A.

Teeuw
Modern Indonesian literature abroad

In: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 127 (1971), no: 2, Leiden, 256-263

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 MODERN INDONESIAN LITERATURE
ABROAD

I n recent years a growing interest in modern Indonesian literature

Jl has become manifest outside Indonesia. It may be useful to give
a short survey of such materials as have come to my notice, even though
this survey is of necessity incomplete.
First of all it should be mentioned that literary, cultural and scholarly
journals and magazines have discovered modern Indonesian literature
and regularly or incidentally publish translations of poetry, short stories,
essays etc. The well-known journal INDONESIA, issued half-yearly by
the Modern Indonesia Project of Cornell University, has published a
number of Indonesian stories in English translation, for example Idrus'
stories Fujinkai and Och... Och ... Och (vol. 2) and Surabaja (vol. 5),
Ajip Rosidi's stories Among the Family (vol. 1) and A Japanese (vol. 6),
while Heather Sutherland (vol. 6) and Harry Aveling (vol. 7) con-
tributed essays on modern literature.
Another magazine which deserves to be mentioned as an interesting
effort to make available to a wider audience modern literary and other
cultural products from Southeast Asia including Indonesia is TENGGARA
(tenggara means Southeast). So far five issues have come out, .the latest
one bearing the year 1969. Another volume, containing Southeast Asian
plays, has been announced. Several short stories, poems and essays on
Indonesian literature have been published so far. In vol. 5 there is an
interesting section on traditional Malay music and drama, with papers
by Tan Sri Mufoin S'heppard, William P. Malm, Mohd. Taib Osman
and Amin Sweeney, but it falls outside the scope of the present survey
to go into these papers, all of which were read at the 1969 Conference
on the Traditional Drama and Music of Southeast Asia in Kuala
Lumpur.
As an example of a magazine devoting a special issue to modern
Indonesian literature, the Australian quarterly WESTERLY should be
mentioned. M. A. Jaspan acted as guest editor for the issue of October
1966 which was wholly devoted to this literature. It contains two
 MODERN INDONESIAN LITERATURE ABROAD 257

informative articles on Bahasa Indonesia and its development by

Professor A. H. Johns and Dr. Soebardi, translations of nine poems
by Chairil Anwar and others, and of four short stories, three of them by
Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Johns also contributed a substantial paper
on the most important Indonesian poet after Chairil Anwar and before
Rendra, i.e. Sitor Situmorang. The magazine is illustrated with, some
examples of contemporary Indonesian carving and painting. Thetrans-
lations, though not flawless, are sufficient to give the interested reader
an adequate idea of the originals.
Another Australian magazine which more recently published a special
Indonesian issue is QUADRANT. Here Ivan Kats was the guest editor,
and although this issue is not exclusively devoted to literature, a sub-
stantial part of it is taken up by Indonesian writing and essays on
Indonesian writing. Again Johns contributed an interesting paper under
the title "Through Myth and Dream: the Indonesian Quest for Reality";
this paper is a plea for a kind of literary history, different from the
one usual both in Indonesia and abroad; rather than "parcelling up
literary history into a series of generations", and by doing so "failing to
observe what authors of different 'generations' have in common", critics
should emphasize the basic themes of all modern Indonesian writers,
from Kartini in 1898 to Goenawan Muhammad in 1968, issues such
as alienation (from one's traditional milieu, from one's public, as well
as from literature abroad), and the "struggle to discover or build a new
identity, a sense of purpose and a function". Furthermore a fragment
from Mochtar Lubis' autobiography, essays by prominent intellectuals
such as Goenawan Muhammad, Nono Anwar Makarim, St. Takdir
Alishjahbana, Pramoedya's "Letter to a Friend from the Country" and
a short story by Gerson Poyk, together with some poems by Taufiq
Ismael and Rendra, give interesting glimpses of present-day Indonesian
literary and cultural life. The remainder of the issue is taken up by a
number of papers on politics and economics by Arief Budiman, the late
Soe Hok-gie, Jacob Oetama, B. Dahm, J. M. van der Kroef and
Soedjatmoko. Two remarkable papers dealing with the problems of
economic development and aid in connection with cultural relations,
specifically between Australia and Indonesia conclude the volume: one
is by Lional Landry who has been professionally involved with inter-
national cultural exchange for a long time, and the other by the Research
Director of the Centre of Southeast Asian Studies at Monash Univer-
sity, J. A. C. Mackie. Both papers are commendable reading for anyone
having all too optimistic ideas about cross-cultural communication and
258 A. TEEUW

