Below the Written Tip of Translation:
Cross-medial Interaction in Malay
Amin Sweeney
Prefatory Note from 2009
A New Book Published by Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia
On the 8th December this year, I was presented with a book just published by
KPG for I was one of the contributing authors to the book. Indeed, my article
had been a paper in the proceedings of the seminar in Paris which form the
basis of this book. Indeed, all my expenses for the trip to Paris had been
funded by the French government. The original article, in English, I translated
or perhaps better “transculturated” into Malay/Indonesian seven years ago.
The English version had received the touch of a copy editor, Ms. Rosemary
Robson. The final versions were sent to me by EFEO.*
Although KPG is the publisher, in the case of this book in the
Indonesian edition, entitled Sadur Sejarah Terjemahan di Indonesia dan Malaysia, it
is clear that KPG merely published the materials handed down to them by
EFEO without presuming to make changes or offer comments. Thus, only
when friends at KPG and I leafed through the pages did it become apparent
that my article had disappeared from Sadur. More accurately, it had been
excluded from the book by EFEO without any notification to KPG or myself.
Now that merits a crooked smile, for only one Malaysian was invited to attend
the seminar in Paris. Me! However, this Malaysian counts himself fortunate to
have escaped incarceration in the Tugu Selamat Datang (Welcome
Monument) together with the names of other contributors to the book.
Stifling… Just take a look at the cover. Only two people escaped. They‟re on
top of the monument, waving in relief.
This is not the place to speculate about motives. Who knows, one may
find signs of wrath-ignition in the following article which is served up in its
original form, including some material from the abstract, from seven years in
the past.
It is high time for radical change in the field of Malay literary studies.
This, essentially, is the message of the following article. This change will not
happen in the West, where the field is approaching extinction. The future has
to be in Malaysia and Indonesia.
* Files: sweeney-E-revision; sweeney-RR; sweeney-I-as.
F or many months, before finally putting two fingers to keyboard
in an attempt actually to write coherent sentences rather than
simply dashing off odd notes, I had been espousing the fond
conceit that producing a paper for this project would be a smooth
operation. The espousal was reinforced by the director of this project,
who encouraged me to bring together various relevant ruminations I
had produced in the past. Over the last weeks, cold reality froze my
conceit. I finally began to digest the nature of the project and realized
that almost all my ruminations over the years have relevance to the area
of discussion I chose for this project, which was interaction between
the oral and the written. Bad choice, it seems, for while the projected
volume will swell to over a thousand pages, individual contributions are
limited to many fewer than that!
This project on translation is truly gargantuan, involving an effort
to nudge some eighty scholars into cooperating to produce an inte-
grated volume. All too often, when conference proceedings are turned
into a book, the result is still a slew of some dozen disparate articles
capped with a desperate attempt by the editor to demonstrate that there
is unity and development. Here, the project directors have clearly
invested much effort into facilitating the production of an integrated
volume. The plan allows contributors to see their place in the whole
book and encourages us to contact authors writing about „proximate
domains‟. These are excellent ideas. However, some questions arise
concerning the rationale underlying the structuring of the project. How
did those „proximate domains‟ become proximate? I am not com-
plaining! We contributors were repeatedly given every opportunity to
provide input. In my case, however, it was only after immersing myself
in thinking about the project and trying to write something that, too late
perhaps, questions began to surface.
In the proposal, we read: “By „translation‟ we mean all kinds of
adaptations, renderings and transpositions, including oral ones.” After
this foreboding use of „including‟, it comes as no surprise to find that
there is an overwhelming emphasis on „texts‟—the words „text‟ and
„texts‟ occur 48 times in the proposal—and there is never any doubt but
that written texts are intended, for oral and textual traditions are clearly
distinguished. Yet in the section of the proposal concerning
performance, there seems to be some slippage over the understanding
of „oral‟. Regarding topics worthy of study, we read:
Below the Written Tip of Translation: 3
Cases of oral translation (performance of mabasan in Bali, reading
and simultaneous translating of Malay texts in Lombok).
Traditional literatures were mostly oral; did the translations have
a different status? Examples of oral texts (performances or tales)
translated (or re-created) into Indonesian oral texts before being
put into writing (if ever).
I would suggest in response (in reverse order): firstly, the notion of an
„oral text‟ in this context seems to represent a teleological somersault:
the scholar who hears a tale orally composed in performance may
anticipate the text he hopes to produce from recording it (once fixed, it
becomes a text!)1 This tendency results from the centuries-old con-
ditioning of the print literate to view the oral as some kind of unwritten
writing, leading to the now thankfully obsolete contradiction in terms:
„oral literature‟; secondly, „traditional literatures were mostly oral?‟ It is
not clear what is meant by „traditional literatures‟, for in section one it
was stated that: “We will make no distinction between „traditional‟ and
„modern‟ literatures.” Suffice it to say that no literature can be „oral‟.
Thirdly, the examples given of oral translation seem to be text-based,
and this is confirmed in a personal communication by our project
director.
To the literary scholar whose whole life has been focussed upon
books, it cannot but seem entirely reasonable that a history of
translation should be concerned with „texts‟ and „works‟. Until quite
recently, it was taken for granted that access to the Malay oral tradition
was via „Folk Literature‟, and there was little awareness that this was a
corpus of literary material produced by Malay scribes on British
initiative, having but a tenuous connection with oral tradition. Of
course, from a practical point of view, it may seem an impossible
undertaking to attempt a study of translation from an oral foreign
discourse into an oral Indonesian equivalent, at least from a historical
perspective. Yet “The main objective of the project is to consider the
history of translation in Indonesia and Malaya [sic!] in all its dimensions,
all periods of time (9th to 20th centuries), all languages (foreign and
Indonesian), and all domains of writing and intellectual activity
1 I personally have no problem with a wider conception of „text‟. Indeed, a
behavioural sequence is viewed by some anthropologists as a text, to be read and
interpreted. My point here is that we should be consistent and stick to our
definition of terms.
4 Amin Sweeney
(literature, religion, law, science, etc.).” This is already a vast field to
cover but it considers the dimensions only of the written, of so-called
„works‟. Two points emerge from this:
1) In the context of discourse as a whole, translation of texts
represents the written tip of a huge spoken iceberg. During the time
taken by a scribe, clerk or scholar to translate one written work, there
would have been—and still are—thousands of translations being
transacted in the oral domain.2 These could range from the directive of
the Arab nakhoda to his Malay-speaking mualim: “Ask them where we
can moor the boat and find lodging,” through the religious teacher‟s
translations of hadith; or the exposition in Malay of oral Thai mantra; yes,
on through the translation of my Malay instructions to the lady barber
just arrived from Canton, to the attempts by the academic to explain to
his students in Malay the intricacies of orality-literacy studies.
2) If such a major domain of translation (and it is a vast potential
research project in itself) is not amenable to a historical approach, this
may not bode well for hopes of producing a coherent and integrated
history of translation as a whole. Indeed, we might ask at this point:
why write a history at all, even of written translation? European
scholars of the nineteenth century tended to write histories as a matter
of course, even though their topic might have little to do with history,
for history was the prime way to organize knowledge of all types.
Winstedt‟s attempt to write a literary history of traditional Malay
literature using an outdated model of the history of English literature
succeeded in hiding what was important to Malay tradition, asking of it
rather questions that were irrelevant and producing a scrambled
chronology. It revealed nothing of a Malay system of discourse but
contextualized a part of Malay tradition in the realm of English
literature and then excoriated it for not matching up to English
standards.3
Hooykaas felt that knowledge of Malay literature was too scanty
to permit Winstedt‟s brand of chronological ordering, and attempted to
organize his writing according to a different pattern. His work Perintis
Sastra (1961) thus consists of a series of short paragraphs, each dealing
with a separate topic. Yet the fact that Hooykaas and Winstedt shared
2 Let‟s say within a one kilometre radius of the writer translating a work!
3 For a detailed discussion of these issues in a wider context, see Sweeney 1987.
Below the Written Tip of Translation: 5
the same presuppositions and were equally committed to the diachronic
approach ensured that his apparent attempt to dispense with a
chronological filing system served only to underline his concern with
chronology and his commitment to the historical model, for the result
was a reverse chronology. It also drew attention to the absence of an
alternative system. The proposal states: “The final publication will
follow a thematic order rather than a linguistic or chronological one.”
In this history of translation, if there is to be no chronological order,
does this represent a flight from the diachronic? If the tentative plan
represents a portent of the thematic order, how will it address the
aspect of development, by which I mean both the development and
evolvement of the aspects of translation addressed and the development
of the book? So far, we are presented with twelve themes each
containing from five to fourteen, often seemingly very disparate, sub-
themes. Whence the theoretical glue that will bind these materials into a
coherently developed argument? In the absence of either type of
development there can be no history, but rather a survey. The glue of
my choice would be epoxy resin prepared by mixing the contents of
two tubes, one labelled „The Noetics of Translation‟, the other „The
Rhetoric of Translation‟.
