The Lontar Foundation was launched in 1987 to raise the profile of Indonesian literature worldwide, initially intending to translate Indonesian fiction into English for publishers. Largely through necessity, however, the foundation has since become a publisher in its own right. Founded by John McGlynn and Indonesian authors Sapardi Djoko Damono, Goenawan Mohamad, Subagio Sastrowardoyo, and Umar Kayam, Lontar has since, to date, published works from over six hundred and fifty Indonesian authors in English, providing vital contributions that trace the country’s complex cultural and literary developments. In this interview, McGlynn speaks on his interest in Indonesia, the importance of Lontar’s work, and the challenges faced by Indonesian literature both at home and abroad.
Sarah Gear (SG): How did you first become interested in Indonesian literature?
John McGlynn (JM): It all began with wayang—Javanese shadow puppets. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, from 1970 to 1972, I was a combined art-design-theatre major and had begun to create shadow puppets depicting characters from Western literary texts. I was participating in protests against the Vietnam War and my characters told the struggle of a small nation against a powerful aggressor. The problem was that while I was able to craft these new shadow puppets, I had no idea how to operate them. After a summer course at the University of Washington in Seattle, where I studied shadow puppetry technique with a Javanese dalang (shadow master), I transferred to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the centers for Indonesian Studies in the United States. In the span of the next two years, I took an array of other courses relating to Indonesia, including a mentorship in Indonesian literature.
I then left for Indonesia in May 1976, on a three-month scholarship to study advanced Indonesian. That trip, which ended up lasting until December 1978, was an intensive cultural immersion process, during which my primary language was Indonesian. I traveled extensively in Sumatra and Java, studied language and literature at the University of Indonesia, served as an assistant to renowned linguist and translation theoretician Ian Catford, and worked as a translator for a number of Indonesian institutions.
I was spending most of my free nights at the Jakarta Arts Center, or Taman Ismail Marzuki (TIM), as a spectator to plays, poetry readings, and cultural discussions. At TIM, I came to know numerous prominent Indonesian authors, a number of whom then asked me to translate their work. I was collecting and reading all the literary texts I could get a hold of and had begun to translate numerous Indonesian short stories, and several novels as well; all this led me to pursue a Master’s degree in Indonesian literature at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, which I did from January 1979 to May 1981.
SG: You launched the Lontar Foundation in 1987. Can you tell me how this came about, and what the main aims of the Foundation are?
JM: In college I had been able to study the cultures of Japan, China, India, and other countries through literary translations, but such was not the case with Indonesia. In 1974, when I first began to study Indonesian at the University of Wisconsin Madison, its library of six million titles contained only a handful related to Indonesian literature.
Progress in the introduction of Indonesian literature to the international public was slow, dependent as it was on the initiative of individual translators—“single fighters,” I call them. Largely published by small Asia-based publishers, few garnered much recognition outside Indonesianist circles. By the early 1980s I, too, had a growing number of published translations to my name, but most were published by academic presses and attracted little mainstream attention. Unable to count the number of rejection slips from publishers to whom I sent submissions, I began to see that if Indonesia were to ever gain a foothold on the international literary stage, something had to change. A different approach was necessary—I just didn’t know what.
A dual epiphany came in 1986, when Mobile Oil Indonesia awarded me funding for the translation of And the War is Over (Dan Perang pun Usai), a novel by Ismail Marahimin, and then later, the Jayakarta Foundation provided funding for my translation of a poetry collection by Sapardi Djoko Damono—that year’s Indonesian recipient of the SEA Write Award (from the Kingdom of Thailand). Institutional support, I suddenly realized, would be the key to publishing a steady stream of Indonesian literary translations.
I discussed the idea of establishing a foundation for the translation of Indonesian literature with Sapardi, my former teacher and friend, who agreed with my plan and called on three other authors—Goenawan Mohamad, Subagio Sastrowardoyo, and Umar Kayam—to join forces in this venture. Lontar, the name we chose for the foundation, was officially established on October 28, 1987.
The basic idea behind the foundation was to balance the negative picture abroad through the production of Indonesian literary translations. Originally, we did not intend Lontar to be a publishing house; we hoped only to produce literary translations which would then be published by commercial publishers. This hope was soon squashed when I came to see that commercial publishers—for obvious reasons, to give them due benefit of the doubt—need to make a profit from sales, and that most of them are not in the business—and it is a business!—not only for idealistic reasons.