cultural cooperation between a "Western" country, whether Australia,

the U.S.A., Japan or the Netherlands, and an Asian country such
as Indonesia.
Separate books containing translations of modern Indonesian litera-
ture in Western languages have also appeared in recent years. After
the excellent English translation, by the late Claire Holt, of Mochtar
Lubis' Tmlight on Djakarta (Sendja di Djakarta), more interesting
for sociological and political than for literary reasons, his earlier and
better novel Djalm tak ada Udjung (1952) <has been successively
translated into Italian by L. Santa Maria, into English by A. H. Johns,
and into Dutch by C. H. Schaap. I cannot judge the Italian translation;
the English one is quite accurate and adequate, while the Dutch one
is also sufficiently reliable to give the reader a good impression of
the original.
It is fortunate, and justifiable from various angles, that Mochtar
Lubis' novels gradually reach an international audience; one must
hope that others, such as Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Achdiat K.
Mihardja will follow soon.

Rufus Hendon published, in English translation, Six Indonesim

Short Stories, by H. A. M. K. Atnrullah (Hamka), Barus Siregar,
Rusman Sutiamarga, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Armijn Pane and Bakri
Siregar. From a purely literary point of view this combination of
authors is a bit unusual, but the translator was apparently not primarily
interested in literary values. He indicates that each of the stories
illuminates some aspect of Indonesian life, and indeed as such it is an
interesting collection, in a fully reliable and quite readable English
translation. A similar collection of Indonesian stories in Dutch trans-
lation, compiled and translated by Beb Vuyk and the present author
and containing thirteen stories by eleven authors of the generation of
1945, for obvious reasons cannot be discussed here in any detail.
Much more ambitious in scope and design than either of the last
two books is a collection of Indonesian short stories in French trans-
lation which was edited by Denys Lombard with the collaboration
of Winarsih Arifin and Minnie Wibisono. This collection contains
altogether 68 short stories, by 46 different authors, covering the period
from 1933—1965. On each author a short but extremely useful bio-
graphical and bibliographical note is added, while in six appendices
some information useful for the reader who is not familiar with the
Indonesian background and history is presented. The French trans-
 MODERN INDONESIAN LITERATURE ABROAD 259

lations seem quite adequate and the volume as a whole is a most

interesting presentation of modern Indonesian literature to a French
public. The only thing which is perhaps regrettable about this book is
its appearance in a series the circulation of which is normally restricted
to a scholarly public, whereas it deserves the attention, of a much wider
circle of general readers interested in literature.
Translating poetry for a non-scholarly, literary audience is of course
incomparably more difficult than translating prose stories. Still, in
recent years some major efforts to make modern Indonesian poetry
accessible to Western readers have come to my notice. One was by
the late lamented French scholar Louis-Charles Damais who published
a collection of 102 poems from the period 1925-1950, with short but
valuable notes on the authors. I feel incompetent to judge of the poetic
adequacy of these renderings in French, but they are certainly reliable
and accurate, which is more than one can say of the English trans-
lations of Indonesian poetry which now remain to be discussed in
more detail.
Burton Raffel, now a professor of English, first came across Indo-
nesian literature while teaching English in Indonesia in the early fifties.
He developed a keen interest in Indonesian poetry, especially the work
of Chairil Anwar. His two most recent and most ambitious books,
after an earlier Anthology of Modern Indonesian Poetry (1964), are
one on the Development of Modern Indonesian Poetry, and an edition
of the complete poetry and prose of Chairil Anwar, with an English
translation.
It is indeed a pity that Raffel's fascination with Indonesian literature
is not equalled by his knowledge of the language in which this literature
is written. There can be little doubt that in many cases Raffel has a true
"feeling" for the "meaning" of the poems with which he is dealing.
But it is also evident that in other cases this intuitive and approximate
approach leads to misunderstanding and completely wrong translations
of the originals, as it is not 'based on sound grammatical knowledge.
I am aware of the fact that this is a severe judgment, which stands
in need of substantiation. I will therefore give a few examples. I want
to emphasize that these examples are by no means exceptional cases,
but are taken from a fairly large number of comparable mistranslations.
Firstly, a very simple case. The last two lines of Sitor Situmorang's
well-known poem Lagu Gadis I tali: Abcmg lenjap hatiku hantjur /
mengedjatr bajamg disaldju gugur are translated by Raffel as follows:
"I'll vanish, my heart cracked, Running from the reflection of falling
260 A. TEEUW