Well, all very well and good! One of the strengths of the proposal
is precisely that the project directors have not imposed an overarching
approach, so it is not for me to suggest one. Let us accept furthermore
that this project is essentially a study of the translation of written works.
This does not mean, however, that what lies below the written tip of
Indonesian translation can simply be tucked away in a neat section on
say, „orality‟ much as „folk literature‟ was slotted into Winstedt‟s history
of Malay literature. There is a misconception abroad that the main
focus of my work is this thing called orality. Serving as an external
reader of philological dissertations has proved instructive for me.
Candidates have been known to exclaim: “Oh that book of yours is on
my shelf but I haven‟t finished it” on having it pointed out that I have
written as much about written tradition as about anything oral, though
endeavouring to treat each in the context of both.
An iceberg metaphor might not seem to hit the right spot for a
paper being written in Jakarta. Yet much of that „written tip‟ resides in
much colder climes. Indeed the most authoritative writing on that
written tip emanates from lands swept by the winds from the cold
6 Amin Sweeney
North Sea. Yes, those old manuscripts residing in air-conditioned,
humidity-controlled luxury in London and Leiden never had it so good.
It is hardly surprising that many scholars of traditional Malay literature
should imagine that these manuscripts are in their prime element. Well,
noetically, things change radically! Most scholars of traditional Malay
literature once proud to be identified as „philologists‟, now bolt for
cover from that term faster than rabbits into burrows. And the
manuscripts? In Malay terms, they are the beneficiaries of an alien
system which created the concept of preserving all manner of artifacts,
which, in the culture producing them would have long been consigned
to the garbage heap. We reap great benefits from the European system,
but let it not be forgotten that they are benefits in European terms.
And while Malays have naturalized the concept—yes we have our air-
conditioned collections in Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta—let it not be
forgotten that this was not the Malay way of preserving tradition.
Those manuscripts actually had a life! They were performed in a
living society. They were written to be performed and to be heard. They
were written for a listening audience, most of whom were not
conversant with letters. The scribes were consummately attuned to their
noetic economy, which was orally-oriented.
Thus, much of my work over the past decades has been con-
cerned with the relationships between oral and written composition in
Malay. Only by studying their interaction can one begin to understand
the workings of either for, since the advent of writing in the Malay
world, the development of neither tradition has been independent of or
even parallel to the other. On the one hand, writing caused the
displacement of large areas of the oral tradition and transformed much
of what survived. On the other hand, oral habits persisted in written
composition throughout the age of manuscript culture: the principles of
oral composition were still required for effective communication with a
listening audience familiar only with an oral/aural tradition. Thus, a
vital distinction to be made is not merely that between oral and written
composition, but also between aural and visual consumption. Indeed,
the same „literary grammar‟ was used to generate both oral and written
composition schematically, although both traditions developed their
own conventions in accordance with the different media involved.
Even in this age of print and mass literacy, many areas of Malay-
speaking society still reveal a strongly oral orientation. Everyday speech
Below the Written Tip of Translation: 7
was also schematic. The various levels of discourse reflected a general
state of mind.
Studying the noetic system of Malay discourse involves examining
how knowledge was shaped, communicated, retrieved and preserved in
various media: the oral system of composition, both stylized and non-
stylized; then through the range of manuscript, print and electronic
culture. This cross-medial study of Malay composition is no less
formidable a task than achieving cross-cultural understanding, and no
less important for those who work only with texts, be they chirographic
or print. For those scholars, there may be no perceived reason to
bother with such issues; the comforting physical tangibility of book or
manuscript allows them to indulge themselves in the old idea of
reliability and accuracy, for the text is simply one object to be turned
into another object. But the traditions one studies are not merely
objects of scrutiny placed in a state of suspended animation before the
scholar. They are traditions of communication and persuasion shaped
in the interaction between speakers/writers and audiences: conventions
that form and reinforce verbal communities. The same goes for the
scholar‟s own tradition, of which his writing is a manifestation. The
scholar of the traditions „we‟ study is the product of a changing noetic
system studying a changing noetic system, his own or another. And it is
the very interaction between the systems involved in such study which
contributes to much of such change.4
In this paper, therefore, I shall endeavour to make my con-
tribution relevant to the scope of this volume as a study of written
translation. Thus, my aim is not to cover „the oral‟, for I aim to cling to
the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, I rather relish the notion of presenting a
cautionary tale!
In the following, I present some examples of translation modes.
A few are cross-lingual; almost all are cross medial. They include
language produced in writing and speech by foreigners for an
Indonesian audience; pronouncements on how translation should be
undertaken; scholars‟ interpretations of media shifts and their use of
registers. Some of these examples provide remarkable insights for their
time; more demonstrate the risks of textual tunnel vision; all are salutary
4 I have written about these issues at length elsewhere. See for example, Sweeney
1980, 1987, 1994a, 1994b.
8 Amin Sweeney
lessons on the effects of taking one‟s print-literate givens too much for
granted. Ironically but inevitably most of the sources from the past
appear in writing; sometimes very atypical writing.
An awareness of a text as a transaction between an author and
audience, both implied in the text, brings with it the realization that a
most daunting task for the translator is the reshaping of the audience he
perceives implied in the text. Without that awareness, all efforts taken
to establish the „correct‟ meanings will still produce an ineffectual
transaction. Particularly when there is a sizable cultural difference
between original and target languages, extensive cultural translation may
be needed in order to postulate an audience whose cultural literacy—in
Hirsch‟s (1988) sense—matches that of the intended reader.
One of the most widely used books on Malay literature has been
Hooykaas‟s Perintis Sastra (1961), which is a translation of his Literatuur
in Maleis en Indonesisch (1952). Apart from the fact that the translation is
often meaningless unless one has the Dutch original to hand, there has
been no attempt either by author or translator to adapt the text to suit
an Indonesian or Malaysian audience, so that analogies and illustrations
from European culture are used to introduce Malays to Malay literature!
Thus, for example, on page 90, the student is expected to gain some
insight into the language of the penglipur lara by being told that „In
Europe, the words charme and carmen have the same origin‟; on page 19,
the remark that few composers are as free in the form of their poems as
the priest Guido Gezelle from Flanders is used to clarify a point on
„sound values‟ (nilai bunyi). Although Hooykaas claims in the Dutch
version (1952:4) that the book is specifically intended for Indonesians,
the audience actually postulated turns out to be a European one, that is,
one which could learn to understand Malay discourse only through an
understanding of Dutch discourse. He was still writing for Dutch
students, for he knew no alternative. He thus introduced Malay
literature to Indonesians as a very foreign entity.
If my concern were merely to emphasize the need to repostulate
one‟s audience when one‟s work is translated into the language of a
culture very different from one‟s own, there would be little more to be
said on the matter. The significance here of these illustrations intended
for a Western audience, however, lies in the fact that many of them
have become „topoi‟ in Malay/Indonesian literary studies. Guido Gezelle,
certainly, did not attract much attention, but generations of Indonesian
Below the Written Tip of Translation: 9
students can attest to the necessity of memorizing what a „carmina‟ is in
order to describe a pantun. A further example is Hooykaas‟s account of
how Overbeck witnessed the creation of a pantun (1961:78). This again
has often been used to teach Indonesian and Malaysian students about
the composition of pantun!
The most bizarre example of mispostulating an Indonesian
audience occurs on page 61 of Perintis Sastra. In a section on end rhyme,
Hooykaas analyses not a Malay pantun, but a syrupy creation in English
by Wilkinson (1924:54), which is not even a translation of a pantun, but
a pretty, ego-centred Victorian conceit based on a rather poorly-
structured and badly-balanced pantun.
I lose a pearl, amid the grass It keeps its hue though low it lies
I love a girl but love will pass. A pearl of dew that slowly dies.
This was based on:
Permata jatuh di rumput. Jatuh di rumput gilang
Kasih umpama embun di hujung rumput. Datang matahari hilang.
Winstedt (1961:184) could not resist pointing out in a footnote that:
“Actually the Malay means something different.” He then proceeds to
give his own translation, which is no great improvement:
You drop a pearl, ‟t will keep its hue. Above the sward and gleam the same.
You drop a girl. For fleet as dew; Love melts before a never [sic] flame.
We see from these examples that for Hooykaas, Malays were very
much „the other‟. For Malay readers, Hooykaas was equally „the other‟.
