Posts filed under 'indonesia'

Translation Tuesday: “sailing to batavia” by Zen Hae

July 18, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by George A. Fowler

we have left the city that belittled us, the country that shall vanish in one smack of the hand.

This Translation Tuesday, to coincide with our Summer Issue and its standout Indonesian Special Feature, the spotlight is on the subtle, elegant prose of Zen Hae. A colonial administrator longs for the comforts of his nyai —his Indonesian concubine—and the febrile sensations of the land he has subjugated, plundered, and since departed. He has sucked hard on its every pleasure, and the taste has brought everything into question.

may you my nyai be always under the lord’s protection—who allows interest on loans and subjugation of new worlds. be well in your acceptance of all things.

if this lowly one sails to batavia, nyai, wear a blouse and the best batik cloth. and betel nut…chew it gaily—use gambier from barus and quicklime from banten to perfect its redness. there’s no need for a parasol. that’s because we’ve missed the batavia sun from the very start. that’s the eye that kisses our ancestors on the fourth day. under it they supposed the swampland was a future heaven and the bare-chested men were sheep with no shepherd. someday that is where our kingdom shall be made real.

related thereto, wait for this lowly one in jacatra’s bay. welcome him at the mouth of the ciliwung with a three-blossom smile.

we have left the city that belittled us, the country that shall vanish in one smack of the hand. we have swallowed months of curses at sea, and have crawled across almost the entire earth, with a map more wondrous than a dream. we have sojourned at the cape of hope, at goa, coromandel, columbo, malacca, also cities wiped out before dawn. a third of us are dead, another third sick and will die the moment we arrive, and one or two now gone mad. we, though, the strongest men, remain.

we smelled the scent of liquor in the brick houses in the south. that one was he who subdued the mountain wind and boiled our blood into adulthood. we have dreamed for you nyais to pour it into cups when we are tired of building this city and would like to know what will happen ten seconds before doomsday. if this unworthy one grows old, oh lord, even if he shuts his eyes, let it not be at the end of the sword or muzzle of a cannon, nor even from malaria or dysentery, let it be only in your embrace alone, amongst the fragrance and warmth of spices.

if this unworthy one steps foot in batavia, nyai, receive us, your children too: our blood has been tainted and given birth to across the ocean.

Translated from the Indonesian by George A. Fowler

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Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Cyntha Hariadi (UWRF Feature)

November 20, 2018  |  in Translations, UWRF  |  by Norman Erikson Pasaribu

you materialize an ocean / and I, a fish inside.

Welcome to the seventh and final installment of A World with a Thousand Doors—a multi-part collaboration with the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival to showcase previously untranslated contemporary Indonesian writing. This week, we feature three poems by award-winning Indonesian writer Cyntha Hariadi, translated by Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Indonesia, Norman Erikson Pasaribu.

We suggest reading installments one, two, three, four, five, and six of the series if you haven’t already. We also recommend the final reflection by Festival attendees Norman Erikson Pasaribu and Tiffany Tsao, Asymptote‘s Editor-at-Large for Australia.

Hands

they used to paw the sky, squeeze the clouds

they fought the wild crows, bargained with the gatekeeper of heaven

 

these hands—they took down the moon, put it here to light this bedroom

they tickled the sun, so it shone longer, brighter

 

now, they cave in every time I raise them up

they squeal in pain at the mere task of tying up my hair

 

sewn-up to this chest, they can only wait

for the saviour to stop its never-ending sob READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Gratiagusti Chananya Rompas (UWRF Feature)

October 16, 2018  |  in Translations, UWRF  |  by Mikael Johani

Breaking News. / outside, the universe is dark. it is Real.

Welcome to the third installment of A World with a Thousand Doors—our Translation Tuesday series showcasing Indonesian literature, brought to you in partnership with the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. This week’s feature: poetry by festival guest Gratiagusti Chananya Rompas, translated by past Asymptote contributor Mikael Johani. If you are joining these amazing writers and translators, don’t forget that you can save 20% on the 4-Day Pass by entering the code MPAS at the online checkout!

 

soap bubbles float in the air explode

on the tip of my toes

a scavenger collects rubbish from tiny barrels crams them into oversized

plastic hessian bags

washes his hands with water from a half-empty mineral

water bottle

 

mums run around, carry hello kitty backpacks, ben ten water bottles,

an extra change of clothes, a tiny towel

kids scream and shriek they want to buy baby turtles kept in colourful transparent

plastic boxes

a tourist photographer presses the shutter on his camera

ten thousand rupiahs per photo

 

and always you forget to smile

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Winter 2017: Intimate Strangers

September 24, 2018  |  in 30issues30days  |  by Tiffany Tsao

Who better to bare our intimate, struggling self with than several thousand of our closest friends?