snow". Raffel has not understood that abang here is used by the girl
to indicate her lover, and should be translated therefore as the pronoun
"you"; moreover the meaning of kedjar ("to chase") is apparently not
familiar to him. The actual meaning of the lines quoted is therefore:
"You have vanished, and my heart is crushed; I run after a shadow
in the fallen snow (or perhaps even better: Running after a shadow
I collapse in the snow)."
A more complicated case is the following. In Chairil Anwar's well-
known poem Puntjak the first part of the second sentence runs as
follows: Kederasan ramai kota jang terbawa/ tambah penjoal dalam
diri — diputar atau memutar —/ terasa tertekan. In Raffel's translation:
"The excitement of the pushing, crowded city, heaping problems/ Onto
problems — whether spinning or spun —/ Feels quieter, calmer."
Now I agree that the basic structure of the sentence is: Kederasan ...
terasa tertekan, although I do not admire his translation of these words:
kederasan is "hurry, hecticness" rather than "excitement"; terasa
means "is felt (to be)", and tertekan is "suppressed"; it is this inadequate
rendering of certain shades of meaning which in my opinion gives the
translation a flavour rather different from the original. However, there
is more. Kederasan ramai kota in Indonesian cannot mean "the excite-
ment of the pushing city", but rather "the hectic hurry of the town" ;
jang terbawa, whatever Raffel's interpretation, simply means: "which
is 'brought", and that is exactly what the poet means: "the hurry which
we (kita further on, 'here implied in ter-) had brought with us." For
the next four Indonesian words I cannot even guess from Raffel's
overall translation, how he has interpreted them individually, but in
any case the result is completely wrong. Tambah in Chairil's language
simply means "and also, in addition" (see, for example, his poem
Hampa, where Raffel's translation in this respect is correct!). It
coordinates syntactically the noun kederasan with the noun penjoal,
which however does not mean "problem(s)". The translator has not
recognized the form with pe- plus nasalization, which indicates "the
person (or instrument) who (which) does, or has, what the basic word
indicates." Penjoal therefore must mean "the man or thing who or
which makes or has problems, puts questions, etc.", analogically to
penanja "the asker of questions". Apparently the author wants to say
that not only the external hectic hurry of the town below has been
suppressed but also the question-asker within (dalam diri, diri is com-
mon with Chairil for "person", especially the person of the poet himself).
The addition diputar atau memutar refers to the question which the
 MODERN INDONESIAN LITERATURE ABROAD 261

penjoal, the question-asker within, puts: "to be turned around or to

turn around", that is the question! The tcmja at the end of the poem
refers back to this question put by the penjoal, within whom it is now
temporarily suppressed. Altogether, as a translation we would get some-
thing like: "The hectic hurry of the town which we had brought with
us as well as our inner self posing the everlasting problem — whether
we are turned around or are ourselves turning things around — are
felt to be suppressed." This of course is not a poetically adequate
translation of Chairil's lines. I am happy to leave such a translation
to people with more poetic intuition, like Raffel, but no translator should
start working on such a poem without having grasped the meaning of
the words, the function of the forms and the structure of the sentence.
It should be noted that such errors in the translations as have been
pointed out cannot be explained away by the need for a poetic rendering
of the original. This is also obvious from the sometimes elementary
mistakes which occur in the translations of prose fragments, and for
example in a mistranslated title such as "Night Stabs through the Day"
for Melalui Siang Menembus Malam which actually means something
like "Through Daylight Penetrating into Darkness."
All this does not go to say that R'affel's books are without value.
The edition of Chairil's complete original works, in a handy volume
(and the paperback edition at a reasonable price) is a most useful book,
certainly while Indonesian editions are so difficult to obtain outside
the country of origin. In general the edition of the poems is reliable;
a few errors or misprints of some consequence which I noted may be
pointed out: p. 6 1. 1 Dimana is incorrect for Dimasa (the translation
is based on the correct text); p. 181. 6 Barangkali is one word, not two;
p. 34, 1. 1 the first edition of Kerikil Tadjam has terpupus which seems
a better reading than terputus; p. 36 1. 9 hantijur, read hantjur; p. 48
1. 3 the first ed. of KT has meningkat instead of mengikat; p. 62 1. 6
the hyphen should be corrected into a dash; p. 68 1. 10 segara, although
occurring in various editions, is wrong for segera as Raffel himself
translates; p. 98 1. 12 read beta punja nama instead of punja nama;
p. 126 1. 12 read riba instead of rib; p. 144 1. 11 read djandji; p. 146
1. 1 puntjuk should probably read puntjak; p. 148 1. 10 read dengan.
The most important variant readings from different editions of the
poems are given in an Appendix to the book.
The other book does not pretend to be a definitive work on Indonesian
poetry as a whole, and it certainly is not. It can best be characterized
as an, anthology of poetry, mostly in chronological order and with
262 A. TEEUW

