything

This past May, at the 2025 NSW Literary Awards ceremony, Elizabeth Bryer was awarded the biennial Translation Prize for her English-language rendition of Eduardo Sangarcía’s haunting debut novel, The Trial of Anna Thalberg. Based in Australia, where she lives on unceded Wurundjeri land, Bryer’s recent translations include fiction by Claudia Salazar Jiménez, José Luis de Juan, and María José Ferrada, and she is also the author of the award-winning novel From Here On, Monsters, which was published by Picador in 2020. Bryer first learnt of Sangarcía’s novel in 2019, when it was still a work in progress, during a conversation with Vito D’Onghia, a literary agent with whom she had previously collaborated. D’Onghia’s enthusiastic description of the Spanish-language manuscript about the Würzburg witch trials so intrigued Bryer that she asked if she could read it. Later, a revised and extended version of that early draft would go on to beat eight hundred other submissions to win the 2020 Mauricio Achar Award in Mexico. After Restless Books acquired the North American English rights to the novel, on the strength of Bryer’s English-language sample, she translated the remainder of Anna Thalberg, and it was published to critical acclaim in 2024.  

Elizabeth wasn’t able to attend the awards ceremony, which was held in the State Library of New South Wales, but she pre-recorded an acceptance speech, which was beamed onto the big screen for the audience, and streamed online for those watching from home. During her recorded speech, in addition to thanking Eduardo Sangarcía, D’Onghia, and others who had supported her work, Bryer also referenced the prize money that she won. Speaking directly to the organisers, Bryer said: ‘This makes such a material difference to my practice. After this project, I had decided to wind back my translation activity. I couldn’t see a way to make it viable. This changes everything.’  

At the ceremony that night, as I watched Elizabeth speak, it struck me how rare it was for a translator, when accepting an award, to acknowledge the dire financial conditions imposed on literary translators by ‘the market’. It was a frank disclosure that would unsettle me for days after the ceremony. I kept thinking about how close we had come to losing one of our most innovative translators because it hadn’t been financially viable for her to continue. In the weeks that followed, I found myself wanting to connect with Bryer, to hear more about her practice and her experience translating The Trial of Anna Thalberg while contending with an industry that consistently undercompensates translators’ expertise and labour. I reached out a month or so after the ceremony. By that time, I was back in New York, and Elizabeth had had a baby, but she was gracious enough to correspond with me while still in the thick of fresh parenthood. We exchanged emails throughout the Australian winter and North American summer, though we never once mentioned the weather. 

Sarah Timmer Harvey: Congratulations again on winning the 2025 Translation Prize for translating Eduardo Sangarcía’s The Trial of Anna Thalberg! How was that experience, and what does it mean to you? 

Elizabeth Bryer: Thanks so much, Sarah, and right back at you for your shortlisting. I would have liked to attend, but it wasn’t to be – I filmed the acceptance video not long before going into labour, then watched the ceremony from my couch, beneath my then-unnamed baby, as my milk came in. 

It was an enormous honour to be on that shortlist – to have won, and also to know that the three judges, whose own work I deeply admire, saw merit in my work. I am immensely thankful, too, that the State Library of NSW listened to translators’ concerns and removed the minimum word-count restriction so that works such as my translation of Eduardo Sangarcía’s The Trial of Anna Thalberg might be eligible alongside books of more conventional length. The literary merit of a book and its translation is rarely about word count, and of course, in some cases, implication and economy are a literary work’s most notable characteristics. Commercial considerations and cultural norms already make it a challenge to interest Anglosphere publishers in novellas, so it’s nice that this prize has now broken free from those same limitations.  

STH: It must have been a wonderful but intense few days for you. I feel honoured that you are willing to correspond with me so soon after the birth of your baby. Pregnancy and post-partum are periods of intense neuroplasticity. Do you find this phase of parenthood has you thinking about your work any differently, if at all?  

EB:  Right now, feeling this powerful desire to direct my attention towards meeting the physical and emotional needs of a tiny human, I can’t stop thinking about new parents in Gaza, who are being deprived of their capacity to nurture their newborns. Of all the cruelties to inflict on a fellow human being, this must count among the most severe.  

