Activist Translation: Interpretations and Reinventions of the Latin American “Boom” in Indonesia

During the Indonesian anti-authoritarian student movement of the 1980s and 1990s, Indonesian translations of Brazilian social theory and Spanish-language literary texts associated with the Latin American “Boom” circulated across Java and Jakarta. These translations were inspired by perceived parallels between Indonesia’s authoritarian state and rightwing military dictatorships in South America (e.g., Brazil, Chile, Argentina), and they were frequently distributed underground, printed serially in newspapers or published by small-scale independent presses associated with the student movement. In this talk, I propose that these materials can be understood as activist translations, in which the processes of translating, publishing, distributing, and reading a foreign text is embedded in a larger project for social change. I argue that Indonesian translators engaged Latin American texts as part of a fugitive world literature: though they spoke no Spanish or Portuguese and relied on existing English translations, translators advanced interpretations of source texts that were grounded in Indonesian political concerns, and specifically in a desire to revive practices of social commitment in the arts under conditions of authoritarianism. Although such activist translations were ephemeral, I show that they nevertheless continued to influence how Indonesian authors grappled with narrating histories of state violence at the turn of the twenty-first century. Finally, I conclude the talk by speaking to how these transnational and intertextual histories factor into my own creative process as a literary translator, and specifically to my experiences translating contemporary Indonesian narratives of dictatorship violence into English.

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Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies

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