incidental, varied comments, some of them more to the point than

others. Not only in the translations of the poems but also in some of
the comments the author through lack of linguistic knowledge is some-
times led to strange conclusions, for example in his explanation of
berkedjar-kedjaran which is certainly not a ber-iorm of kedjar-kedjaran
but rather a regular reciprocal form, with prefix ber-, suffix -an and
duplication of the base (p. 48) ; 'ndak "no, not" is not correctly qualified
as a corruption of tidak (p. 49), but is rather a dialect form,; nor is
'nusia a colloquial form of manusvi, but rather a poetic abbreviation
(p. 97). Linguistic comments on a poem by Tatengkeng are also in-
adequate (p. 113). Raffel's selection; of poets and poems is in general
justifiable, although it is somewhat out of proportion that Amir Hamzah
should receive so little space and attention: only thirteen pages out
of the total of 190 — four of the thirteen moreover being devoted to
Tagore rather than to Amir Hamzah himself. A valuable part of the
book is the Appendix consisting of 64 pages, containing twenty-two
items of literary criticism in English translation; it should be remarked,
though, that nine out of the twenty-two items reappear in the edition
of Chairil's work. Anyone aiming at bringing together Raffel's collected
works on Indonesian poetry will end up possessing the same items in
some three or four different volumes!

December 1970 A. TEEUW

PUBLICATIONS REFERRED TO, IN ORDER OF DISCUSSION.

INDONESIA (magazine published biannually by) Modern Indonesia Project, Cornell

University. Editors: Benedict Anderson, Ruth McVey, Elizabeth Graves
and others. Vols. 1-10, 1966-1970.
TENGOARA, jointly edited by Lloyd Fernando, Ismail Hussein, A. Bakar Hamid,
Wong Phui Nam, Kuala Lumpur. Nos. 1-5, 1967-1969.
WESTERLY, editorial John Barnes, Peter Cowan, Tom Gibbons, Patrick Hutchins.
October 1966 (being 2/1966). Guest editor M. A. Jaspan. Published Quar-
terly by the University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands, Western
Australia.
QUADRANT, edited by Peter Coleman and James McAuley. Sept.-Oct. 1969, No. 61,
Vol. XIII, No. 5. Guest Editor Ivan Kats: Indonesia Special Issue.
Published by H. R. Krygier, Clarence Street, Sydney.
Mochtar Lubis, Twilight in Djakarta. Translated from the Indonesian by Claire
Holt. New Voices in Translation. Hutchinson of London. 1963.
 MODERN INDONESIAN LITERATURE ABROAD 263

id., La Strada senza Fine. Traduzione dall'indonesiano, introduzione e note di

Luigi Santa Maria. Publicazioni dell'Istituto per l'Oriente. II Serie - Nr. 6.
Roma 1967.
id., A Road with No End. Translated from the Indonesian and edited by Anthony
H. Johns. Hutchinson of London. 1968.
id., Weg sonder Rind. Wereldbibliotheek n.v. - Amsterdam-Antwerpen 1969
(vertaling C. H. Schaap).
Rufus S. Hendon, Six Indonesian Short Stories. Translation Series No. 7, Yale
University Southeast Asia Studies. 1968.
Moderne Indonesische verhalen. Samengesteld en ingeleid door Beb Vuyk en
A. Teeuw. Polak & Van Gennep. Amsterdam 1967.
Histoires Courtes d'Indonesie. Soixante-Huit "Tjerpen" (1933-1965) traduits et
presentes par Denys Lombard avec la collaboration de Mmes Winarsih
Arifin et Minnie Wibisono. Publications de l'Ecole Francaise d'Extreme
Orient. Vol. LXIX. Paris 1968 (635 pp.!).
Cent deux Poemes Indonesiens (1925-1950), mis en francais par Louis-Charles
Damais. Preface du Prof. Dr. R. Prijono. Illustrations de M. Salim.
Librairie d'Amerique et d'Orient Adrien-Maisonneuve. Paris, 1965.
Burton Raffel, The Development of Modern Indonesian Poetry. State University
of New York Press, 1967.
The Complete Poetry and Prose of Chairil Anwar. Edited and translated by
Burton Raffel. State University of New York Press. Albany, 1970.