It’s also making me think about communication in the broadest sense – of whose words have the power to kill, and whose words are ignored. I’m thinking of writers and translators such as Refaat Al-Areer and Ali Shehda Abu Afash, murdered by a nation-state hellbent on gaining narrative control of how the rest of the world understands the genocide it is committing. And I’m thinking about the courageous efforts of translators, self-translators, and journalists who are working so hard and at such great personal cost to get word out to the rest of the world, including Bisan Owda in Gaza, Motaz Azaiza, who was forced to leave, and Mohammed el-Kurd in the West Bank. 

The acute attention to the object of our study while simultaneously being responsible for it: this might be what parenting shares most with translation. The privilege of that close-up perspective, of bearing witness to another’s learning and another’s workings from such proximity. Translation and parenting are both defined by the act of paying attention. And both activities reinforce our connectedness to others all over the world.  

STH: Yes, as translators we are uniquely conditioned to pay close attention to even the most subtle shifts in tone and energy. I think that also applies to the world around us. Like you, I’m thinking constantly about the parents and children in Gaza, and the interpreters, translators, and journalists who are risking their lives every day to document and share the truth of what is being done to the Palestinian people. 

EB: Have there been changes in your own life that have made you think of translation differently?  

STH: I was living in New York City through the worst of the pandemic, and like many people in Covid epicentres, the experience changed me profoundly. At the time, I was translating Jente Posthuma’s What I’d Rather Not Think About, which is about a woman in deep denial of a situation unfolding within her family. Her brother fails to communicate his distress in a way that is acceptable to her, and the woman’s wilful ignorance is made easier because she is so focused on semantics. Covid was a bit like that for me. I knew a lot of people who were in denial about the reality of what was going on at the time, despite the extensive media coverage and the insane number of deaths constantly being tracked all over social media. In New York, we were burying people in mass graves on Hart Island, while some of our friends and family in other cities and countries were still debating whether lockdown and masks were even necessary, and still refusing to cancel their trips to other countries. People around the world purportedly had access to the same images and statistics, but the words being used to describe them, and the accompanying contextualisation, could radically differ depending on which kind of media people were engaging with. I think, in a strange way, all of this – combined with the novel I was translating – made me realise how innately prescriptive a language can be, and how easy it is for a reader to overlook or resist the message at the heart of a text if it is something that would be expressed differently in their own language or culture.  

This experience deepened my sense of responsibility to the readers of my translations. While studying translation, a lot of time was spent discussing the visibility and value of my art and practice as a translator, as well as my responsibility to the writer or original text, but the reader’s encounter with the text always seemed to be a bit of an afterthought. I began to pay more attention to the deeper meaning underpinning each text, tapping into my role as a cross-cultural storyteller and dedicating more space to ensuring that the writer’s intended message would resonate with readers from a different cultural context. In a way, it’s about acknowledging that literature in translation is an ongoing conversation, rather than a monologue.  

Speaking of resonant messages, I was deeply moved by the acceptance speech you recorded for the NSW Literary Awards. Aside from thanking your editors, the author, and others who helped bring this translation to life, you also laid bare the financial challenges that you and many other translators experience working in this industry. Can you share a little more about these challenges and how they affect the work you do? 

EB: Well, I don’t think anyone goes into literary translation without knowing that it may need to be subsidised by other sources of income. But lately it has felt harder. And the ‘industry’ can seem so nebulous when you are staking out a corner of your living space to work in snatched moments. In my experience, translators are often idealists, and we want to see the literary works we love have afterlives in multiple languages, but the material conditions can make that hard to facilitate. I’ve always enjoyed complementing the rewarding but solitary work of literary translation with other jobs, but it can be a challenge to strike the right balance.  

 STH: What is it in particular that has felt harder for you lately? And what do you think has caused this shift?  

EB: I suppose, in the pie graph of time I wish to allocate to different types of labour in my life, the portion labelled ‘translation’ is larger than what the income generated by that labour makes sensible. It is an immense privilege to be entrusted with giving an author’s text a new form. Previously, the delights of spending time in someone else’s literary world outweighed the real-world considerations of sustaining myself. But lately, these considerations are more at the front of my mind. 

STH: You mentioned wanting to use part of the prize money to mentor an emerging translator. Did you have a mentor yourself, when you were starting out?  