January 2017: I have turned 40. Though I no longer remember when exactly I set down the rule for team members to refrain from sending me email over weekends, it is likely the embargo originated from this time. Entering a new decade is an occasion to take stock, to insist on a proper work-life balance. But 40 has always felt like an especially significant milestone, possibly because, as a teenager, I’d read an essay in which the narrator wonders obsessively if he’d land on the “right side of forty,” the obsession guiding his every life decision. Then his fortieth birthday comes, and with it the realization, like thunder, that he has lived life wrong. I’ve not lived life wrong, but I have certainly lived against the grain. Around this time I notice, for example, that I am spacing out more and more in gatherings with former classmates when talk turns to acquiring a second property. I stumble upon David Williams’s devastating essay in World Literature Today and can’t tear my eyes away from the line: “I couldn’t see it at the time, and I certainly refused to acknowledge it, but when my parents’ overeducated, thirty-something child chooses to sell his labor well below a living wage, they can be forgiven for thinking that their blue-eyed son is engaged in a sophisticated form of self-sabotage.”  Perhaps, this is why our sixth anniversary issue comes with what Australia editor-at-large Tiffany Tsao calls below a “frankly [desperate]” editor’s note; still, as she says, “who better to bare our intimate, struggling self with than several thousand of our closest friends?”

. . . you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else . . . This phrase hails from Amanda DeMarco’s brilliant rumination on life as a translator, Foreign to Oneself. Published in our Winter 2017 issue, the essay is composed entirely of excerpts from other texts (this particular quote is taken from Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby). As I reread these words while writing this essay, my vision began to get a little blurry. I’m being maudlin, I know. But where else is one entitled to get weepy if not in a retrospective that invites writers to indulge in nostalgia? And the truth of this observation about being a translator sang out all the more because this was also the issue in which my translations of Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s poetry made their debut.

At that point, I was Asymptote’s Indonesia Editor-at-Large (my country of focus is now Australia, where I reside), and a few months earlier, I’d come across some of Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s poetry. Having heard that he’d recently won the Jakarta Arts Council Poetry Manuscript Competition, I reached out to him via Twitter to ask if I could work with him to translate his poems for our poetry editor’s consideration. This issue marked the start of an ongoing and very fruitful translator-writer partnership with Norman, who later came on staff and is our current Indonesia Editor-at-Large. English-language versions of Norman’s other poems were subsequently published in various magazines, and awarded both a prize and a grant from English PEN. The collection from which these poems are excerpted will be published by Tilted Axis Press in March 2019. If it weren’t for Asymptote, I’m not sure if Norman and I would have ever started working together. READ MORE…

Announcing Our Partnership With: Ubud Writers and Readers Festival

September 8, 2018  |  in News  |  by Norman Erikson Pasaribu and Tiffany Tsao

Save 20% on passes to Southeast Asia's biggest literary festival with Asymptote!

Asymptote is proud to announce a collaboration with Southeast Asia’s biggest literary festival! Held in Ubud, Bali, the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival will take place this October, featuring exciting and instructive conversations, talks and performances by leaders in world literature. Do read on to find out how you can get a discounted festival pass with Asymptote.

The Ubud Writers & Readers Festival (UWRF) celebrates its fifteenth year as Southeast Asia’s leading festival of words and ideas, from 24-28 October in Ubud, Bali. From humble beginnings, the UWRF has grown into Indonesia’s leading platform for showcasing its writers and artists, and one of the world’s ’20 Best Literary Festivals’ (Penguin Random House).

The five-day program of insightful in-conversations, intimate literary lunches, impassioned debates and powerful performances will feature more than 180 authors, journalists, translators, artists and activists from 30 countries. From Indonesia to Ireland, Sweden to Spain, the Philippines to Pakistan and dozens of countries in between, this year’s UWRF promises a world of stories, ideas, and solutions at a time when amplifying diverse voices and rarely-heard perspectives is more critical than ever.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

December 15, 2017  |  in News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar, Kelsey Woodburn, Norman Erikson Pasaribu, and Paul Worley

Your weekly literary news from around the world.

Our team is always keen to keep you up to speed on the most recent prizes, festivals, and publications regarding the most important writers around the world. With this in mind,  we are excited to bring you the latest news from our editors-at-large in Mexico, Central America and Indonesia. Stay tuned for next week! 