And the Malays depicted in Hooykaas‟s writing were the Malay readers‟
other‟s other! Their own discourse was fed back to them as something
quite foreign to them. Yet colonial authority, vested in the printed
word, had an aura of sacred authority. Students had problems relating
what they were taught to what they knew. One result was that much of
the material taught was simply learned by heart without being digested.
The problem is that this approach became naturalized; students were
not even aware that they did not understand what they were „learning‟.
Indeed it came to matter little what was taught. Thus appeared,
particularly in Indonesia, dozens of horrendous little text books on
literature full of topoi not understood by the authors themselves and
10 Amin Sweeney
often having not the vaguest relevance to Malay or Indonesian
literature.5 The situation is no better in higher education. A vast amount
of material finds its way into theses and dissertations that is not
understood by the writers. A major problem is that the writers are
unaware that they do not understand; indeed the very nature of what
understanding what they read involves is not something examined. This
may be seen from an observation of people‟s comprehension of
newspapers and news on television, not to mention the often incredible
Indonesian subtitling of foreign video movies.6 These subtitles often
produce a new story! I was surprised that a number of friends, all
university graduates, had a significantly less than perfect understanding
of what they read or heard. Yet they had not been aware of this until I
started asking questions. For in an editorial in Kompas (25 August,
2000), words such as sirkumstansi, lakonik, appeal, and kredibel caused
problems for several persons. One thought that lakonik was derived
from lakon. In television interviews, one hears phases such as track
record, electoral threshold and human capital development, which many people
do not understand. Likewise for non-Javanese Indonesians, the
enormous amount of Javanese vocabulary used in Indonesian is often
imperfectly understood. My point, however, is that these uncompre-
hended items of speech just seem to sail by unnoticed. The whole
nature of comprehension requires attention.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a young Dr. van
Ronkel was en voyage for the Indies aboard a pilgrim ship taking a
contingent of Indonesian hajis home from Mekka. The captain, on
hearing that one of his passengers was a language expert newly
graduated from Leiden University cum laude, asked van Ronkel to make
an announcement informing the pilgrims that they could collect their
food and drink on producing their tickets. Once the pilgrims were
assembled on deck, van Ronkel produced the following speech.
Maka adalah nachoda bahtera ini memberi ma„lumat kepada
sekalian djema„ah Hadji, bahwasanja sekalian tuan2 Hadji akan
diberikan makanan dan minuman bilamana waraqah dari bahtera
ini dipertundjukkan kepada tuan nachoda.
5 See Sweeney 1987: 267ff.
6 I cannot resist adding a short appendix on this.
Below the Written Tip of Translation: 11
Bafflement ensued and eventually it fell to the head seaman to
convey the message. He brandished a thick bamboo stick and bellowed:
Heee, apa kowe tidak mengeeerti?…Kalau mau makan kasi lihat
tiket…..Ayo, lekas ambil makan….!
Instant reaction! The hajis rushed off to get their food while the
officers and crew collapsed in mirth. This incident, recounted by
Bagindo Dahlan Abdullah (1950) who must have heard about it from
van Ronkel, seems to have been a watershed for van Ronkel; it
impressed upon him how „Malay‟ for previous generations of scholars
was the written language of times long gone and was of but limited use
for one who would converse in the spoken language. For Europeans
conditioned in print culture, little difference in idiom was expected
between written and spoken language when both were supposedly
being used „correctly‟. And, of course, writing could be honed at leisure
into the most developed form of speech. For van Ronkel this was not
simply a cross-cultural experience; the cross medial translation of his
words impressed upon him the gap between the idiom of traditional
written Malay and that of everyday speech. The type of speech used
reminds us, too, that attention must be paid to registers, to which I
return below. Van Ronkel‟s experience also shows us how the
mispostulating of an intended audience may be rectified more rapidly in
an oral than in a written transaction, for the immediacy of the situation
(especially with a hungry audience!) allows the swift reaction and
subsequent feedback impossible for readers, as of Perintis Sastra. But in
both cases, it was not the intended audience that recognized the
mispostulation, but rather the unintended: the seamen and myself
respectively. As noted, Malay and Indonesian readers of Perintis Sastra
had no complaints. This whole question of comprehension is rather
reminiscent of audiences of some genres of Malay stylized oral
composition, where not all the language used is expected to be
understood.
This brings me to a another example involving Hooykaas, whose
fame as a scholar of Balinese religion is beyond challenge; yet he did
not speak Balinese. In 1968, I was informed by some relatives of I
Gusti Ngurah Ketut Sangka living at the puri in Krambitan, Hooykaas‟s
research pied à terre, that Hooykaas sometimes spoke to them in Old
Javanese. They were hugely impressed: “His language was so refined.
12 Amin Sweeney
Even we didn‟t understand a word!” When I asked Hooykaas about
this, he simply chuckled. What then might at first sight seem to be
another mispostulation of audience if semantic transparency be taken as
the criterion turns out to have been a rhetorical (and ritual) tour de force
for the „speaker in the text‟, whether or not this was the „biological‟
Hooykaas.
This is not a throwaway anecdote chasing a cheap laugh. I recall
jukeboxes long in the past where one might insert a coin not for loud
music but for silence. An inventory of the jukebox‟s potential
performance would have to include no-music along with the music.
Similarly, in studying translation, we must look at no-translation. I mean
by this the stratagem of producing language not intended to be
understood. As touched on above, some genres of Malay stylized oral
performance such as Wayang and Main Puteri present a variety of
linguistic usages which are opaque to the audience. Indeed the
performers themselves can often provide only the most idiosyncratic
explanations and may resent being asked for meanings. The power is in
the opaque. Shortly before he died, Tengku Khalid, last patron of the
arts in Kelantan, gave me a mantra written in Jawi, with a note that I
was to make use of it. It read “Kum kum dal kum.” The stratagem may
be described as „the functional meaningless of ritual language‟.7
Particularly in the Main Puteri and in ritual performances of the
Wayang and Mak Yong, there is much that is opaque to the audience.
Here we observe the gap between the ostensible audience and the
intended, indeed, postulated audience. The ostensible listeners are the
spirits addressed. The intended rhetorical impact is on humans! Thus,
when scholars attempt to translate their recordings of such a
performance, it is wise to resist the print literate‟s desire for
„transparency‟, for otherwise they will be in the company of Carol
Laderman (1991) whose wish to clear up all obscurities in translating a
performance of Main Puteri led her to the creation of a transaction that
never occurred, producing rather a display of the creative abilities of
performers turned informants to produce imaginative yet idiosyncratic
answers to her questions. In translating such performances, I personally
prefer to create philological problems in the English reproducing those
7 With apologies to my friend Professor Frits Staal, from whom I am expropriating
the title of his profound article „The Meaninglessness of Ritual‟.
Below the Written Tip of Translation: 13
facing the philologist of Malay. For these are no manuscripts to be
purged of perceived corruptions.8
Perhaps a quick cross-medial hop is needed to demonstrate that
the „no-translation‟ stratagem cannot be conveniently cordoned off.
Philologists are consumers, too! Indonesians are still rhetorically
empowered in this area. Indeed there is an ongoing battle between
authors and audiences. Take light bulbs. Phillips bulbs are expensive
but reliable. The package has information in Indonesian and English.
Light bulbs manufactured by Indonesian companies lack credibility. So
one is unlikely to find a light bulb claiming to be „made in Indonesia‟.
Rather, one encounters a variety of apparently Japanese light bulbs, for
there is no Indonesian information provided. Everything on the
packaging is written in Japanese apart from the company‟s name, which
is clearly Japanese. A little investigation reveals that let‟s say, Toyofuji, is
based in Tangerang! Yet Indonesian audiences are not stupid either!
People tend to be cautious when a product provides descriptions only
in Japanese or German, another favourite. So we buy Phillips. One up
for the Dutch!
It seems that economic concerns reign supreme! In Perintis Sastra,
Hooykaas and his translator apparently imagined that they were hitting
their rhetorical target; Likewise perhaps, the newspaper editors; and
Hooykaas‟s implied speaker as a success in Old-Javanese-for-Balinese.
My point is that whereas the implied authors of these texts were
ambivalent, confused or humorously deceptive, the Indonesian
audiences did not choose to reject the role assigned them as audience.
But when we get down to purchasing light bulbs, Indonesians know
how to evaluate!