EB: Not in a formal sense, but, back in 2016, I secured funding from the Ian Potter Cultural Trust and Copyright Agency to attend the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference in Vermont, which was a life-changing experience. Our workshop leader, the distinguished translator Esther Allen, has since been magnanimous enough to offer a steadying word during moments of crisis. I have been inspired by her integrity, and she has taught me to keep my expectations of publishers high, and not to capitulate to exploitation.  

STH: These are such valuable lessons for any translator to learn. When I think of exploitation in our industry, I definitely think of underpayment, but increasingly, I also think of the threat of AI. Perhaps I shouldn’t even call it a threat, because it is already happening. Some publishers and authors are turning to AI to ‘supplement’ the work of translators, or in some places, wholly replace them. I’ve been assured by some well-meaning people in publishing that there will always be a place for ‘literary’ translators, but this feels just as unsettling, because who or what will determine that promised ‘place’?  

I think about what acclaimed translator Julia Sanches said in a recent Guardian article on the launch of GlobeScribe and other AI translation services: ‘Even though I don’t think GlobeScribe can translate the kinds of literary texts I translate, I am gloomy about the emergence of all these new AI “translation” services. They give the appearance that translation is instant, which devalues my labour, and also that it is mediocre, which could make “good enough” the new standard for the literary arts. And that’s a disservice to both authors and readers.’  

What are your thoughts on AI and its place in our industry? Do you use any AI tools in your own work, and do you think translators can engage with them in any way that is beneficial to us? 

EB: I think it’s so true what Sanches says – any steps in the direction of ‘good enough’ are very much a disservice to everyone involved. Example-based machine translation tools such as Google Translate were already flagrantly violating translators’ copyright by incorporating their iterations into the results, and the latest developments in AI have only exacerbated that.  

For me, using AI tools would diminish the pleasure of translating. The creative and intellectual puzzles are why I do this. I am sure there are ways to engage that are beneficial, but I suspect that is more the case for professional translation than for literary translation.  

Thinking about it now, I can separate translation into the part that feels less interesting – for me that’s the earliest, very rough draft – and the part that I love, the reason I do this, which is the rewriting of that first draft. That’s the part that feels like imaginative and linguistic play.  

Yet I don’t think I could hand over the first, less interesting part of the process to AI without losing something important. Your question is making me suspect that I feel this way partly because of the way tedium connects more broadly to creativity, or at least in my sense of it. In my writing practice, for example, I often cultivate a sense of boredom, which allows ideas to drop in, or allows me to recognise the ideas when they drop in. 

And I’m also very wary of anything that smacks of the capitalist obsession with productivity and efficiency, which, to my mind, is AI all over. What is your take on AI in literary translation? 

STH: Honestly, I’m feeling let down by the publishers who are even entertaining the idea of working with AI. I know that we, as translators, understand the value of our work, but I’m starting to believe that the pool of people in the publishing industry that truly know and value our work is shrinking. That is already evident in how challenging it is to get publishers to pay translators a living wage. It’s obvious to me that the tech bros creating these AI translation tools have never worked as literary translators, much less in publishing, and that they have no interest in actually understanding our work and our art. But I expect this from them. Far more disappointing are the publishing houses who are choosing to use AI translations in order to bypass engaging human translators. For example, last year, the largest Dutch publisher, Veen Bosch & Keuning, which is owned by Simon & Schuster, announced their intention to use AI to translate a ‘limited number’ of their ‘commercial fiction’ titles. They sent emails to their authors offering this as a viable pathway to getting published in other regions of the world. Such publishers are well aware of the work that we translators do, and the level of expertise and value we bring to each project, and they’ve heard all our complaints about AI’s many deficiencies and drawbacks, but instead of showing support for translators, they are choosing to partner with tech companies who are doing their best to dispense with us. If it isn’t already obvious, I don’t like to use AI translation tools at all and I believe that using AI to translate a novel should be as laughable and offensive to the entire industry as publishing a novel written by AI would be. I’ve experimented with some AI translation tools, because I was curious and wanted to know how they worked, but I was shocked by how sub-par and unimaginative the translations they generate actually are, not to mention the number of hallucinations and mistakes they spit out.  

In any case, our human-to-human collaborations are infinitely more interesting. Did you work closely with Eduardo Sangarcía on the translation of The Trial of Anna Thalberg? And if so, how was that process for you? 

