Juxtaposing the interlinear translations in ML 341 and EAP329/1/11 reveals an interesting correlation between the two versions of the Malay text: they are too different and too similar at the same time— too similar to be unrelated and, at the same time, too different for the differences to result from corruption in the process of recopying. This ambiguity brings up questions around the practices of transmitting interlinear translations, which appear to have differed from those of reproducing the matn. How can two texts be this much different but still related? A possible explanation is that the interlinear text might have gone through multiple stages of both written and oral transmission, which involved a teacher dictating the translation looking into a written copy, but feeling free to slightly modify or complement the text during the dictation—adjusting to the students’ level and anticipated need for additional elucidation. Frozen on the page of a manuscript, this interlinear text captures the translation as it was performed in the classroom, demonstrating one of the many ways in which orality and literacy were entangled within Malay manuscript culture and Islamic educational practices.

References:

Collective volume with two texts in Arabic with interlinear translation in Malay, Leiden University Libraries, Or. 7075, http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:3128072

DS 0043 00014, DREAMSEA Repository, https://www.hmmlcloud.org/dreamsea/detail.php?msid=1403

Mau'izah and Adab al-Muta'allim, British Library, EAP329/1/11, https://eap.bl.uk/archive-file/EAP329-1-11

Mawaiz al-Badiah Waghairiha, ML 341, National Library of Indonesia

 As a first step to find out I made a comparison of the religious aspect of the two renderings. In the ninth-century text the religious aspect is part of the core message. The text  tells a romantic story about a happy couple and their vicissitudes. At the same time the story is about good and evil: Rama, the namesake of the poem, is an incarnation of the Hindu god Wisnu, come to the earth to liberate the world from evil. The setting of the text is thoroughly Hindu: we read about Hindu gods, Hindu concepts of good and evil, incarnations, Hindu patterns and prescriptions regulating life, etcetera. Fine tuning the above question one wonders what remains of this Hindu aspect in the modern version, created in an Islamic environment.

 For my pilot I picked one small passage of the story, the so-called ‘hymn in praise of Rama’. This hymn is embedded in both texts in the episode of the battle waged by Rama and his allies against the villainous king who kidnapped his wife. A serious setback for Rama occurs when a magic weapon is applied by the enemy: he is paralyzed on the spot. Unable to move he loses his fighting spirit and gives up. At that moment a divine group appears in sky, singing his praise. As a result the effect of the magic weapon is undone. Soon Rama gains the upper hand.

Figure 2. Hanuman, one of Rama’s allies, immobilized by the magic weapon of the enemy. Relief at Panataran. Source: Jasadipoera, Serat Rama, 1925.

What interested me was the miracle that happens to Rama: what is the secret of the hymn? An analysis of such hymns in general in Old Javanese literature carried out by Stuart Robson suggests that three elements are crucial for the hymn to have effect: it is uttered by one of the protagonists of the story, it is uttered at a moment of crisis, and it contains a plea for help, persuading the deity addressed by underlining that deity’s supreme power and the worshipper’s humility and helplessness.

These three elements are all present in the old hymn. How about the modern version? This shows many similarities compared to the old version: the context is the same, and so is the content, even up to and including some of the wording and imagery. However, next to the many similarities there are also dissimilarities, quite a few in fact, in wording, in imagery. I found dissimilarity especially in two respects. To begin with, there is a difference of tone. While the Old Javanese hymn is a reverent prayer to the god, the modern version is rather an encouragement in a familial, even homely tone.

Next, besides the difference in tone, there is also a difference of perception on who Rama is. The Old Javanese text stresses the oneness of Rama and Wisnu, whereas in the modern version there is no oneness at all – at least, it is not mentioned explicitly. The godlike Rama of the Old Javanese in the modern version is reduced to a brave hero.

The conclusion from this small comparison must be that the modern version of the Ramayana replaces views no longer acceptable by modern standards. At the same time it appears that, although the translation can by no means be called interlinear, still the principle underlying interlinear translation, of faithfulness to the original at the level of the word, is adhered to within the limits set by religious doctrine.

References:

Jasadipoera. Serat Rama. Kawewahan beboeka lan sesorah déning toewan J. Kats. Djilid III (Weltevreden: Balé Poestaka, 1925. Mawi gambar tjorèk 33 idji. BP 696b).

Kern. H. Rāmāyaṇa. The Story of Rāmā and Sītā in Old Javanese. Romanized edition by Willem van der Molen (Tokyo: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 2015. Javanese Studies 1).

Pigeaud, Th.G.Th. Literature of Java. Catalogue raisonné of Javanese Manuscripts in the Library of the University of Leiden and Other Public Collections in the Netherlands. Volume I (The Hague: Nyhoff, 1967. Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde).