The watershed perceived by Bagindo Dahlan in the intellectual
development of van Ronkel was not, alas, a watershed for Malay studies
in general. Some seventy years after the van Ronkel episode, another
newly graduated Leiden language expert began teaching at a Malaysian
university. His salary was slow to materialize, so he wrote a one
sentence memo to the University Registrar: “Aku ma„lumkan padamu
bahwa aku belum menerima gajiku.” It may seem that my quoting this is
merely for poetic balance! After all, if it were a typical example of the
field in the seventies it would not have provoked mirth. Yet just some
8 See the translation of Cerita Raja Budak in my Malay Word Music (1994).
14 Amin Sweeney
two decades previously—and long before—the reactionary antics of
C.C. Brown provoked no hilarity; rather they had the respect of
contemporary mainstream colonial scholarship. I shall resist the temp-
tation to dwell on earlier pronouncements such as that Kelantanese is
„incorrigibly lazy in its pronunciation of terminations‟, not to mention
„primitive‟. I shall focus rather on his later, outlandish pontifications
about translation in his A Guide to English-Malay Translation (1956a). He
rails against the use of „modern Malay‟, which he equates with
Indonesian. Writers of „modern Malay‟ and Indonesian are simply
translating from English, he avers. Syllogistically-challenged Brown! Go
to step three and confront your enthymemic fallout: all writers of
Indonesian know English!
The thrust of Brown‟s book is that Malays should write as they
speak. He provides a tolerable „modern Malay‟ translation of an English
sentence (well, yes, actually, the English sentence was translated by
Brown from a sentence in the Sejarah Melayu!) Of course, that „modern
Malay‟ sentence must be denounced and the „writer‟ must face Brown‟s
inquisition: “But if he first asked himself „how would I say this in
Malay‟, he would realize that:” blah blah blah. Brown then presents the
„correct‟ translation. It is the original sentence from the Sejarah Melayu!:
“Segala orang Melaka pun hairan terkejut menengar bunyi meriam itu.” Well,
sorry Mr. Brown. That is not the way Malay people spoke in 1956, for
there was still a huge gap between the written and the spoken language.
Brown‟s equating the language of the Sejarah Melayu with that of
correct Malay oral parlance would be amusing, rather than sinister, were
it not for the fact that Brown had colonial power. He was an examiner
in Malay! At the time he wrote, he had just completed examining over a
thousand essays written by mainly Malay students, who were to be
penalised for writing in „modern Malay‟ and not in the idiom of the
Sejarah Melayu.
Brown‟s insistence that Malays should emulate the language of
manuscripture such as the Sejarah Melayu and eschew the use of
„modern Malay‟ would, if successful, have hindered intellectual
development and restricted „abstract‟ thought: the Sejarah Melayu itself
was moving away from the oral tradition. Were twentieth century
Malays to have espoused the language of the Sejarah Melayu, they would
have been moving in a counter direction taken by the scribe(s) of the
Sejarah Melayu himself. Of course, Brown was not as obtuse as he
Below the Written Tip of Translation: 15
presents himself. He clearly knew quite a little about orally-oriented
written composition in Malay. His whole agenda was to keep it orally
oriented. Aurally-consumed manuscript literature was focussed on
narrative action: it needed the dramatising of speech; what would
become abstractions in visually-consumed texts had to be presented in
concrete narrative examples. Brown was adamant in denying the Malay
language any development. Any notion of reported speech had to be
translated into direct speech; any threatening abstraction had to be
disarmed and turned into narrative. In this he was at one with the likes
of Winstedt, who was implacable in his opposition to Malay intellectual
development. Winstedt, for example, condemned the Taju ‟l-Salatin as
being written in „atrocious‟ Malay. Yet it was works such as this that
pioneered Malay abstract thought. If it be thought that I am being
intemperate, turn only to William Roff‟, who considered that Winstedt
“did more to circumscribe Malay educational progress, and to ensure
that the Malay peasant did not get ideas above his station, than anyone
else before or since” (Roff 1974:139).
When we consider Brown‟s diatribe against modern Malay as
mere translation from English, two thoughts come to mind: first, much
of the „modern‟ Malay being produced at the time seems difficult to
fault. One need consult only the language of Memoranda Angkatan
Sasterawan 50. Asraf, Usman Awang and Keris Mas, for example?
Brown clearly sought out the worst examples he could find. And his
own „correct‟ examples were sometimes off the Malay planet. Secondly,
if Brown was so opposed to the influence of English on Malay, one
must ask why was his own spoken Malay so anglicized?
It seems that „registers‟ simply cannot be ignored. Van Ronkel
clearly learned something about cross-medial transactions. Unlike
Brown, who wished Malays to write as they spoke (well, yes, as they
should have been speaking!), van Ronkel had learned that they did not
speak as he had imagined they spoke. Brown learned nothing. Brown‟s
injunction that one should write as one speaks could have been
conceived only in a mass-literate print society. Such a notion would
have been anathema to members of the exclusive coterie of scribes,
whose whole existence depended on not writing as one spoke. But
Brown strangely imagined that Malays spoke the language of the Sejarah
Melayu. In writing about Malay dialects, he awarded „grades‟ depending
16 Amin Sweeney
on how closely they approached the language of that one text.9 So these
Malays should have been speaking the way they should be writing,
which is the way they should be speaking! In essence, Brown still
subscribes to the conventional wisdom of Valentijn and Werndly
through to de Hollander10 and almost to van Ronkel that writing is the
purest form of the language.
But what of the variety of registers in Malay? I have no idea how
van Ronkel graded the translation of his announcement. „Low Malay‟
perhaps? He probably did not subsequently emulate that style. Yet it hit
exactly the right register in the context. It was correct Malay! This view
would have aroused the ire of Malay language teachers during colonial
times and beyond! In Malaya, Malays used different registers when
talking to people of other ethnicities. As with van Ronkel‟s translator,
Malays would use what is dubbed „bazaar Malay‟ in certain situations
when speaking to other Malays. Yet none of these registers was taught
by Malay language teachers to their British pupils. Indeed, the language
taught had little resemblance to the language spoken by Malays,
including those very teachers! Yet those pupils were also clearly
adhering to a standard of their own. Munsyi Abdullah gives us an
exhaustive exposé of the problem in his Hikayat Abdullah. So many of
his pupils‟ insistence on producing Malay with jalan bahasa Inggeris drives
Abdullah to distraction. Their Malay is pure translation. Yet when he
quotes Englishmen, they are depicted speaking in what has clearly
become a conventionalized literary patois. The idiom was still that of the
hikayat, but interspersed with features such as inversion of noun or
pronoun with ini/itu. For example: dia mau bunuh sama sahaya; ajar sama
sahaya baca Melayu; boleh kasi khabar sama sahaya; hari ini juga selesaikan itu
pekerjaan; sahaya boleh kasi mengertinya. The same idiom is employed when
Malays—and Abdullah himself—speak to Englishmen. Abdullah is
9 For example, Kelantan and Terengganu Malay “do not come as well as Perak
Malay out of a test by Sejarah Melayu standards (1956a:124).
10 For de Hollander, the „pure‟ Malay is written Malay, and, as is the case with Dutch,
the purity of spoken Malay will depend on the education of the speaker and on the
situation (1882:293). Here again we see the assumption of the print-based society,
referred to above, that one speaks, or should speak, as one writes, and this, of
course, cannot apply to a radically oral manuscript culture. For a detailed
consideration of Valentijn and Werndly, see Sweeney 1987:44ff.
Below the Written Tip of Translation: 17
clearly bowing to an existing convention,11 for he puts this idiom into
the mouth of his own pupils, including those he considers to have
learnt well!
The convention survived well into modern times. In a short story
from 1959, titled Mereka tidak Mengerti, Keris Mas (1992:648ff.) presents
a wickedly funny and very thinly veiled portrait of an ex-colonial
official, „Bill‟. The English translation patois is much in evidence. In the
following, „Bill‟ and his ex-driver are engaged in conversation. One
should note that the driver responds in the same patois.
“Apa macam sekarang, Amat? Ada baik? Ada senang?”
“Baik juga, tuan.”
“Kerja ada bagus?” ……. “Oh, ya, awak ikut saya punya nasihat. Mesti
panggil tuan. Ada mengerti?”
“Wah, tidak boleh itu macam, tuan….”
The convention survived because it was based on the actual
speech of so many British living in colonial Malaya. When I speak of a
translation patois, I anticipate an objection that the Malays who
employed it to Europeans were not translating, for they were those who
did not speak English. It was a patois of translation because it was
reinforced generation after generation by English speakers of Malay.