EB: My default is not to pester authors too much, but Eduardo Sangarcía was very generous in answering any question I had, and I learned a lot from him. I remember, for example, that back when I was preparing a sample, I was sure that the word ‘brezo’ in context wasn’t referring to ‘heather’, and his response delighted me: it was an early modern word for ‘cradle’ that he had read in a work by Lope de Rueda. I love how these conversations can further open up the text and its influences. 

STH: So interesting that you think of it as pestering! My preference is to build a relationship with the writers before I start translating. I want to know the sound of their voice and pick up on their speech patterns, understand their source(s) of inspiration, their writing process, their ideal reader. Sometimes, I even ask the writers I work with to tell me the music they listened to when they were writing, then I’ll play that same music while translating, in an attempt to channel that same headspace or mood. I find this helps me find the right tone. Angela Rodel, who won the International Booker Prize for her translation of Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter in 2023 said in an interview,‘[a]ll translation is a duet whose true beauty would not be possible without both voices or both melodies coming together’. I tend to take Rodel’s idea and run with it! Of course, not every writer wants to collaborate in that way and it’s important to respect that, but I’m always delighted when they do. Do you have any particular rituals or methods that help you connect to the text and channel the right tone in translation?  

EB: Oh, I want to build a relationship too, but this often comes after the translation. I especially love when, in promoting the book, we get the chance to interview each other about the work, for example.  

As for Rodel’s image, it’s really appealing. It’s very neat too. And I can’t help but be a little wary of neat analogies – and metaphors. It seems we translators can’t resist using metaphors to talk about the work we do. That makes me a little suspicious, as tempted as I am by what she says! 

I’ve been thinking for a while now about doing something slightly different. I’ve spent some time reading Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s views on translation, and comparing those views to her own translations, and what really stands out for me as something I would like to emulate is how radical and radically personal her translations are. She critiques translations as often lacking the stylistic experiments that define the work of writers such as Monique Wittig or Alice Walker. I think Spivak’s own translations illustrate what translations that allow their authors to speak to Wittig or Walker as equals might look like. And those are translations that are radical and radically personal – sometimes so much so that they are situated way out there, on the outer limits of interpretation.     

In my case, I aim to achieve this by, among other things, protecting my own encounter with the text I’m translating. My communion with the author happens through the text, not through, to use Gerald Murnane’s term, ‘the breathing author’ – at least not until I have a draft I am relatively satisfied with. At that stage, I compile any lingering questions in a document and send them to the author, but otherwise, I want to encounter the text as the reader does. As fascinating as I find your practice of listening to the same music, in my case I would find music distracting. So: nothing but the literary text, and the world I build in my mind through my encounter with that text, supplemented by research and literary intertexts. 

STH: Did you have to do much research for Anna Thalberg? And was there something you learned while researching that especially informed the way you worked on the translation? 

EB: I did a lot of research. I read historians’ monographs and articles about the era, as well as primary sources, and translations of primary sources. I read up on early modern clothing, fabric, cultural practices, units of measure, toponyms, livelihoods, beliefs about witchcraft, folktales. I researched biblical phrases, literary works including H. P. Lovecraft’s stories. So many things! 

Sangarcía was inspired to write Anna Thalberg after reading a pamphlet by the priest and poet Friedrich Spee. Amid the widespread paranoia of the age, Spee was one of the few to publicly denounce witch trials. Sangarcía wanted to engage in a centuries-spanning conversation exploring how oppressive systems can become self-perpetuating processes, so the accuracy of the historical details was key. 

All the research was relevant, even the rabbit holes. One challenge was thinking up a translation strategy that wouldn’t ignore the fact that the work I was recreating was by a Mexican author writing in Spanish. I always like to smuggle in some trace of the source language, but with The Trial of Anna Thalberg, it couldn’t jolt the reader out of its fictional setting in early modern Europe, in what is now Germany. In the end I trusted that these traces would come through via the text’s representation of social relations. And I loved, for example, that potatoes are mentioned on the first page: here in this poor woman’s kitchen is evidence of the influence of the so-called ‘New World’ on these people’s everyday lives. 

I also got to geek out with editors extraordinaire Rodrigo Aguilera-Croasdaile and Jennifer Alise Drew about how much Latin we could get away with inserting, about epithets for historical rulers, about so many other details. 