Rama Jarwa Leiden University Library Or. 1791.

Robson, Stuart. "Hymns of Praise in Kakawins. H.M. Creese and A. Griffiths (eds.) From Laṅkā Eastwards. Rāmāyaṇa in the Literature and Visual Arts of Indonesia (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2011. Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 247) 1-10. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004253766_002

For instance, in the section dealing with clothes and textiles, there appears a confusing word spelled as dāl-ḥā’-rā’-yā’-ḍād (in 3231(8)) or dāl-ḥā’-rā’-ṣād (in 3233(2)), which can be read as daḥrīḍ or possibly daḥriṣ (3233(2) provides no diacritics). Such a word does not seem to be found in dictionaries, but its interlinear Malay translation appears to give a clue to what it might have originally been. Below the line, this word is translated as suji baju (‘shirt embroidery’). There is an Arabic word for embroidery that could have sounded similarly to daḥriṣ to a non-native Arabic speaker, that is taṭrīz, as well as another word, takhrīm, that could have possibly transformed into daḥriṣ as a result of two stages of corruption, phonetical and graphical (the final mīm having been misinterpreted by a copyist as ṣād). If any of the two is the case, this seems to suggest that the history of reproduction of the text included both written and oral transmission, i.e. at different points in time it might have been copied from a manuscript and written down by dictation.

In the Arabic lines of the vocabulary, such possible traces of oral transmission still appear to be rather scarce. The majority of misspellings are those a copyist could produce due to inattention or unclear handwriting in the earlier manuscript, while the scribe’s own relatively fine hand suggests that the wordlist was copied without much haste from a written source—which seems to not be the case for the Malay translation. This translation is scribbled between the lines in a less accurate manner and might not have been copied at the same time with the Arabic text. Besides the sloppiness of the handwriting, there is another feature pointing to the different life paths of the Arabic and Malay parts of the vocabulary. The Malay translations of the Arabic words in the two manuscripts are largely identical, but not entirely, and the differences do not seem to result from recopying. For example, the Arabic word al-sundus (‘taffeta,’ thin silk textile) is translated in 3231(8) as kain sutra yang nipis (‘thin silk fabric’) and in 3233(2) as just kain (‘cloth, fabric’); and al-biṭānah (‘lining’) as lapis baju (‘shirt lining’) and luar baju (‘outer layer of a shirt’), respectively. Might these differences be due to a teacher’s reinterpretation in the classroom, or a student’s hastiness in writing the translations down?

Corrupted as it is, the Arabic wordlist in the vocabulary still appears to be a more stable part of the text than the Malay translations. The spelling differences between the two manuscripts seem to be not intentional, but rather result from the multiple stages of thorough but not flawless recopying by non-native Arabic speakers. The variety in translations, on the other hand, appears to be more voluntary, which might reflect the fluid character of interlinear translation and the role of an oral element in its transmission.

Arabic words are put one after another in a line, little space being left between them. Their Malay translations hang hooked to them beneath, often exceeding the source in the number of words and length. The vocabulary is divided into three big chapters according to a grammatical principle: particles, nouns, and verbs. Within the chapters, thematical arrangement is applied. The chapter on the nouns takes an encyclopaedic form, commencing with sections on God’s names, religious, epistemological and abstract terms, and then proceeding to words describing the physical world: those for land and sky; geographical notions; inanimate phenomena and materials; spices and aromatics; food and drinks; vessels and household utensils; diseases; plants and their parts; water and fish; animals and insects; body parts; categories of people; clothes and furnishings. Often a number of synonyms is provided, their translation replaced by the letter mim under the line. Humans find themselves in the fauna section, after the word al-ḥayawān (‘animal’), which is translated to Malay as segala yang hidup (‘everything that lives’). They are classified according to their gender, age, and social roles: men and women, old and young, free and slaves, kings, ministers and warriors. Women are divided into maids, brides, widows, young and old, married and not, and a variety of kinship terms is listed, as well as other words describing interpersonal relationships: friend, enemy, neighbour.

The sloppy handwriting and somewhat messy structural arrangement of this anonymous manuscript leaves an impression that the vocabulary was not intended for any audiences. It rather resembles personal notebooks in which learners of foreign languages write down words learnt and to be learnt in an endeavour to systematise their knowledge. Apparently compiled by a Malay-speaking learner of Arabic somewhere in nineteenth-century Sumatra, this wordlist provides an insight not only into the language learning practices of the time, but also into the student’s worldview and mindset. Assembling the elusive foreign words in logically arranged sections, the scribe unwittingly describes the world around—in an encyclopaedic and largely intuitive way.