Paul Worley and Kelsey Woodburn, Editors-at-Large, reporting from Mexico: 

The Tsotsil Maya poetry and book arts collective Snichimal Vayuchil held a book presentation for its latest publication, Uni tsebetik, on November 30 at the La Cosecha Bookstore in San Cristobal de las Casa, Chiapas, Mexico. A collection of works by the group’s female members, the volume was introduced by the Tsotsil sculptor and multimedia artist Maruch Méndez and anthropologist Diane Rus. The event is part of a big month for the group, which includes the publication of their selected works translated into English, and a reading of works from Uni tsebetik at the Tomb of the Red Queen in the Maya archeological site of Palenque.

The same night, the State Center for Indigenous Languages, Arts, and Literature (CELALI) held a book presentation for its latest publication, Xch’ulel osil balamil, by poet and artist María Concepción Bautista Vázquez. The anthology Chiapas Maya Awakening contained her work in an English translation by Sean S. Sell, who was interviewed in Asymptote in April.

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Marianne Katoppo: The Frog who Left the Coconut Shell Far Behind

September 28, 2017  |  in Essays  |  by Norman Erikson Pasaribu

"Katoppo’s novels tell the story of independent women restrained by conservative men."

Writer and world-renowned feminist theologian Marianne Katoppo maintained that theology was rooted in language. Asymptote Indonesia Editor-at-Large and poet Norman Erikson Pasaribu makes the case that with her writing, Katoppo also challenged and defied the systemic injustices of Indonesian society that were inherent in language, too. Enjoy Norman’s beautiful essay in English and scroll down to read it in the original Indonesian. 

From approximately the 500 classic Malay proverbs that I had to memorize as a child, one of the proverbs I loved most was: ‘Like a frog under a coconut shell.’

The illustration is clear: a frog that never surpasses the boundaries of a coconut shell will only view the world as a dark, quiet, and limited place. If anyone were to tell it that there’s another world: a colorful and bright place, with music and an open natural landscape, this frog will say it’s a lie.

—Marianne Katoppo

“After all, language is where theology begins,” Marianne Katoppo writes in her revolutionary book, Compassionate and Free: An Asian Woman’s Theology (1979).

She then presents an argument about how sexism and patriarchy in the church are rooted in language. She says that in Hebrew, the Holy Spirit Ruakh is feminine, which evolved into Pneuma, a gender-neutral form in Greek by the Septuaginta translator, and then changed into the masculine in Latin. “Therefore, the Trinity we have now is entirely male,” Katoppo concludes.

Indonesia is a nation where people’s lives are strongly driven by religion. This is clear even in the first principle of Pancasila, the Indonesian state’s foundational philosophy: “Believe in the one Supreme God.” Thus, although the Indonesian language does not have the concept of gender in its grammar, it is unsurprising that the country’s religious institutions—which have been long dominated by men—have also contributed to an unfair system of privileges. Religious institutions often become the first barrier that “the other” has to face in order to be a whole individual.

Marianne Katoppo’s life was a constant battle against such oppressive structures. Born in 1943, Katoppo was raised in a family with feminist values. Her father was the minister of education of the short-lived State of East Indonesia (1946—1950), and he upheld gender equality among all of his ten children. Katoppo pursued her theological education at the Jakarta Theological Seminary before leaving Indonesia and continuing her theological studies in Switzerland, Japan, England, Korea, and Germany while also studying languages. Later, she continued to explore the edges of the world to teach feminist theology.

Katoppo’s interest in theology was entwined with her passion for languages. She published her first short story at the age of eight. Besides her seminal work, Compassionate and Free: An Asian Woman’s Theology, Katoppo also published five novels: Dunia Tak Bermusim (A World with No Season, 1974), Raumanen (1977), Anggrek Tak Pernah Berdusta (The Orchid Never Lies, 1977), Terbangnya Punai (The Green Pigeon Flies Away, 1978), Rumah di Atas Jembatan (The House on the Bridge, 1981). She won the prestigious Jakarta Arts Council Novel Competition in 1975 for Raumanen and became the first woman to win the SEA Write Award in 1982. Fluent in twelve languages, she translated Knut Hamsun, Nawal El Saadawi, and Elie Wiesel into Indonesian—all of which were published by Obor, a Catholic publishing house in Jakarta. Given the enormity of her achievements, I—born and raised in Indonesia—seriously believe that no Indonesian man has matched Katoppo’s accomplishments. READ MORE…