Yes, here we can flout the how-many-children-had-Lady-Macbeth
fallacy and peek behind the scene created by Keris Mas. For I knew
Mubin Sheppard well—oops, I mean „Bill‟. How about “Boy, ini teh
sangat tebal!” Yes, that was Sheppard sitting on the veranda of the Kota
Baru resthouse in 1968 complaining to a waiter (in pure Colonel Blimp)
that his tea was too strong. This man of no glottals gained something of
a reputation among Malays as a Malay scholar. Malays expected
Europeans to speak thus. I introduced him to Dalang Awang Lah, the
greatest shadow-master of modern times, and was intrigued by his
insisting that Awang Lah‟s Hanuman puppet was „sangat halus‟, even
when Awang Lah stressed that it was kasar. When the dalang grew quite
irate, I had to explain to Sheppard, who was becoming quite
11 For instance, in the Misa Melayu (p. 84): Sahaya itu hari membedil… („That day, I
shot…‟); and in the Hikayat Marsekalek (p. 17), Daendels is made to say:…yang gua
punya mau di dalam itu pekerjaan („…my wish in that business‟). See Sweeney
1987:101, n.36.
18 Amin Sweeney
bewildered, that the dalang was not being overly modest, for in that
context, halus in Kelantanese means „small‟, not „refined‟, and that in
repeating that Hanuman was kasar, Awang Lah was insisting simply that
his puppet was big, not coarse! Kelantanese visitors take an inordinate
time to make their excuses and depart someone‟s house. Sheppard
simply shot to his feet and bade Awang Lah: “Terima kasih. Selamat
malam.” Yes, “Thank you. Goodnight!” A man of but one register. In
English, too…
Mubin Sheppard provided closure to a long-standing tradition:
how Europeans should speak Malay. In 1958, as a sergeant in the
British army on national service, I was sent from Kuala Lumpur to
Singapore for a six-week course in Malay. My delight was that I had
already been learning to speak Malay by mixing with the lower order to
the extent that I was accused of going native. The staff-sergeant in
charge of the course needed none of that. For him, every word in Malay
had a direct equivalent in English. He asked for the Malay word for
„depend‟. I suggested „bergantung‟ or „tergantung‟. “No,” he barked.
“„Depend‟ is „berkait‟.” Oh yes, his upper-class English accent was
manifest only when he spoke Malay.
It took me some time to realize that the British colonial agenda
for teaching Malay was a tad skewed. The kind of Malay that I spoke
was clearly not appropriate, for I was lowering myself to „their‟ level.
One must maintain some distance. Sheppard had this distance down to
a tee. He was among the last of a colonial line of exponents of the
translation patois. They did not think in Malay, and God forbid that they
should exhibit Malay body language and descend to the level of natives!
The patois of translation had a single register. It was, at best, elevated
kitchen Malay.
When I began with the example from van Ronkel, I was using the
term „oral‟ to mean „spoken‟, without further complication. The speaker
might be literate or not. A problem lies in the definition of the terms
„oral‟ and „orality‟. It is surely unnecessary to argue that while literacy is
needed to produce written expression, it is not identical with written
expression. While literacy is the ability to read and write, few people
would use „orality‟ in the sense of „ability to speak‟ [Havelock (1982:44)
is an exception; but he uses quotation marks for „orality‟]. „Orality‟ used
thus would cause problems when collocated with „literacy‟, and literate
people are still able to speak. But are they still oral? Perhaps only in the
Below the Written Tip of Translation: 19
second sense; an oral exam, for example, may be one of the most
literate of exercises. „Oral‟ when juxtaposed with „literate‟ may possess a
very different significance from „oral‟ when juxtaposed with „written‟.
„Oral‟ in the first sense led to the fairly recent coining of the term
„orality‟, which reflects an attempt by scholars to break through the
barriers of their literacy in order to appreciate the noetics of those who
do not possess writing. „Illiterate‟ is still a valid term for „nonliterates‟ or
„orals‟(?) in a society aspiring to „universal literacy‟. But the use of „non-
literate‟ or „pre-literate‟ to describe a condition that we might equally as
well describe as „pre-illiterate‟ is an imposition rather like, say, imposing
the rules of English grammar on Malay. For we are studying a different
noetic economy: the oral system. The irony of the situation in which we
find ourselves is that the study of „orality‟ cannot but be a literate
activity, and still cannot be defined except in terms of „literacy‟.
Reference was made above to the use of similar principles of
composition used in both manuscript and stylized oral traditions. A
major shift occurred with the advent of mass education, widespread
print literacy and the growth of a reading public. One might say that in
Malay tradition the move from the chirographic to the typographic
caused a more major shift in modes of composition than did that from
oral to chirographic. Again, one does not easily find clean breaks. As
noted, even in this age of mass literacy, a strong oral orientation still
survives in some areas. And, shifting the significance of „oral‟ in mid-
sentence, we may say that this „oral orientation‟ is found in both written
and oral composition! And in the oral expression of both „orals‟ and
literates. So we are indeed also examining the „orality‟ of literates. I
therefore prefer the term „oral orientation‟.
For our predecessors, the only possible frame of reference was,
on the one hand, writing and print, and on the other the everyday
language of conversation. In such a milieu, it was no easy task even to
become aware of the existence of such an entity as the stylized oral
form, let alone comprehend its significance. The spoken word of
nonstylized discourse was seen as an unwritten, indeed defective, form
of writing. In taking down an oral tale, therefore, the logical procedure
was to have it tidied up and put into an acceptable form. It may perhaps
seem strange that although scholars had certainly heard the stylized form
(e.g., Maxwell 1886), they did not consider it worthy of further
investigation or even recognize it for what it was. The reason is that
20 Amin Sweeney
they equated it with the language of the book. The confusion of these
media is particularly well illustrated by a number of European reports
which clearly confuse the stylized performance of orally composed tales
with the chanted recitation of manuscripts. Newbold (1839,II:327), for
example, speaking of the fondness of the Malays for hearing recited the
Hikayat Hang Tuah, proceeds to describe what has to have been a
penglipur lara performance, where the teller may be heard „relating
portions from memory of these popular romances‟. Indeed, the
confusion persists to this day, as may be seen in Milner (1982:4, 38):
For example (p. 38), “Rulers also had their own storytellers, Penglipor
Lara,57 who read aloud Malay tales to the populace,58” the first
footnote reference being to Skeat‟s mention of the Kedah storyteller,
the second to hikayat reciting in Sumatra as described by Anderson
(1826). On page 4, a very useful reference to the reciting of hikayat in
East Sumatra is provided. But in the next paragraph we are told that
„these storytellers‟ were often wandering minstrels of the type described
by Maxwell, who were oral tellers (Sweeney 1987:82).
The fact that the presentation and consumption of both written
and stylized oral composition appeared—and sounded—so similar to
the uninitiated apparently led some European observers who saw a
teller performing without a text to assume that he had learned it off by
heart.
It may seem an impossible task to learn anything about the
spoken word—let alone translations into it and out of it—prior to the
electronic age: Malay scribes would translate speech only into the
written dialect. Europeans would deal only with the „pure‟ written form.
Yet there were a few loners who provided some brilliant insights. I have
written elsewhere (1987: 102ff.) about the contributions of Marsden
and Clifford. Marsden relates his failed attempts to produce a Malay
pantun. This leads him to ruminate on the speech of Sumatrans in
general with splendid results. Clifford was seemingly writing fiction. Yet
he provides penetrating insights into the Malay speech system of his
time. Oh yes, sorry, this was in English, so we are still on translation!
Clifford was worlds apart from his junior colleagues Brown and
Sheppard, who shunned „isolation‟, which meant no English company.
Clifford clearly thrived on the company of Malays, especially village
people. Indeed he often dressed as a Malay. Sheppard‟s memoirs (1979)
Below the Written Tip of Translation: 21
reveal his envy of Clifford (and dislike of Brown!), but Sheppard could
not emulate him, for Sheppard was a man of but one register.
The insights of Marsden and Clifford are particularly illuminating
for they are focussed upon discourse in general. So many literary
scholars and folklorists have tended to carve out from the domain of
oral societies those forms of speech, such as narrative, which they
perceive to parallel genres of „literature‟. Only by studying the discourse
of a society as a whole do we learn something of the general state of
mind permeating all media. Marsden and Clifford took note particularly
of areas of everyday speech which drew upon the stylized form.
Voorhoeve was many years ahead of his contemporaries in his study of
Sumatran oral traditions and the role of writing in those traditions. One
of his major findings was that the „rhymeless line‟ of the Sumatran tales
is the basic Malay story form. Indeed, these short parallelistic stretches
of utterance are the basic units not merely of narrative, but also of the
kata adat, incantations, and indeed of the pantun, and ultimately, after
literary refinement, of the syair form. Whereas scholars in the past have
seen this „rhythmical verse‟ as „the Malay‟s first essay in poetry‟
(Winstedt 1958:145), it should be noted that the motive was not „poetic‟
in the modern sense. This method of processing speech was a highly
pragmatic way of storing knowledge orally. True, Voorhoeve rues the
neglect of this „poetic‟ form by writers of „classical‟ Malay prose. I do
not accept this negative assessment of that „classical‟ Malay style, which
I consider to be the inevitable result of the development of a written
dialect in the hands of an elite anxious to emphasize the exclusive
nature of its craft. Yet Voorhoeve was writing decades before even the
idea of „orality‟ was conceived.
