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Javanese literature is one of the world’s richest and most unusual literary traditions, yet it is little known today outside of Java, Indonesia, and a handful of western universities. With its more than a millennium of documented history, its complex interactions over the centuries with literatures written in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Malay, and Dutch, its often-symbiotic relationship with the performing arts of puppetry and dance, and its own immense creativity and insight, this vastly understudied literature offers a lens to understanding Java’s fascinating world, as well as human ingenuity more broadly. The Introduction briefly explores the history of the field. It also introduces the essays in this volume which take a fresh look at questions and themes pertaining to Java’s literature, employing new theoretical and methodological lenses.
In:
Storied Island
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This chapter investigates one of Java’s most popular yet little studied textual traditions, the Sĕrat Ambiya. These “Tales of the Prophets,” which appear in numerous manuscripts inscribed in palaces and villages, in poetry and prose and in various scripts, depict the lives of the many prophets of Islam leading up to Muhammad, the Seal of the Prophets. The chapter examines two manuscripts produced in the mid-19th century Javanese pĕsantren milieu, focusing on scenes in which, I suggest, the life of an Ambiya figure echoes with that of a Javanese wali. Thus, for example, the episode of nabi Ibrahim constructing the first mosque in Mecca shares much with the well- known story of Sunan Kalijaga’s role in the erection of Java’s first mosque in Demak. Hence the chapter points to a “wali-Ambiya interface” through which two great Islamic traditions – those of the walis and nabis – were intertwined and mutually constituted in major Javano-Islamic pedagogical settings.
In:
Storied Island
New Explorations in Javanese Literature
Volume Editor:
Javanese literature is one of the world’s richest and most unusual literary traditions yet it is little known today outside of Java, Indonesia, and a handful of western universities. With its more than a millennium of documented history, its complex interactions over the centuries with literature written in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Malay and Dutch, its often symbiotic relationship with the performing arts of puppetry and dance, and its own immense creativity and insight, this vastly understudied literature offers a lens to understanding Java’s fascinating world as well as human ingenuity more broadly. The essays in this volume, Storied Island: New Explorations in Javanese Literature, take a fresh look at questions and themes pertaining to Java’s literature, employing new theoretical and methodological lenses.
New Explorations in Javanese Literature
Volume Editor:
Javanese literature is one of the world’s richest and most unusual literary traditions yet it is little known today outside of Java, Indonesia, and a handful of western universities. With its more than a millennium of documented history, its complex interactions over the centuries with literature written in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Malay and Dutch, its often symbiotic relationship with the performing arts of puppetry and dance, and its own immense creativity and insight, this vastly understudied literature offers a lens to understanding Java’s fascinating world as well as human ingenuity more broadly. The essays in this volume, Storied Island: New Explorations in Javanese Literature, take a fresh look at questions and themes pertaining to Java’s literature, employing new theoretical and methodological lenses.
Author:
Interlinear translations from Arabic into Malay and Javanese have been produced in Southeast Asia since at least the sixteenth century. Such translations included an Arabic original with its lines spaced out on the page and a word for word translation appearing between the lines, attempting to replicate the Arabic down to the smallest detail. This essay engages with the theme of World Literature and translation by (1) considering the interlinear text as microcosm: a world of intent and priorities, of a transfer of meaning, of grammar and syntax in translation, of choices and debates, and (2) by thinking of Arabic writing during an earlier period as a world literature sought after in many regions, whose translation in diverse forms and tongues had a vast impact on languages and literary cultures.
Author:
If numbers tell a story, the conversion to Islam of the peoples of the Indonesian archipelago can be counted as a great success. It is clear that Islam has taken strong root in the region and has influenced many facets of life – from politics and language to the economy and education – over several centuries, as it continues to do today. The protracted process of the region’s large-scale Islamization has given rise to various explanations and interpretations, representing different perspectives on when, where, how and why individuals and communities converted to Islam. The goal of this essay is to focus on a little-explored source for the study of conceptions about, and depictions of, conversion to Islam: the literary corpus of the Book of One Thousand Questions. Although this narrative is known in many languages, my emphasis here is on its versions in Javanese and their relationship to additional, more popular conversion narratives in that language. The comparative study of such sources reveals how early conversions were remembered, retold over time, and reconfigured to address local, and contemporary, events and concerns.
Author:
Beyond the boundaries of what is typically considered the Indonesian-Malay world, a small community known today as the Sri Lanka Malays continued to employ the Malay language in writing and speech long after its ancestors left the Indonesian archipelago and Malay peninsula for their new home. Although it is reasonable to assume that the ancestors of the Malays spoke a variety of languages, at least initially, no traces of writing in another Indonesian language have ever been found. Below I present the first evidence of such writing, in Javanese, encountered in an early nineteenth century manuscript from Colombo.
Author:
Abstract
Gerard Genette’s notion of the paratext as ‘a threshold of interpretation’ is employed in this article to explore a host of paratexts in late nineteenth century Javanese manuscripts from the Pura Pakualaman court library in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Although paratexts were used in earlier years, especially in the form of illuminated opening pages, verse and metrical markers and some (often very brief ) information about authors and scribes, the final decades of the nineteenth century and first two of the twentieth saw major shifts in the kind of paratexts employed, reflecting, I suggest, wider changes in practices of reading, writing and the transmission of knowledge.
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Abstract
In his insightful essay, “Silence Across Languages,” (1995) A.L. Becker suggested that every language consists of a particular balance between speech and silence: between what can be expressed in words and what must remain unspoken. One important implication of this fact, he further claimed, is that the different silences between and across languages make translation very difficult, if not utopian. Taking Becker’s essay as its starting point this essay explores the question of silence and sound in translation through a study of interlinear translation. An inter-linear translation in which each line is Arabic is followed by its translation into Malay constitutes a microcosm in which to view the act of translation from up close and in detail. The essay suggests that it is also a space in which silences are “not allowed,” or must be overcome, as these translations do not offer the luxury of adaptation and re-tellings where words, idioms, grammatical and syntactical elements can be glossed over, ignored or remain unheard. An interlinear space forces the scribe, translator, reader and listener to produce and pronounce the sounds of different languages even when they are “incompatible” and thus may overcome the silences, in however small a way, and offer us a paradigm of “sound across languages.”
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Abstract
The idea of keywords was introduced in Raymond Williams’ seminal Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), and has since had a profound influence on research in multiple fields. This article explores what the idea of keywords might contribute to the study of interlinear translations from Arabic into Javanese. The interlinear translation, which presents an Arabic text with a word-for-word Javanese translation appearing between its lines, is a space where languages, beliefs, and entire histories encounter one another on the page. Taking as my example the 1864 interlinear Babad Maulud (a Javanese translation of the Arabic Maulid Syaraf al-Anām, recited on the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday), I suggest that despite the Javanese translator’s overall literal translation strategy which attempted to duplicate the original, he or she decided to add “Javanese keywords” at particular points in the translation, with such exceptions revealing contemporary Javanese understandings of social etiquette, identity and genealogy.