Found in translation

In 1986 the king of Thailand gave an award to Indonesian poet Sapardi Djoko Damono for his contributions to Indonesia’s literature. Damono, in turn, wanted to hand out some of his verse when he accepted the award in Bangkok. The only problem was Damono’s work had never been translated into another language. So the poet asked his friend John McGlynn to prepare a selection in English, the lingua franca of Southeast Asia.

For McGlynn, an American translator living in Jakarta, it was a flashback to when he started studying the Indonesian language in college a decade earlier.

“It was ridiculous,” he says. “I had studied Japanese and Chinese literature in translation, but for Indonesian there were less than five books in translation.”

McGlynn, finally, decided to change that. Along with Damono and several other Indonesian writers, McGlynn formed an organization to translate and promote the largely unknown literature from the world’s fourth most populous nation.

In 1988 the Lontar Foundation was born; its first publication was a collection of Damono’s work called “Suddenly the Night.”

Since then the foundation has published scores of books and branched out into documenting some of the archipelago’s cultural traditions, such as regional theater and dance, which are threatened by the irresistible pull of globalization.

“Until Lontar was established, people abroad didn’t look at Indonesian literature as literature,” McGlynn says. “Whenever Indonesia appears in a newspaper it’s because of a disaster. I wanted to create a more accurate picture. Not necessarily a better picture but a more balanced one.”

Professor Hendrik Maier, an expert on Malay literature who teaches in the new Southeast Asian studies program at UC Riverside, agrees that the foundation has made the study of Indonesian writing possible in the English-speaking world.

“Lontar made a lot of things accessible in good translations,” he says. “At last we have these books in English. It’s also good for the self-confidence of the Indonesians; they’re proud that they get their place in the world.”

Indonesia is one of the world’s largest countries, but it’s also a relatively young one. When the Indonesian republic was born in 1949, after three centuries of Dutch colonialism, language was one forge of nationalism. The new country stretched from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific, encompassing 17,000 islands. The archipelago was also a riot of languages with some 300 tongues spoken. The literary tradition was more oral than written, everything from the spoken word epics of the Kalimantan Dayaks in Borneo to Javanese court songs.

The new government declared Bahasa Indonesia (a dialect of Malay) the national language.

“Indonesia owes its identity to the Indonesian language,” says novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, whose memoir “The Mute’s Soliloquy” was published here by Lontar in English.

*

‘Passion for Indonesia’

Toer is Indonesia’s best-known writer, a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize, who published his first book in 1950. Yet it wasn’t until 40 years later that his work began to appear in English in the U.S. (Hyperion East, an imprint that specializes in Asian books, is Toer’s American publisher.)

Toer, whose family’s first language was Javanese, was one of the first major authors to write in Indonesian. Even today, only seven of the 30 books he has written have been released in the U.S.

“A translated book,” he says, “is more important than a diplomat.”

McGlynn concurs.

“Before Lontar there was no possibility of teaching Indonesia literature abroad, of finding out aspects of Indonesian culture beyond politics or economics,” he says. “I want people to understand the Indonesia I care about. My passion is for Indonesia more than Indonesian literature, but I do feel that only through arts and culture can you understand another culture.”

It was puppets, not books, that first brought McGlynn here.

A theater major from the University of Wisconsin, McGlynn came to Indonesia in 1976 to study wayang kulit, the famous shadow puppet theater. He had begun studying the language in Wisconsin and continued at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta. His interest in puppets waned as he began to learn about the country’s literature.

“At first, literature was only a tool to learn the language,” he says. “I asked my professor to set up a course to study Indonesian literature. I was the only student. I wasn’t truly viewing it as literature. I wanted a greater understanding of the culture. Then I found a lot of gems. It was only after a few years that I got a calling, a mission.”

McGlynn returned to the U.S. long enough to earn a master’s at the University of Michigan in 1981. “I think it was the first degree in Indonesian literature in the U.S.,” he says.

Over the last two decades some 20 American universities have added the teaching of Indonesian literature, usually under the auspices of Southeast Asian studies (the topic is more popular in Australia).

The idea for Lontar, McGlynn says, came from an Indian organization called the Seagull Foundation that was formed in 1987 to promote South Asian arts. The name Lontar refers to the palm-leaf manuscripts that record the archipelago’s oldest writing.

For the first several years, McGlynn and the other staff worked for free. McGlynn earned his living by translating Indonesian economic journals into English.

Today, Lontar employs 25 people, has its own website (www.lontar.org) and operates on an annual budget of about $100,000. McGlynn is the director of publications.

About a third of the foundation’s revenue comes from publishing, another third from the sale of note cards and calendar reproductions of beautiful illustrated manuscripts. The rest comes from donors such as the Ford Foundation and the Luce Foundation.

*

A literature’s status at home

Even in Indonesia the country’s literature is not exactly a priority. “English is a mandatory subject in school,” McGlynn says. “Indonesian literature is not.”

Lontar Executive Director Adila Suwarno hopes to change that, eventually. “I’m Indonesian, but I’m disappointed there are not many Indonesians that realize how important it is to preserve our culture,” she says. “But I understand that. A country like ours has to feed and house people first. It’s easier to collect funding for poverty. This is too sophisticated.”

Lontar has published 40 books. The titles don’t exactly have bestseller written all over them: There’s a four-volume history of Indonesian theater, a six-volume collection of Javanese literature, an oral history from survivors of the bloody anti-communist purge of the 1960s, the first history of Indonesian cinema and a boxed set of bilingual theater texts. After Sept. 11, Lontar put out a volume called “Manhattan Sonnet,” which featured prose and poetry by 24 Indonesian writers who had lived in New York or traveled in the U.S.

“We want to distribute more aggressively to schools around the world,” Suwarno says. “Our educational system is terrible. In our small world we need information for Indonesian students.”

Lontar is also preserving other aspects of the country’s culture with a series of films, ranging from interviews with writers such as Toer and Damono to Balinese shadow puppet performances. The foundation also houses a library stuffed with rare books, old photographs, slides of manuscripts and performances.

“Our mission is to promote Indonesia through literature,” Suwarno says. “I really hope we become one of the biggest libraries of information in Indonesia that everyone will be able to access. It’s a long-term project.”

McGlynn says the foundation’s goal is to publish a library of 100 key books. “Whether that will ever happen I don’t know,” he says. “We have a lot of plans but not the personnel or endowment.”

Part of McGlynn’s plan is to raise a $1-million endowment to keep the foundation afloat. “We want to run it like a professional publishing company,” he says. “I just want to be on the board. I’ve done it for love. I don’t expect anyone who replaces me to do that.”