Worlds-Within-Worlds: A Testimonial

January 19, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Tiffany Tsao

Indonesia Editor-at-Large Tiffany Tsao on Indonesian writing—and how Asymptote fits in a new, more nuanced "World Literature"

Asymptote’s mission is to introduce not only literary voices from a wide range of countries, but a greater number of voices from within each country. That’s where our twenty over editors-at-large, from Cuba to China, come in. Their goal? To seek out the worlds nestled within worlds that may be invisible from the outside. With their fingers on the pulse of their regions’ literary scenes, our editors-at-large act as extra eyes and ears for our section editors, ensuring a stream of the freshest content from the world over. Often this work is commissioned from scratch (see Mui Poopoksakul on Contemporary Thai Fiction or Yardenne Greenspan on Contemporary Israeli Literature). Editors-at-large also organize outreach events, partner with local journals, and send us literary dispatches for the blog. Our Indonesian editor-at-large, Tiffany Tsao, who gave us this dispatch from the 2014 Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, wrote the following blog post to commemorate our fourth birthday.

—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief

World literature is a loaded word with a lot at stake. The term makes a grand promise: access to literatures, in foreign tongues, about unfamiliar peoples, in far-flung places. “World Literature” promises to reveal the astounding diversity of the globe through letters.

But its execution risks the exact opposite effect: in place of diversification, simplification; in place of multiplication, diminishment. A handful of writers behave as spokespeople for an entire nation, ethnic group, even continent; a single novel purports to function as representative of a variegated and ever-varying literary and popular culture of any given context. This prospect of oversimplification alarms both skeptics and advocates of world literature alike, and (unfortunately) even the most good-intentioned of attempts to avoid this plight may count for naught. READ MORE…

Notes from the Field: Ubud Writers and Readers Festival 2014

October 13, 2014  |  in Dispatches  |  by Tiffany Tsao

“Is it possible to celebrate linguistic diversity while using one language only—that same language of global hegemony—to do so?”

The Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, held annually in Bali, Indonesia, is Southeast Asia’s largest (and arguably its most well-known) literary festival. This year, the festival featured about 150 writers hailing from more than 25 different countries. Its eleventh iteration, however, proved an even more festive occasion than usual, overlapping with both Saraswati Day—a holy day in the Balinese Hindu calendar dedicated to Saraswati, the goddess of wisdom and knowledge—and a series of religious ceremonies held at the nearby Gunung Lebah Temple. The sun was hot, spirits were high, and the roads were packed as religious and literary pilgrims crisscrossed the small town of Ubud from morning to evening to attend their respective events.

Among the many recurring topics of conversation and debate at the festival was the growing global dominance of the English language. Japanese novelist Minae Mizumura confided her regrets about choosing to write in Japanese rather than English (she was capable of doing both, having spent twenty formative years in the United States), thus forgoing the opportunity to reach the wider audience that writing in English would have afforded her.

And yet, despite initial regrets, Mizumura affirmed her commitment to write in Japanese, noting not only that she has had a far greater impact on Japanese literature than she could have ever had on English literature, but also that she regards writing in a non-English language as a sort of personal moral obligation. Asking her audience to imagine a world in which the best and brightest spoke only English—a horrible, pitiful world, she opined—she regarded her writing as an attempt to save us from that awful fate. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Poetry by Nala Arung, translated by Tiffany Tsao

July 8, 2014  |  in Essays, Translations  |  by Tiffany Tsao

"Who would have guessed that love would collide / Into the wall that is FPI."

Efpei I’m in Love by Nala Arung

The cover of Efpei I’m in Love, a poetry collection by Indonesian writer Nala Arung, announces that it is “a book of tasteless poetry.” And it is apparent from the outset that its tastelessness operates on multiple levels.

Its title is deliberately lowbrow—a take on the title of the wildly popular teenage chick-lit novel, Eiffel … I’m in Love, published in 2001 and adapted for film as a romantic comedy of the same name two years later.

The Efpei that has displaced the original Eiffel refers to the FPI, or Islamic Defenders’ Front. A hard-line Islamic vigilante organization, FPI has gained national notoriety for using violence to enforce their interpretation of Islamic law. Its members often patrol areas for signs of un-Islamic activity, destroying property and beating up offenders. The organization has also attacked religious minorities, including Buddhists, Christians, and Ahmadi Muslims, whom they consider a heretical sect. FPI is certainly no laughing matter and hardly the stuff love poems are made of—or so it would seem until one reads the titular poem “FPI, I’m in Love.”     READ MORE…