Posts filed under 'classic literature'

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…

Texts in Context: Glynne Walley on Kyokutei Bakin

August 29, 2022  |  in Texts in Context  |  by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

Hakkenden represents a whole other side of premodern Japan: big, messy, intellectually sophisticated, verbose, and populist.

Welcome to our new monthly column, in which Katarzyna Bartoszyńska seeks out academics who contribute to and elucidate the world of literary translation, revealing their deeper studies into texts both well-known and overlooked!

The following interview, conducted with Glynne Walley of the University of Oregon, spans Walley’s unprecedented efforts in bringing a titanic work of classical Japanese fiction to light. In his monograph Good Dogs: Edification, Entertainment, and Kyokutei Bakin’s “Natso Satomi hakkenden” (Cornell University Press, 2018), Walley explores the oft-ignored popular literature of nineteenth-century Japan, and how Bakin’s master epic foregrounds fundamental questions of morality, virtue, and the functions of fiction in society.

Katarzyna Bartoszyńska (KB): Tell me about your book, Good Dogs: Edification, Entertainment, and Kyokutei Bakin’s “Natso Satomi hakkenden.” Can you briefly describe the central idea or argument?

Glynne Walley (GW): Essentially, I’m looking at how a mid-nineteenth-century popular writer with aspirations toward capital-L Literature used a rhetoric of didacticism to satisfy both the demands of entertaining readers and his own desire to turn the novel into something Serious. The writer in question, Kyokutei Bakin (1767–1848) was one of Japan’s first professional authors of fiction, and he accomplished that by being acutely aware of what audiences wanted. At the same time, under the influence of masterworks in Chinese vernacular fiction, he had an idea that fiction, which his society considered beneath intellectual notice, could be a vehicle for serious ideas. It was a negotiation that other novelists in other places were also engaged in, but since Japan was operating largely outside their influence at that moment, Bakin makes an interesting case study of how the tensions between commerce and Art played out in a different and very specific context.

KB: What led you to this topic?

GW: The novel I focus on—Nansō Satomi hakkenden (Hakkenden for short, and Eight Dogs in English)—was hugely popular in its day, acutely influential on the next couple of generations, and remains crucially important to literary history, both for its intrinsic worth and for the role it played in debates over the modernization of fiction at the end of the nineteenth century. Despite this, it has been almost entirely neglected in Anglophone scholarship—mentioned, but seldom analyzed. It was time for a monograph on Hakkenden, I felt, and if nobody else was going to do it, I figured I might as well give it a shot.

KB: I’m burying the lede here a little bit because you are also, of course, the translator of Bakin’s Hakkenden! This is a monumental task—Hakkenden is massively long, immensely complex, and challenging to translate. What were the particular difficulties that this translation posed?

GW: Hakkenden is a massively long work! The modern edition I work from is nearly six thousand pages. The biggest challenges relate to that—and no doubt that length is one thing that kept the work largely untouched by Anglophone scholars and translators. Perhaps the smartest thing would have been to come up with a volume of highlights (a few short excerpts had already appeared in anthologies), but since the scale was part of the point of the work, I really wanted to see the whole thing in English.

The other big challenge is the language. It’s written in classical Japanese, which is grammatically and syntactically quite different from modern Japanese. The author writes in a wide array of styles within classical Japanese, drawing from literary masterpieces from Japan and China as well as the popular theater and fiction of his day, making for a really diverse stylistic palette. And he’s also incorporating a lot of elements of vernacular (as opposed to classical) Chinese writing, which adds a distinctive flavor, but which is, in a way, much harder for the modern reader than classical Chinese. Understanding all these registers, which are freely mixed in virtuoso ways, is hard enough, but the translator, of course, wants to try to capture them in English . . .  READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

December 3, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Laurel Taylor, and Mary Hillis

Workshops, festivals, and plenty of new publications and announcements to celebrate in this week's round of literary news.

The “great moon of December” leads us into the final starts of 2021, though the literary world shows no signs of winding down. Let our editors introduce you to classical poetry reawakened, Arab literature awards, star-studded literary events in Tokyo, the latest from the European Literature Festival, and much more!

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

Once upon a time, the so-called ‘women’s magazines’ of today had a completely different form (though they were never truly intended for women per se). Back in the tenth century, there was a celebrated Shiʻite Muslim Arab court poet, master chef, and polymath called Kushājim; originally from Ramla in Palestine—near contemporary Tel Aviv—Kushājim lived during the turbulent war-ridden period of the Middle and Late Abbasid Caliphates, which led him to move between Jerusalem, Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo before finally settling in Aleppo. During his lifetime, Kushājim was considered the epitome of excellence in literature, and was highly commended by the literary critics of his time, both for his poetic works and intellectual faculties. His canon “vividly chronicles culinary, social, and intellectual aspects of court life [. . .], detailing numerous native and exotic foodstuffs and recipes; the social etiquettes of sharing wine and food; the various musical instruments used at the time to entertain the caliphs and their guests; the harem with its cross-dressing male and female dancers, concubines, and odalisques; the wide variety of plants and geometric designs found in courtly gardens; indoor pastimes and outdoor sports; the art of gift-giving; and the traits of coveted courtiers and boon companions.” What does this resemble but the contemporary women’s magazine?

Ancient Exchanges, an online journal at the University of Iowa devoted to literary translations of ancient texts, has recently published four gastronomic poems by Kushājim—on asparagus, mushabbak, khushkanaj (both desserts), and pomegranates. Translated from classical Arabic by Salma Harland, the four poems are run bilingually, accompanied with art by ArabLit Quarterly art director Hassân Al Mohtasib.

In her translator’s note (which includes a teaching guide), Harland explains that “although the original poems were written in accordance with the fixed feet and rhyme schemes often used in classical Arabic poetry, I have chosen to prioritize aesthetic grace and readability over meter without completely eliminating musicality.”

One is invited to take a seat at Kushājim’s table, set by Harland, and to take in a feast by a master who “not only details the preparation methods and ingredients needed for certain dishes but also the impact that their elegant presentation has on the banquet guests. Mouths water and eager hands cannot keep their distance”; even “[a] sedulous ascetic would break his fast / and yield before such a repast.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

July 3, 2018  |  in Translations  |  by Ryan C. K. Choi and Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

As I continued to stare at the drifting peaks, a peculiar scene from my past came to mind.

Today we bring you three enigmatic pieces by “the father of the Japanese short story.” You probably know Ryūnosuke Akutagawa without realizing it—one of his short stories served as the basis for Akira Kurosawa’s classic film Rashōmon. Each of these tales brings a quick punch of emotion, leaving an impression on the reader not unlike that of microfiction. 

Sennin[1]

There was once a sennin who worked as a jurist in O Town near Lake Biwa. His favorite pastime, more than anything else, was collecting gourds. Stored inside a giant closet on the upper floor of his rented home was his vast collection hanging from nails hammered into the posts and lintels.

Three years had gone by, when, one day, the sennin received a notice of transfer from the government. He was to relocate forthwith to his new post in H City. He made arrangements for all of his furniture and belongings except for his gourds, of which he had amassed over two hundred. He had no idea how to go about moving them, and he refused to part with a single one.

READ MORE…