STH: How did you approach finding the right voice in English? And how did you tackle the variations in voice and narrative form? 

EB: I started with a close reading. One feature that especially stood out for me was the way the third-person omniscient narration abruptly shifts from one character’s sphere of experience to another’s, supported by innovative formatting of line breaks and margins. While this isn’t exactly the ‘sensation of a novelized rumour’ that Julián Herbert identifies in Fernanda Melchor’s and Valeria Luiselli’s novels in a fascinating piece for Southwest Review, it does exhibit the concern Herbert recognises among contemporary Mexican novelists – their interest in addressing the tension between society and the individual. 

In Anna Thalberg, these mid-sentence changes in focus, often across geographical and temporal distances, highlight the bonds between characters, their being-in-relation. They suggest that every person’s actions have consequences for others, no matter how far apart those individuals find themselves. Furthermore, they offer a felt experience of what it is like to be entangled in social relations. 

This seemed really important to get right. It meant paying close attention to tenses, to the images connecting these people across time and space, to the repetition of certain words.  

I also took special delight in conjuring an early modern feel through the text’s vocabulary. For example, I remember making late-stage revisions, changing words such as ‘clearing’ (claro) to ‘glade’, or ‘tomorrow’ (mañana) to ‘on the morrow’, or ‘stew’ (potaje) to ‘pottage’.  

And I worked to create a hypnotic rhythm, often inspired by biblical cadences and syntax. Each chapter is one long sentence, which can make excerpts tricky because they are necessarily clauses rather than full sentences, but to give one example, in this case Vogel is enumerating the reasons he is writing to the bishop for permission to torture Anna:  

My version: ‘in the event that learning the ways in which the executioner’s instruments augment pain until it washes away the world, until it nails the wretched soul under sufferance to every protracted minute, to every hour made eternal, to every night rendered a long sojourn in a sensory inferno, in the event that learning this failed to convince her to accept the errors and wickedness of her ways…’  

Google Translate: ‘if you find out how any of the executioner’s instruments makes the pain grow until it washes away the world, until it nails down the unhappy one who suffers torment with each minute that stretches, with each hour that drags on, with each night that transforms into a long stay in the hell of the senses did not convince her to accept her mistakes and evil deeds…’ 

(The source text: si enterarse de la forma en que cualquiera de los instrumentos del sayón hace crecer el dolor hasta deslavar al mundo, hasta clavar al infeliz que sufre el tormento a cada minuto que se dilata, a cada hora que se eterniza, a cada noche que se transforma en una larga estancia en el infierno de los sentidos no la convenciera de aceptar sus yerros y maldades…) 

STH: That is brilliant, and a perfect illustration of why AI translation tools are no match for the investment and artistry of a literary translator. Sangarcía certainly makes it glaringly obvious that the witch trials were a product of the rampant misogyny and superstition underpinning European society and its religious and social institutions at the time. The writing is so perfectly evocative that it actually made me angry. I had to put the book away several times while reading it, which made me wonder how emotions factor into your work. Do you allow yourself to channel or feel emotions while translating, or do you deliberately foster an emotional distance? 

EB: I don’t think I could cultivate emotional distance if I tried. At one point I remember feeling physically ill after long hours spent reading about the torture instruments used during the Inquisition, and on those days, I had to take more frequent breaks. What about you? Do you find that emotions figure in your own work? 

STH: Absolutely. I’m the same as you in that it would be impossible to leave my emotions out of my work. But I see that as a strength. I want my work to feel intuitive to the reader, which means that I welcome those emotions and want to feel the words as deeply as I can. I find the somatic poetry rituals of CAConrad very inspiring and liberating. Academia brought me to translation, but it wasn’t until I experienced CA’s rituals and encountered Cecilia Vicuña’s work that that I began to think about translation as more than an intellectual act. I opened myself to integrating embodied wisdom into my practice. I’m constantly workshopping my translations with my voice. I find this keeps me in touch with my emotions, a bit like an actor would workshop a script. Sometimes that means that I’m crying at my desk, or a particular turn of phrase will have me feeling euphoric – and it’s interesting to note which words elicit those physical responses. This is also the reason I can’t work in a café or library. I’m able to keep quiet for a couple of hours, but sooner or later I’m going to start muttering word combinations to myself or audibly responding to the scene I’m translating. However, when I’m not working, I love going out to cafés, libraries, and bookshops to listen to friends and colleagues read and perform their work. That’s one of the things that I appreciate most about New York City. The translation community is thriving, has an audience, and is exceptionally supportive. Do you feel part of the Australian literary community?  

