Thresholds of Interpretation on the Threshold of Change: Paratexts in Late 19th-century Javanese Manuscripts

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 fijinal decades of the nineteenth century and fijirst 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

What Happens When you Really Listen: On Translating the Old Javanese Ramayana; Ramayana Kakawin, Sargah 26, Translation and Essay

Page range: 1-30A translation of the final canto (sargah) of the Old Javanese Ramayana, composed circa the ninth century AD and based in part on a Sanskrit telling, which was creatively adapted on Java. The translation is accompanied by an essay which explores several of the canto’s themes as well as the experience of translating a story from so distant a time and place

Reading between the Lines: A World of Interlinear Translation

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

Citing as a site: Translation and circulation in Muslim South and Southeast Asia

Networks of travel and trade have often been viewed as central to understanding interactions among Muslims across South and Southeast Asia. In this paper I suggest that we consider language and literature as an additional type of network, one that provided a powerful site of contact and exchange facilitated by, and drawing on, citation. I draw on textual sources written in Javanese, Malay, and Tamil between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries to argue that among Muslim communities in South and Southeast Asia, practices of reading, learning, translating, adapting, and transmitting contributed to the shaping of a cosmopolitan sphere that was both closely connected with the broader, universal Muslim community and rooted in local identities. I consider a series of 'citation sites' in an attempt to explore one among many modes of inter-Asian connections, highlighting how citations, simple or brief as they may often seem, are sites of shared memories, history, and narrative traditions and, in the case of Islamic literature, also sites of a common bond to a cosmopolitan and sanctified Arabic