Voorhoeve was not concerned with cross-medial translation per se
although he was paving the way in that direction. I hold that any
investigation of the development of Malay manuscripture—or indeed
literacy in Malay—must focus upon these basic units. Indeed, in certain
extant texts of traditional (i.e., manuscript) Malay there are indications
of the influence of these units of speech. Examples of such texts are the
Hikayat Raja-raja Pasai and the Silsilah Kutai, in both of which we
encounter instances of the short, mnemonically-patterned stretches of
utterance so typical of oral style. Kern provides some extremely helpful
observations. He notes the occurrence of a considerable number of
„short rhythmical passages‟ of „stereotyped descriptions‟, which alternate
22 Amin Sweeney
with the prose parts of the work but are not distinguished from them
by the format. Even more importantly, from his examples we are able
to see how with writing, the original rhythms begin to break down, the
only parts able to preserve their form somewhat longer being the
relatively fixed runs. Yet while I have argued that some degree of
mnemonic patterning was still needed in aurally consumed writing, the
strong patterning of the orally composed tales, found especially in these
runs, was no longer functional for preserving the text. Clearly, we are
observing here what should be an entirely expected feature: the
transition from an oral to a written style. Kern, however, did not see
these developments in such terms. For him, as for so many other
European scholars, this was no development, but „rather a
retrogression‟; the language was being „corrupted‟. Yet if we apply the
logic of this view to Europe, we would still be communicating
significant knowledge in „rough rugged‟ verses akin to those of
Beowulf.12
The morass in which an orthodox philologist may find himself
when he rigidly applies his methods to a work in the schematically
composed Malay tradition is seen in the study of the Hikayat Seri Rama
carried out by Zieseniss (1963), whose conclusions are accepted by
Winstedt. After comparing the Shellabear and Roorda van Eysinga
versions in his translation summary, he becomes aware that the work will
not yield to the tools of the philologist in search of an archetype. He
notes a close relationship between the two versions, but is stymied by
the contradictions and other differences, and forced to conclude that
the two versions „can only have arisen by means of oral tradition‟ from
„the same original source‟ and that „this original Ro[orda] + Sh[ellabear]
version cannot, as the contradictions show, have possessed a clearly
defined form‟ (1963:180). However, a comparison of the many passages
in the two versions with almost identical wording reveals that these
similarities are typical of a written style, and that the relationship can
only have been chirographically controlled. The two versions are the
product of schematically creative copying of an earlier version or
versions, some of which is preserved in both versions. It is not
12 See further Sweeney 1987:112ff. for a much more detailed treatment of
Voorhoeve‟s and Kern‟s contributions. With regard to a question raised in the
proposal as to why there were no translations into Batak, see ibid, where views
advanced by Voorhoeve relevant to this question are addressed.
Below the Written Tip of Translation: 23
necessary to resort to a primary oral tradition in order to find the causes
of a lack of „clearly defined form‟.
We see from Zieseniss‟s postulation to the effect that two
manuscripts sharing many identical passages could have derived from
an oral archetype that his understanding of „oral tradition‟ was
extremely vague. As is natural for literates in whose thought processes
writing is fully interiorized, Zieseniss could view oral composition only
in terms of writing. For him, the oral archetype was a sort of unwritten
writing: it was fixed in form and clearly indistinguishable from written
language. Yet in oral tradition, the idea of a fixed text of such length is
alien; where relatively fixed passages occur, they are highly stylized,
possessing strongly emphasized mnemonic patterns. But, as I have
stressed ad nauseam, this tendency to view oral composition in terms of
our literary schemata is even reflected in the use of the term „oral
literature‟.13
A similar appeal to oral tradition is made by Teeuw (1964) in
order to suggest a possible explanation of the similarity between parts
of the Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai and the Sejarah Melayu. Yet these
similarities can only be the result of chirographic control. The wording
is too close—especially as the degree of mnemonic patterning is low—
for such passages to have been transmitted orally (Sweeney 1967,
1987:31).
However, it should not be imagined that confronting a
mnemonically-patterned text will necessarily nudge the philologist into
considering the possibilities of oral composition or schematically-
created written composition employing oral principles. In 1979 and
1980, Drewes published the texts and translations of three Acehnese
poems. The first, Potjut Muhamat, was, he decided, an epic. He observed
the considerable difference in wording among manuscripts.
This situation….affords a clear insight into the genesis of
Achehnese epics…after they had been committed to writing.
One may safely assume that none of the manuscripts contains
the text of the epic as recited by the poet himself. Moreover, a
poem of this length must have taxed the poet‟s memory to a
high degree. Slips and variations were hardly unavoidable, so that
from the very beginning the text was not an unvarying quantity.
13 See further Sweeney 1987:30ff.
24 Amin Sweeney
But the poet somehow parted with his copyright when his text
was written down and put into circulation. In the circumstances,
owing to this very circulation, a final version was prevented from
coming into being (1979:6-7).
Here we have a prime example of scholarship comfortably insulated
from the intellectual mainstream of the late twentieth century when the
book appeared. By that time, the Parry-Lord approach had been tested
on all manner of material—commencing with „epic‟—world-wide. I,
too, had contributed a variety of materials from my research on oral
tradition and composition in the Malay peninsula. Indeed, it had
become clear to me that the principles of composition perceived by
Lord as the hall-mark of oral (as in nonliterate) composition were also
employed in written composition of the Malay manuscript tradition
when the intended audience was still aural. Drewes was seemingly
oblivious of all this; he was still mired in conventional wisdom long
demolished; his observations were based on no evidence; there was no
argument.
For Drewes, the poets of Acehnese „epic‟ were, with a single
exception, highly literate. Of one group, he tells us that they „were
persons of a higher educational level than the average person‟. They
composed their epic poems without recourse to writing, and then
recited them by heart. A minor spanner in these works was that one of
the poets lacked this high educational level: “He was illiterate but his
profession required that he have a great command of language…” (My
italics). So, the implied conclusions waiting to be drawn can be only the
following: prior to being committed to writing, these epics were a prime
example of unwritten writing, created by people whose whole life was
writing, but who, for reasons known only to Drewes, decided to
compete for the Guinness Book of Epic by demonstrating their literary
skills without writing a word in a feat of memory unprecedented.
The strong point of Drewes‟s two books of translations from
Acehnese is that they provide a wealth of information. The weak point
is that Drewes does not profit from it. The three works he translates
employ the same poetic metre. He sees „feet‟ and the „iambic‟ where I
am hearing Voorhoeve‟s perceptions on the basic line of Sumatran
poetry. The works all reveal the pull of what Lord would term „oral-
formulaic‟ composition. Not a word about this from Drewes. To the
contrary, the formulas and formulaic expressions of his originals are
Below the Written Tip of Translation: 25
hidden in the translations, and his English gives us print-literacy variety
where the Acehnese gives us the subtle repetitions of word music. If
the translator is consciously endeavouring simply to produce a
comfortably readable English translation, one cannot complain. But
one might then expect a word or two about the composition of the
original in his introduction.
For example, in the Hikajat Ranto, the insertion of a piece of
„poetry‟ (Genre? The whole „epic‟ is poetry) is signalled by the
following:
Djeunoë lên bêh saboh sa‟é, (line 270)
and Bahkeu lên bêh saboh sa‟é, (line 375)
or, in inverted order Lên bêh djeunoë saboh sa‟é, (line 67)
and Lên bêh tamsé saboh sa‟é, (line 383).
None of the formulaic flavour of this comes through in translation.
Note also that the word beutapiké in Beutapiké adoë radja (line 270) and in
Beutapiké wahé adoë (lines 375 & 383) is translated respectively as „think it
over‟ and „reflect on/upon these‟. And adoë, in the two instances of
Beutapiké wahé adoë (lines 375 & 383), is translated respectively as „my
younger brothers and sisters‟, and „young people‟. And what happened
to radja in adoë radja?
The texts of the Hikayat Ranto and the Hikajat Teungku di Meuké‟
present themselves as written composition. Note, for example, the
references in both to the use of paper and ink. Although both texts
reveal formulaic composition, this need not be taken as an indication
that the texts were orally composed. Furthermore, while the Hikayat
Potjut Muhamat is perceived by Drewes as originally some form of
recited unwritten writing, parts of this work, too, were composed in
writing. Drewes speaks of manuscripts „prepared‟ (?) by Snouck-
Hurgronje‟s clerk for the use of Snouck and Drewes himself: “To a
copy of a MS. of 1900 lines that he prepared for my use he added no
less than 1231…” “MS. C numbers 2711 lines, to which, in my copy, T.
