Translating Indonesia’s On-the-Ground Realities: An Interview with John McGlynn

April 11, 2024 | in Interviews | by Sarah Gear

[I]f Indonesia were to ever gain a foothold on the international literary stage, something had to change.

The Lontar Foundation was launched in 1987 to raise the profile of Indonesian literature worldwide, initially intending to translate Indonesian fiction into English for publishers. Largely through necessity, however, the foundation has since become a publisher in its own right. Founded by John McGlynn and Indonesian authors Sapardi Djoko Damono, Goenawan Mohamad, Subagio Sastrowardoyo, and Umar Kayam, Lontar has since, to date, published works from over six hundred and fifty Indonesian authors in English, providing vital contributions that trace the country’s complex cultural and literary developments. In this interview, McGlynn speaks on his interest in Indonesia, the importance of Lontar’s work, and the challenges faced by Indonesian literature both at home and abroad.

Sarah Gear (SG): How did you first become interested in Indonesian literature?

John McGlynn (JM): It all began with wayang—Javanese shadow puppets. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, from 1970 to 1972, I was a combined art-design-theatre major and had begun to create shadow puppets depicting characters from Western literary texts. I was participating in protests against the Vietnam War and my characters told the struggle of a small nation against a powerful aggressor. The problem was that while I was able to craft these new shadow puppets, I had no idea how to operate them. After a summer course at the University of Washington in Seattle, where I studied shadow puppetry technique with a Javanese dalang (shadow master), I transferred to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the centers for Indonesian Studies in the United States. In the span of the next two years, I took an array of other courses relating to Indonesia, including a mentorship in Indonesian literature.

I then left for Indonesia in May 1976, on a three-month scholarship to study advanced Indonesian. That trip, which ended up lasting until December 1978, was an intensive cultural immersion process, during which my primary language was Indonesian. I traveled extensively in Sumatra and Java, studied language and literature at the University of Indonesia, served as an assistant to renowned linguist and translation theoretician Ian Catford, and worked as a translator for a number of Indonesian institutions.

I was spending most of my free nights at the Jakarta Arts Center, or Taman Ismail Marzuki (TIM), as a spectator to plays, poetry readings, and cultural discussions. At TIM, I came to know numerous prominent Indonesian authors, a number of whom then asked me to translate their work. I was collecting and reading all the literary texts I could get a hold of and had begun to translate numerous Indonesian short stories, and several novels as well; all this led me to pursue a Master’s degree in Indonesian literature at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, which I did from January 1979 to May 1981. READ MORE…

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Sarah Gear

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Indonesia

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The Queen’s Argot: The Language of Chess Around the World

January 21, 2021 | in Essays | by Allison Braden

Players worldwide understand the pieces . . . but our understanding . . . depends in part on what we call them.

Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit illustrated the international culture of chess. As it turns out, the game’s spread around the globe is a story of translation. In this brisk and brainy rundown, Editor-at-Large Allison Braden tackles its evolution through time and space, setting up a board in which pawns can be farmers, bishops can be fools, and queens can be counselors.

In December of last year, Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit smashed viewership records for a limited-run series on the site. In the show’s first month of streaming, over 62 million people around the world tuned in to the story of a young woman who overcomes several challenges in her quest to become a world chess champion in the 1960s. The series was based on Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel of the same name, and like readers before them, viewers rooted for plucky chess prodigy Beth Harmon. Her eventual triumph was, for many, a bright spot at the end of a long and difficult year.

You won’t become a grandmaster by watching the series. (In fact, one of the only aspects of the show that pro chess players took issue with was the speed of the games. In a concession to viewers, they were faster paced than matches at real tournaments.) But The Queen’s Gambit is a crash course in the culture of chess. It’s fiercely competitive, requires visual and strategic intelligence, and remains extremely male dominated (despite studies showing men aren’t inherently better at the game). Chess is also truly universal—and where there’s an international pastime, there are translators.