EB: I do, particularly through reading literary mags such as HEAT, and through reading peers’ and elders’ books and translations. At the moment, Agog poetry readings and a Silvia Federici reading group are where I seek community outside my reading practice, and I’m always on the lookout for events organised by Liminal. I have enjoyed AALITRA’s translation slams, too, the last of which was a sold-out event at the Melbourne Writers Festival and is still available to view online. Otherwise, I’ve really relished literary communing through emails and voice messages of late. It’s been a nice, impromptu way to make space for thought and literature amid the rhythms of daily life. 

STH: That does sound really nice. I think I’m having some FOMO! I’d love to feel more immersed in the Australian literary community, but I’ve lived and worked outside the country for so long now. I notice, as a translator, that I spend most of my time reading Dutch-language books for work, and when I am not reading those, I’m generally reading other translations, work by my friends, or contemporary American fiction so I can keep my finger on the pulse of what is being published here. When I was back in Australia in May, it became painfully obvious that I’ve been missing out on some of the best Australian literature over the past decade or so. I picked up Michelle de Kretser’s brilliant Theory & Practice and Siang Lu’s Ghost Cities which deservedly won the Miles Franklin, and now I am hungry for more. Do you read a lot of Australian fiction? Which Australian novels published in the past ten years would you recommend to me? And are there any translations by your peers that I should read? 

EB: Both ingenious works of literature – a great place to start. The sheer breadth of the imagination and the sly humour of Ghost Cities! I read both books last year – Theory and Practice twice, after I thought about the library copy I’d read for two weeks and then couldn’t bear not to own it, notwithstanding the already overflowing shelves in my tiny flat. It is an exceedingly generous book, both for the trust it places in its readers and for everything it gifts them, and it has all the marks of a writer at the height of her powers (and, if you’ve read de Kretser’s other books, you will know those powers were already formidable).  

Ten years is a long time, and I couldn’t possibly mention all the books I’ve loved! But to keep to the same period of the two you mention, Hasib Hourani’s rock flight, Yumna Kassab’s The Theory of Everything and Manisha Anjali’s Naag Mountain are wonderful books, as are, going back a little further, Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy, Sally Olds’ People Who Lunch and André Dao’s Anam. As for translated books, all of them! Two of my favourites of the past few years are Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette, and Rita Indiana’s Tentacle, translated by Achy Obejas. 

STH: Oh, Achy Obejas’ translation of Rita Indiana’s Tentacle is one of my favourite books. It’s so incredibly lush, and the writing is such a revelation. I re-read it all the time. Now I’m even more excited to read the rest of your recommendations. But before we sign off, I wanted to hear about what the second half of 2025 will look like for you. Will you be working towards something you’re particularly excited about? 

EB: A fellow Tentacle fan! I sing its praises all the time and you’re the first person to tell me you have read it. What a treat! 

In the second half of 2025, I plan to go with the rhythms of life at present, and what they lend me are a few thirty-minute windows per day when the little one is asleep on me in the wrap and I’m walking around the neighbourhood – a great time to think.  

I want to give more thought to the mentorship I’m planning for a heritage speaker or a person of colour who is just starting out in Spanish-to-English literary translation, or who is curious about it, or who, with a bit of support, might be interested in it. I want it to be a true partnership, so when I get my next suitable translation contract, I will do a call out to gauge interest in a co-translation collaboration.  

I’ll make sure the mentee’s name is credited first and that they are paid equitably. Of course, the exact ways to make this mentorship most beneficial will depend on the mentee’s preferences, but I’m imagining something like: we each translate a chapter, then share our drafts and revise them, and meet up IRL or over Zoom to discuss before we move on to the next ones. Recently, on one of these walks, I’ve had the idea to hand over communications with the editor to the mentee too, so the mentee can build that important relationship and, hopefully, get future opportunities. Anyway, there is more to be thought out! So that will be my focus for the remainder of 2025, until the next contract comes my way.