Muh. Nurdin has added 89 lines. I have incorporated most of them into
the text printed below….The final lines contain only the usual request
for the reader‟s indulgence.” (my italics). Hello?
Here we see a tantalizing but lost opportunity to examine the
interaction between oral and written composition. There was apparently
26 Amin Sweeney
no need for the scholar to get out and listen. Even if no „epics‟ were
available, an investigation into various other genres of stylized oral
composition in performance would have revealed much about the
mental set informing the „epic‟. It may be that the cross-medial
adaptation of stylized composition in Aceh resembled the situation in
Minangkabau: when the kaba was written, it often retained its verse
form and idiom. This was very different from the practice of Malay
court scribes who converted stylized verse form into the exclusive
prose idiom so roundly condemned by Voorhoeve and Kern. Indeed,
this is the case also of Malay prose originating from Pasai, as we see
from the Hikayat Raja-raja Pasai. Of course, Malay court writers were
consummate producers of schematic composition using the principles
associated with oral formulaic composition, but again, this idiom was
exclusive to the written dialect. The pantun remained the only genre
produced both orally and in writing in a common idiom.
The best-known material resulting from cross-medial translation
is that referred to as „folk literature‟, produced under colonial aegis. I
have written extensively on this subject—it may seem interminably—
and I shall not initiate a rerun here. Suffice it to say that the materials
adapted into writing from the stylized form took a circuitous route, as
they were dictated in everyday speech, the only material surviving
unscathed in the written texts being a number of relatively fixed runs.
Thus, the process of adapting both stylized and non-stylized oral
material into writing followed the same pattern, for no adaptations were
made directly from performances in the stylized form. Despite the
names of British „editors‟ attached to the published editions, the actual
work was undertaken by Malay writers, who sensibly converted their
materials into conventional hikayat. Despite his wide-ranging claims,
Winstedt had little hand in this work, as was noted as early as 1956 by
Kern (Sweeney 1987:89). But it is time for one more quote:
The similarities between the oral folktale (penglipur lara) and the
literary romance have long been noted, although it should
perhaps be mentioned that most scholars were conversant only
with the written adaptations of the oral tales produced under the
auspices of the British (Sweeney 1973). Hooykaas (1947:120)
found that the penglipur lara tale and the literary romance merged
into each other, and that it was difficult to distinguish between
them. Winstedt (1923:29) remarks that „structurally‟ the penglipur
Below the Written Tip of Translation: 27
lara tales „have the outline and machinery of all Malay romance‟,
although in the same paragraph he paradoxically describes the
former as the „cream of Malay literature‟, while the literary
romance is „tedious and a slavish copy of Indian models‟. As we
have seen, this similarity is to be explained by the fact that, in
spite of the different media involved, both the oral and literary
forms were created with the methods of schematic composition
for a listening audience (Sweeney 1987:93)
The „cream‟ was those „metrical passages‟ which Winstedt wrongly
imagined were poetic islands in a sea of ungrammatical prose. Those
passages were runs; the whole tale was performed in the same „metre‟.
Winstedt‟s view became the conventional wisdom for decades.
Scholars thus knew the „oral folktale‟ only after it had been
converted into a written hikayat! There was not much to distinguish the
two forms, apart from the runs. If one wonders why Malay scribes did
not convert the stylized „oral folktale‟ into the „literary romance‟ prior to
the colonial period, the possible answer is a) perhaps they did. The
preserving of runs seems to have been on British initiative; b) why
would they need to? They had all the materials and techniques needed
to whip up a fine hikayat for a listening audience without having to dig
out a teller. What could he do that they could not? And he did not use
their idiom.
Soon after independence, the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka embarked
on an impressive programme of recording oral tradition. A number of
these tales were transformed into literature and published in book form.
The process of transforming the tales recorded both in everyday speech
and in the stylized form initially followed the model employed by the
scribes working on the penglipur lara tales at the turn of the century
under British aegis. But there were differences: there was no longer any
necessity for the „scribe‟ even to meet the teller; the telling was now
electronically fixed and could be repeated ad infinitum. Secondly, while
the scribes working for the British had been transforming the tales into
the written style of their day, the writers of the sixties were, consciously
or otherwise, emulating the „classical‟ Malay of those old scribes, even
though this was the idiom of neither the tellers nor the writers. We
might call this process „retraditionalizing‟ the traditional. For the tales to
be recognized as traditional, they had to be clad in traditional literary
garb. The writers did not seem to be overly impressed. Judged as
28 Amin Sweeney
literature, they felt, these tales left much to be desired. Official
forewords would emphasize the richness and vast scope of the heritage
which had to be unearthed and preserved. Editors, however, often
stress how easy it is to find fault with these tales, noting how
unfortunate it is that they have lost their original qualities, pointing to
errors and changes from „correct‟ speech, observing that the tales are
„all the same‟, and finding that, as the tellers are concerned „merely‟ with
entertaining their listeners, they pay little attention to content or plot.14
Winstedt was still not exorcised.
The pioneer effort of the Dewan in the field of professional
storytelling was Selampit, published in 1959, a tale derived from the
performances of Mat Nor, from Kelantan. The recording, said to be of
a very abbreviated rendering, has been reworked by two hands into „the
form of written literature‟, and almost nothing remains of the original
idiom. The Tarik Selampit does not employ the widely known „metrical
passages‟. Yet in the literary reworking, the model of printing
„rhythmical prose‟ or runs in short lines has been applied to all the
dialogue, which is thus presented in the format of blank verse and
employing an idiom reminiscent of the syair form of poetry. Indeed, on
occasion, a syair rhyme is introduced:
Ayohai adinda Intan Baiduri,
Penawar dendam, penglipur hati
Lamanya kakanda tidak memandang wajah adinda suri
Rindu kakanda tidak terperi.
All this is the work of the writers working for the Dewan. Occasionally,
some of the original idiom comes through, as in the italicized portion of
the following:
Salah seorang dari kita tiada tewas;
Marilah kita mengadu kesaktian di bumi
Di padang luas saujana,
Padang di jalan empat bercabang tiga
14 See, for example, the introductions to the three books published on Kelantan Tarik
Selampit: Cerita Selampit, Cerita Raja Dera and Cerita Si Gembang. The issues addressed
here are treated at length in Sweeney 1994a.
Below the Written Tip of Translation: 29
but the shape and rhythm, and meaning of the original Tarik Selampit
formula—padang luas saujana padang; di jalan empat bercabang tiga15—has
been lost. Hardly a trace remains of Kelantan idiom
These remarks on the Tarik Selampit are a little potted ponti-
fication from my book Malay Word Music. They are not intended to do
justice to the work of adapting this oral material into literature, for I
have discussed those issues there and elsewhere at inordinate and
profligate length. They are presented purely as background for what
follows.
In a book entitled Tasawuf dan Sastra Melayu; kajian dan teks-teks,
Vladimir Braginsky (1993:66-67) writes:
Di samping itu kita pun tidak bisa mengabaikan bentuk rima
yang bersinambung pada seluruh empat larik dalam setiap stanza.
Jika kita sejurus melepaskan diri dari definisi Hamzah tentang
syair, barangkali kita akan mengenal prototipenya dalam salah
satu bentuk lisan Melayu. Inilah yang disebut puisi-puisi tirade,
dalam mana rima-rima atau asonansi-asonansi yang bersinam-
bung menyatukan larik-larik dalam kelompok-kelompok yang tak
sama panjangnya. Puisi semacam ini mengingatkan kita kepada
tirade-tirade dalam epos Perancis atau Turki Kuno (sebenarnya saj‟
Qur‟an itu pun merupakan sajak tirade. Sajak-sajak tirade dikenal
oleh banyak tradisi puisi rakyat Nusantara…, termasuk rakyat
Melayu yang melestarikannya dalam cangriman, nyanyian, dan
terutama dalam epos-epos lisan di Semenanjung Malaka. Di
bawah ini sebuah contoh dari epos Kelantan, Cerita Selampit:
Ayohai anakanda buah hati pengarang limpa
Adakah anakanda kekurangan (apa) apa?
