Making Blood White: Historical Transformations in Early Modern Makassar

A Note on Makassarese Language and Translation

A translation is a reading that tries to make sense. My experience with translation is inevitably personal, formed out of encounters with languages not my own. These encounters include not only formal study and the struggle to read what seem cryptic and elusive texts, but haphazard experiences ranging from listening uncomprehendingly as an Indonesian instructor recited Javanese poetry in his quivering bass voice to hearing the same Dutch-language pop version of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” every morning for weeks in an Indonesian hotel. I know the wonder that comes from learning a foreign language to the point that it enters dreams, that it carries an emotional force all its own, untranslatable.1 Translation thus stems from both understanding and experiences themselves difficult to translate into words. I know too that translation is a controversial effort, one steeped in issues of imperialism and incommensurability. As philology, faith in textual fidelity, and the primacy of the author have given way before postmodernism , the belief that texts contain multiple possible readings, and the primacy of the reader, the question before me is how to translate Makassarese texts such as the Gowa Chronicle.2 Understanding how I tried to capture and pin to paper these ancient texts begins with the social world of Makassar past and present. While recognizing that the translations in this work can only be at best approximations of their Makassarese sense—translations are inevitably “works in progress”— my effort was influenced most by the social context of my own reading and my understanding of the social context of past Makassarese readings of these texts. Many of my readings of Makassarese texts were done under the guidance of my language teacher, Djohan Daeng Salengke. The son of A NOTE ON MAKASSARESE LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION an adviser to one of the last rulers of Gowa, from his childhood Djohan had firsthand experience reading and listening in the now-lost world of the Gowa palace. His sense of Makassarese powerfully shaped my own. Our work together began with his somewhat paradoxical caution that to read a Makassarese sentence in lontaraq beru or jangang-jangang script, one first had to know what it said. These scripts, while alphabetic, are incomplete. Glottal stops, nasalized velars, and double consonants are not graphically represented. Readers must simply know that to form the intended Makassarese word these must be added at the correct places. Thus only by knowing the subject of the sentence can it be read. In many ways, written Makassarese is best viewed as a cue or guide to spoken Makassarese. According to some Makassarese, the written script only “becomes” Makassarese when it is spoken aloud. This is obviously a problem for scholars trying to produce transcriptions and translations of texts. There is no standardized, recognized system of transcription or spelling, and published texts and dictionaries do not follow a uniform pattern.3 Terse and graphically incomplete, words and sentences can have multiple meanings that must be considered within the context of what is being related before one can divine which words the writer intended. That is, only after reflection and deliberation can one “read” a complex Makassarese statement. Sometimes the choices are stark and a choice can quickly be made. For example, Djohan posed to me the following hypothetical sentence: nkerai epep bldtok. This could be transcribed as either nakanrei pepeq ballaq datoka or nakanrei pepeq balanda tokkaq and thus be read as either “fire consumed the Chinese temple” or “fire consumed the bald Dutchman.” At other times simply deciding where words begin and end is difficult, for Makassarese often did not use spaces between words. Coupled with the incompleteness of the script, graphically perplexing sentences such as this— kukukikkkukkukkkikkoku (meaning “my older sibling is angry because I yanked out my vegetables”)—become possible. Reading Makassarese is difficult and requires persistence and patience. Often the meaning of a word or phrase becomes clear only later as the context unfolds, demanding that the reader turn back the page and re-read in this new light. Reading Makassarese—scanning, deliberating, choosing, and remaining open to possibilities—involves actively reworking material to achieve a satisfactory, if always tentative, sense. Furthermore, Makassarese composers assumed a whole world of associations and knowledge that future readers would bring to the text. xii h A Note on Makassarese Language and Translation h Defining a word is never a matter...