SG: What are the principal challenges of working within the Indonesian literary landscape? Is it difficult to bring attention to Indonesian literature in the global literary market? How does Lontar’s work address these issues?
JM: At the international level, I believe it is a general lack of knowledge about Indonesian history and culture that forms the principal challenge to the introduction of Indonesian literature abroad. Then, too, there is the capitalistic raison d’être of most publishing houses and their Western-biased attitude. At home, in Indonesia, a profound systemic challenge is the lack of emphasis on literature in educational curricula, which is the source of a plethora of challenges in the country’s publishing industry, including the lack of respect for editors and all those other wordsmiths who help to turn raw titles into readable texts.
Another problem is that most publishers and authors aren’t very aware of “rights management.” Authors often sign away translation rights to publishers even though the publishers themselves have no or little experience in the promotion and sale of translation rights. Few living authors have agents, and many lack the business acumen to protect and manage their own rights. Dead authors are sometimes an even larger problem, as almost none have an executor for their intellectual property. This means if a poet, for instance, has five heirs, it is necessary to obtain written permission from each of those five heirs just to translate and publish one poem.
Finally, a very big stumbling block is the lack of vision on the part of the Indonesian government in the need for cultural diplomacy, including funding for such cultural-related ventures as translation funding programs, authors’ residencies, book fairs and festivals, and so on.
Despite all these issues, Indonesia does have a huge talent pool and a vibrant literary scene, which I’ve long been happy to be part of.
SG: How easy is it to find funding for translations? Do you receive any government support?
JM: “Easy” is not a word in the vocabulary of translation funding. Worldwide, it’s difficult to find funding for translations and, in this respect, Indonesia is no exception. In Indonesia, where there is no longer a government-sponsored translation funding program and where tax incentives for contributions to cultural ventures are few, the only way to raise money is from the private sector—through personal contacts, on a “who you know” basis.
For a five-year span, from 2014 to late 2019, when Indonesia was the Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair (2015), as well as the Market Focus Country at the London Book Fair (2019), the government was obliged to maintain a translation funding program. But the targeted recipients for funding were—as it should be—foreign publishing houses not domestic publishers like Lontar.
Historically, Lontar has been reliant on funding from the private sector. All told, I would estimate that in Lontar’s thirty-seven years of existence, it has obtained less than 5% of its funding from government sources. The bulk has come from primarily domestic donors and, after that, foreign cultural institutions.
SG: How do you select literary texts to commission for translation?
JM: We’re always open to the publication of most any translated title that comes our way—if, that is, the work has high merit in the original; the quality of the translation is up to snuff; and we have sufficient funds on hand to publish the text. Lontar has, from the very outset, focused on building a effectively large and comprehensive list of titles to enable the teaching of Indonesian literature through the medium of English. We see this as the key to enhanced global appreciation for Indonesian literature. As such, we have sought to bring in English titles which Indonesian literary critics themselves view as essential to the study of Indonesian literature—including novels, poetry, short stories, and drama dating from the end of the nineteenth century to the present.
Over the years, as our list of titles has grown, we have become better able to pinpoint and fill gaps in our catalogue. For example, Lontar published the first anthology of Indonesian queer literature in translation, the first anthology of Sundanese short stories in translation, the first anthology of Javanese short stories in translation, the first anthology of poetry by Indonesian political exiles in translation, the first comprehensive history of Indonesian writing traditions, and so on and so forth. We have brought to public attention the work of numerous authors from “outer regions” as well as the work of marginalized women authors. All told, we have published translations of literary texts by more than six hundred and fifty authors. Coming up next from Lontar are novels by two almost-forgotten women authors, Suwarsih Djojopoespito and Arti Purbani, and we have numerous other titles in various stages of preparation.
Lontar does not compete with other publishers for the publication of titles and, in fact, is thankful when other publishers publish translations of Indonesian literary work. More power to them! The more the merrier.
SG: Does being a translator yourself affect the commissioning and editing process?
JM: The short answer is: of course! But having lived most of my adult life in Indonesia, having known and worked with most of the country’s leading literary lights who emerged during that period of time, and having experienced firsthand the culture and social challenges about which they write, I no longer see myself primarily as “a translator”—or someone who generally focuses on particular kinds of texts or the work of certain authors—but rather as a “cultural interpreter,” whose aim is to present the larger picture of my adoptive country with all its highlights and challenges, all its strengths and weaknesses. All this said, in the selection of texts for translation and publication, I am always asking myself whether the text accurately reflects Indonesia’s on-the-ground realities and whether its characters ring true to life.