In the show, Harmon travels to Mexico, France, and the USSR. As her skill grows, her competitors increasingly hail from foreign countries, and as it becomes clear that the ultimate test of her ability will come in Moscow, she begins to study Russian. In the heady final scenes, commentators relay her moves in a variety of languages for listeners around the world. After The Queen’s Gambit was released, interest in chess boomed. One of the most popular ways to play is online. Chess.com boasts users from dozens of countries, and they can all play one other. Like many sports, chess transcends language; in a way, it is its own language. Players worldwide understand the pieces: the king’s hesitance, the queen’s might. The bishop, which can only move diagonally, speaks his own sideways tongue. READ MORE…

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Allison Braden

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Walter Tevis

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Of Conscience and Blood: Independence Days in Southeast Asia

August 20, 2018 | in Essays | by Khai Q. Nguyen, Norman Erikson Pasaribu, and Theophilus Kwek

"I ask those who think about society, who love life...to become a bit more zealous"

This August and September, we celebrate the independence days of several countries in Southeast Asia, including Singapore (9 August), Indonesia (17 August) and Vietnam (2 September). In today’s blog post, Asymptote travels to Southeast Asia to reflect on writing from the past. Having gained independence from Great Britain, Holland and France, the literatures of these countries often address complex post-colonial histories and the multilingual environs of post-independence life. We asked Asymptote Editors-At-Large Theo, Norman, and Khai, to tell us more about a local writer worth knowing more about, in celebration of national freedom and identity.

Few remember the scene, but for two weeks in November 1960, passers-by on Singapore’s busy Stamford Road stopped to cheer on forty librarians as they formed a human chain to transfer 150,000 books – then the entire national collection – from the dusty shelves of the old colonial museum to a new, purpose-built National Library. Singapore had just achieved self-government, and amid rapid political change, the city was in the mood for new beginnings. Behind this audacious plan was Hedwig Anuar: writer, activist, war survivor, and the first Singaporean Director of the National Library.

Highlights from Our Winter 2017 Issue

January 18, 2017 | in Dispatches | by Hanna Heiskanen and Madeline Jones

The blog editors share their favorite pieces from our latest issue!

Here at the blog, we’ve been mesmerized by the new Winter 2017 Issue since its launch on Monday. We hope you’ve had time to dive in, too, but if not, here are a few great places to start!

“Daland” by Lika Tcheishvili, translated from the Georgian by Ekaterine Chialashvili and Alex Scrivener, is a curious little story, told in the first person by an unnamed dock worker in Bandar Abbas, Iran. Anyone who has seen or read about Lin Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton will find themselves in familiar territory when the narrator becomes the unlikely participant in a duel. Any sense of familiarity stops there, however. The man who challenges him is a mysterious smoker with a perpetually fresh lily—flowers foreign to Bandar Abbas—in his lapel and an appointment with a schooner no one has heard of…

I also cannot get the words of Christiane Singer out of my head. In her essay, “The Feminine, Land of Welcome,” translated from the French by Hélène Cardona, she writes to women, “stand bewitched and ready to leap: the queen, the sister, the lover, the friend, the mother—all those who have the genius for relationship, for welcoming. The genius for inventing life.” She highlights the danger of defining women only by their commonalities, as well as the horrors that could have come to pass—and could still—in a world without women. Their absence would be powerfully felt, even in comparison to situations in which they are already roundly ignored or discredited.

—Madeline Jones, Blog Editor

In “Always Already Translated: Questions of Language in Singaporean Literature”, Boston-born Philip Holden, who has lived in Singapore for more than 20 years, writes lyrically about this multilingual city-state. Having worked with languages Holden mentions—Malay, Malayalam, Javanese, and many others—I loved his description of situations where “I speak in Mandarin to Chinese patients, and they reply not to me but to my Chinese co-worker, who looks back at me in incomprehension. She speaks in Malay to older Chinese and Malay patients, and they reply in Malay not to her but to the third of us, the Indian woman who wears a tudung that marks her out as Muslim and, by a process of mistaken association, Malay.” Multilingual societies are sadly often depicted as wrought with conflict. While language in Singapore is, like everywhere in the world, a political issue, too, Holden focuses on the opportunities it provides for performing and literary arts. We don’t have to search for a common language, he argues—it’s more interesting to find “holes between languages that everyday translation continually fills up”.

I have never read Albanian literature before, however. If you are like me, I can warmly recommend the three poems by Luljeta Lleshanaku, one of the country’s most important writers, as an introduction. Taken from the collection Negative Space and translated by Ani Gjika, the poems describe a simple life: apple trees, a butcher carving meat, “gardens hidden behind houses like sensual neck bites”. But behind each poem is a rotten apple, or cold floors, and getting one’s way without any real gain—poetic realism. Do also have a listen to the translator reading the original text in Albanian!

—Hanna Heiskanen, Blog Editor

Check out the gorgeous video preview of the new issue here:

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