Menyebabkan runsing duka nestapa
Atau adakah (sesuatu) keinginan anakanda
Berkhabar benarlah kepada ayahanda
Ampun ayahanda beribu ampun
Tiada kekurangan suatu apa pun
Melainkan anakanda puhun
Kasehan belas dan limpah kurnia
Ayahanda melarang Wa‟ yang menjual bunga
Berjaja di pekan pesara
15 The wide plain, the plain farscaping, at the four-roads-three-forks.‟
30 Amin Sweeney
Melainkan hendaklah dibawa jual dalam istana
(Cherita Selampit: 24).
Braginsky (1993:66-67) (Italics are Braginsky)
This has to be the jewel in the crown of cross-medial confusion:
Braginsky mistakes the literary adaptation for the oral original. None of
the material addressed by Braginsky came from a storyteller! It was all
produced by an editor employed by the Dewan. Indeed, the editors
acknowledge that they adapted their raw material into the form of
written literature. The „oral‟ form which attracts Braginsky‟s attention as
a possible prototype for the syair form is not oral and dates only from
1959. One notes also that, consciously or not, he has „improved‟ his
text, nudging its metre and rhyme to produce a better syair. The text of
the book reads pohon; it has been changed to puhun! Words I have
placed in parentheses are discarded in Braginsky‟s version. Braginsky‟s
facile dubbing the Selampit tale an epos and particularly his
pronouncement that „It is this which is called tirade poetry‟ take us back
into a hoary colonial world of universalizing categories. When he writes
„this is called tirade‟, he does not mean just by him; rather, that is what
it is, in terms of absolute truth.16 From the passage above, it is clear that
he equates the „tirade‟ composed by the Dewan‟s editors with those
metrical islands preserved in seas of prose published by the British in
colonial times. As noted above, the Dewan‟s editors were also seeking a
similar format, which is why they printed all the dialogue in short lines!
And Braginsky‟s earlier work revealed that he relied only on the colonial
wisdom, which was unaware of the structure and presentation of those
penglipur lara tales.
In order to illustrate the stark contrast between the idiom of the
literary version and that of oral composition in performance, I shall
translate the first seven lines of Braginsky‟s excerpt back into the
Kelantanese style of Mat Nor, the original teller. I also append a
translation into English. As the style of the translation may strike stray
readers as dangerously eccentric, I would refer them to my Malay Word
Music, which translates a whole tale in similar fashion, providing,
however, a long and incontrovertibly sane rationale!
16 Compare this with a sentence (1987:295) I wrote about the tendencies of Malay
students: “when they wrote: „Ini disebut katalis‟ („This is called a catalyst‟), they did
not mean „called‟ just by me; rather, that is what it is, in terms of absolute truth.
Below the Written Tip of Translation: 31
“Aya nik pada.a ayah ga..a‟. Guana nik duduk dengan hati
kerunsingan, ~~ dengan hati kesusahan? Kurang nasi makan
minum, ~~ kurang tepung kendung, sumba mala, sutera laka,
kain bajukah, nik dalam istana, nik? Royat ke ayah, nik.” „Ya saya
sembah ayah. Harap ke ampun beribu ampun, ~~ maaf beribu
maaf, ampun bersusun maaf bertalu pada saya. ~~ Tidak kurang
nasi makan minum, tak kurang tepung kendung, sumba mala,
sutera laka, kain baju, bunga canga, minyak celak, ~~ dengan
bedak boreh saya siap, ayah, dalam istana dengan bedak halus,
bedak kasar.17
„O say nik o.of mine. Why are you with a heart in dejection ~~
with a heart in depression. A lack of rice? Not enough to eat and
drink, ~~ a lack of sweetmeats and treats, blossoms and
blushes, tinctures and tints, silks and twilks, sarongs and jackets,
nik, in the palace? Tell father, nik.” „Yes, I pay obeisance, father.
Hoping for pardon a thousand pardons, ~~ forgiveness a
thousand fold; pardon heaped upon forgiveness pour constantly
upon me. ~~ There is no lack of rice; enough to eat and drink;
no lack of sweetmeats and treats, blossoms and blushes, tinctures
and tints, silks and twilks, sarongs and jackets, flowers and
florals, oils and kohls, ~~ together with powders and pastes
prepared in the palace, father, in the palace, with powders fine
and powders coarse.”
The thought crossed my mind as I addressed the issue of tirades
that there may be those rapidly inclining to the view that the only tirade
in sight is this paper I am writing. Alas, that is not my intention. Yet I
seem to have spent much more time and space taking issue with the
work of some scholars than praising the work of others. This should be
seen in the context of the niche I have chosen for this paper: cross-
medial transposition and interpretation. Outside that context, Clifford,
for example, who merits great appreciation in the niche, is not in the
league of scholars such as Drewes and Hooykaas. Van Ronkel‟s ship-
board mishap demonstrates the importance of firsthand exposure to
the cultures we study. Some scholars excel as all-rounders. Marsden and
Voorhoeve come to mind. Outside my chosen niche, Braginsky is a
prodigy of erudition and an unusually innovative thinker. And Brown?
17 The symbol „~~‟ indicates rebab accompaniment.
32 Amin Sweeney
Well he continued playing golf in Singapore during the Japanese
bombings, asking only whether the bomb craters should be counted as
fair obstacles.
Perhaps that last paragraph will save me from being lumped
together with the scholar who dared to criticize Pigeaud in a review.
For Sang Hyang Hooykaas, always so gently immoderate, responded to
that review in the most delightfully acerbic tone. He denounced the
critic of Pigeaud as resembling a dog who lifts its hind-leg outside the
temple gate.
Perhaps some literary critics are failed novelists or poets. They
should sure as hell not be failed writers! In the field of rhetoric, I have
noticed that accomplished rhetoricians are not always effective rhetors:
they may be brilliant at interpreting the texts of others: they can tell us
exactly who is really saying what to whom, how and why. Yet when
they themselves write, they are focussed only upon the rhetoric of the
text addressed, unselfconsciously blind to their own rhetoric, unaware
of the ethos they are giving themselves and the reader they are creating.
Effective logic may not convince; effective rhetoric does. An example
of an accomplished rhetorician who is also a highly effective rhetor is
Clifford Geertz—some mean souls might even say vastly more effective
than as an anthropologist. His book Works and Lives is a rhetorical
interpretation of the works of selected anthropologists. Geertz‟s own
rhetoric is, as always, immaculate.
All that was to argue that those who would write a history of
translation should have done some translating themselves! The equiv-
alent is not that of a fine literary critic who cannot write poetry; it is
rather that of a rhetorician who cannot write. Writing about translation
into Indonesian languages would seem to demand ability to cross the
cultural border textually in comfort to or from the target language. Only
then is cultural translation possible. The whole point of this paper is to
argue that effective translation can be accomplished only if one adopts
a holistic approach: even though one‟s concern may be purely textual, it
is vital to bear in mind that the text functioned in interaction with other
media. Some attention to the nature of those media may provide the
key to understanding basic aspects of the text itself. Such an approach
may reveal, for example, the reasons why chanters of old Jawi texts in
Lombok stressed that the only texts they could chant were written in
Jawi. Likewise, sensitivity to the ways the texts are chanted may reveal
Below the Written Tip of Translation: 33
how sentence structure is influenced by the necessity to give breathing
spaces to the chanter.
However, first things first. In this article I chose rather to look at
some cross-medial encounters. The article also addresses the common
confusion between the oral and the written by those unfamiliar with the
oral. It considers the rhetorical thrust of „non-translation‟, which ranges
from Old-Javanese through spirit seances to the marketing of light
bulbs. It demonstrates the pitfalls awaiting the philologist who treats his
text in a vacuum. In the past thirty odd years, it has become fashionable
to appeal to the oral-aural nature of Malay literature. All too often these
appeals merely involve quoting from others‟ works, without a bridge of
argument and no actual research on Malay oral tradition, no attempt to
hear the Malay situation. This seems the right moment to leave our
metaphoric iceberg. There‟s a whole Malay World out there, and it‟s
much warmer than on the written tip of a noetic iceberg.
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Appendix on TV subtitles
While labouring to finish this paper, I found myself in front of the
television. Yes, reading subtitles. In just a couple of hours, I reaped the
following:
The character said: The subtitle read: The translator’s problem:
Unspeakable conditions kondisi yang rahasia „Unspeakable‟ thought to mean „secret.‟
I need an heir Aku perlukan udara „Heir‟ confused with „air.‟
This is a nice whore Ini lubang yang menyenangkan „Whore‟ confused with „hole.‟
Emperor of the night Kaiser kesatria „Night‟ confused with „knight.‟
And their child brides Mereka melahirkan anak „Brides‟ confused with „birth?‟
You‟ve got more balls Lagi pula botakmu lebih besar „Balls‟ confused with „bald‟.
than all the cops I‟ve dari semua polisi yang kutemui
met
Below the Written Tip of Translation: 37