Because I am a translator, I steer away from actual editing work. I long ago learned that for most any text, there are as many possible translated versions as there are translators, and that it’s just as important to respect the voice of the translator as it is the voice of the author.
SG: I understand that a large number of different languages are spoken across Indonesia. What language are the majority of literary texts commission written in? And how does this affect your pool of translators?
JM: Indonesia has more than six hundred and fifty languages but just one national language, Indonesian; with relatively few exceptions, the vast majority of published texts in Indonesia are in Indonesian. As such, the vast majority of texts we have published are translations from the Indonesian. That said, in the foundation’s bylaws, Lontar defines “Indonesian literary texts” not just as texts written in Indonesian, but also in any of the indigenous languages of Indonesian. For that reason, we do seek to publish non-Indonesian literary texts and have published anthologies of Sundanese and Javanese works. We have also published translations from Balinese, Buginese, Classical Javanese, and Classical Malay as well. We would like to publish translations from the many other languages, but it is very difficult to find translators who can translate directly from the source language into English.
SG: In your interview with for the Jakarta Post in 2017, you mentioned that some young Indonesian authors write in English in order to get published abroad more easily. Is this a trend that has continued? And is your project a step towards encouraging these authors to write in their own languages?
JM: There is, indeed, such a trend in Indonesia with young Indonesian authors writing in English, but the notion that doing so will make it more easy for them to get published abroad is debatable. Because the global pool of English-language writers is immense, authors who write in English face even greater competition in the publishing market.
I encourage all writers to write in the language in which they are most comfortable, regardless of their target audience, but because an author’s reputation generally begins “at home” and, in Indonesia, where Indonesian literature is defined as literary texts written in the Indonesian language (and not, for instance, texts written by a person of Indonesian citizenship or descent), an author must publish in Indonesian to gain national recognition. Further, at the international level, one of the first things literary agents and publishers look at when debating whether to take on an author is the author’s reputation and popularity in his or her home country.
SG: Does publication in English often lead to Indonesian literature being translated into other languages?
JM: Because English is the world’s lingua franca today, the translation and publication of a title in English does often lead to titles being translated into other languages, sometimes through the use of English as a bridging language, sometimes directly from the source language to the target language. Because Lontar obtains only English translation rights from the authors we publish, however, we have no way of knowing how many of our titles have been used by non-English language publishers to determine whether to pick up a title for translation into other languages. Even so, for its role in providing a window to Indonesian literature, Lontar has frequently received praise from abroad. Juergen Boos, President of the Frankfurt Book Fair, once remarked that it was only because of Lontar’s work that they were able to consider Indonesia in its selection as Guest of Honour for the 2015 edition.
SG: What titles are you most proud of having published, and why?
JM: “Proud” is not a word I often use to describe my work. Perhaps because of the editor in me, regardless of how pleased I am to have finished work on a title, I almost always see something I could have changed once it has been published—the choice of font, the cover design, whatever. The same is true for works I have translated. When reading the published work, I immediately see words or phrases I might have altered. That said, in terms of “significance,” at the top of the list of titles Lontar has published, I would have to put our multi-volume collections of twentieth-century Indonesian drama, poetry, and short stories. These “Norton-like” anthologies provide a true picture of the development of Indonesian literature during the past century. Also at the top of the list would be Illuminations: Writing Traditions of Indonesia, the first comprehensive history of writing in Indonesia. I would also mention Lontar’s “Modern Library of Indonesia” series; it includes over sixty titles, giving readers a look at the social and cultural changes that have occurred in Indonesia throughout its history.
John H. McGlynn lives in Jakarta where, in 1987, he and four Indonesian authors established the Lontar Foundation. McGlynn is the Indonesian country editor for Manoa, a literary journal published by the University of Hawaii; and a contributing editor to Words Without Borders, Warscapes, and Cordite Review. He is a founding member of the Asia Pacific Writers and Translators Association and a member of the International Commission of the Indonesian Publishers Association (IKAPI), PEN International-New York, and the Association of Asian Studies. McGlynn is also a trustee of AMINEF, the American Indonesian Exchange Foundation.
Sarah Gear is a PhD candidate at the University of Exeter. Her work examines the ways in which politics and publishing intersect, by comparing the commission, translation, and reception of contemporary novels by nationalist and liberal Russian writers. Sarah holds an MA in Translation Studies from the University of Stirling, and a BAHons in French and Russian from the University of Glasgow.
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