Source:

Or. 3231(8), ff. 33r –32v, Leiden University Library

The manuscript contains a copy of the Arabic text of Umm al-barāhīn (‘Mother of arguments’, also known as al-‘Aqīdah al-sanūsiyyah al-ṣuġrā or al-Durra) complemented by a variety of ‘secondary’ texts that either follow it or occupy interlinear and marginal spaces. The text of Umm al-barāhīn itself occupies 50 pages; the lines are widely spaced leaving enough room for interlinear notes, while the frame ruling creates large fields for marginalia. The latter fields are extensively used for glosses; between the lines, translation to Malay is placed, its units hanging hooked to the corresponding parts of the Arabic text. Following the Umm al-barāhīn, another (supplementary but much lengthier) text occupies some 93 pages of the manuscript, i.e. sharḥ (commentary) by Muḥammad Zayn al-Faqīh Jalāluddīn al-Āshī, a scholar from eighteenth-century Aceh. Composed in 1756–1757 and also known as Bidāyat al-hidāyah, this work is the earliest known ‘Malay version’ of Umm al-barāhīn and the oldest Malay work on ‘aqīdah, which remains highly popular up to the present day.

The manuscript represents an epitome of the long and peculiar afterlife of al-Sanūsī’s work in the Indonesian-Malay world. Written in fifteenth-century Tlemsen, by a North African Ash‘arite theologian, this ‘aqīdah was a rationalistic attempt to systematize the essentials of the Islamic faith. There were indeed three versions of the catechism, the ‘short’ (al-ṣughrā), ‘medium’ (al-wuṣṭā), and ‘long’ (al-kubrā) ‘aqā’id, as well as an even shorter one called ṣughrā al-ṣughrā. Having spread throughout the Islamic world, these texts were used in religious education and marked the grades of primary, middle, and advanced studies. Over the centuries, an extensive body of glosses and commentaries has grown around al-Sanūsī’s creeds—especially al-ṣughrā that has gained most popularity—both in Arabic and other languages of Islam. These were taught together with the main text, and often shared the page with it in manuscript copies and later in printed editions.

In the Indonesian-Malay world, al-Sanūsī’s short catechism has become the most popular and widely used work on Ash‘arite doctrine. A cluster of commentaries, glosses, versifications, and additions has been built around it by local scholars, initiating the development of a new regionally-specific genre of ‘aqīda writing, i.e. the sifat dua puluh (‘Twenty Attributes’). Among the kitab kuning (teaching materials used in pesantren, Islamic boarding schools) dealing with the doctrine, texts based on Umm al-barāhīn are the most popular group and are often referred to as Sanusi or Sanusiyah. Manuscript copies of the matn (original text) of Umm al-barāhīn tend to contain Malay or Javanese interlinear translations, some of those closely following the source text and others including certain amount of commentary.

The manuscript discussed in this post demonstrates a case of a rather literal, word-by-word, translation. Every Arabic word, including particles, prepositions, and other function words, finds its equivalent in Malay. But also some extra Malay words are added in order to make the translation readable independently of the source. Literal as it is, the translation is still not an exercise in deconstructing the original text into isolated elements: if rearranged into horizontal lines, the translation reads as a self-consistent (though not naturally structured) text. Neither is the translation entirely literal: one can find in it scarce explications woven into the text.

The opening lines of the text, whereas al-Sanūsī defines the three basic logical categories of his argument, go as follows (corresponding Malay translation units are put in parenthesis):

i‘lam (ketahui olehmu) anna al-ḥukm (bahwa sesungguhnya hukum) al-‘aqlī (akal itu) yanḥaṣiru (tersimpan ia) fī thalāthat (pada tiga) aqsām (bahagi) al-wujūb (pertama wajib) wa-al-istiḥālah (dan kedua mustahil) wa-al-jawāz (dan [ke]tiga jaiz) fa-al-wājib (maka yang wajib itu yaitu) mā lā (barang yang tiada) yutaṣawwaru (terupa) fī al-‘aql (pada akal) ‘adamuh (adamnya makna adam di sini nafi) wa-al-mustaḥīl (dan yang mustahil itu yaitu) mā lā (barang yang tiada) yutaṣawwaru (terupa) fī al-‘aql (pada akal) wujūduh (wujudnya) wa-al-jā’iz (dan yang jaiz itu) mā yaṣiḥḥu (barang yang sah) fī al-‘aql (pada akal) wujūduhu (wujudnya) wa-‘adamuh (dan adamnya) 

The translation is mostly literal, except for the order words added to structure the text and a brief explanation of the word adam (see in brackets):

Know that rational judgement is confined to three parts: [firstly] necessity, [secondly] impossibility, and [thirdly] possibility. The necessary is that of which non-existence is not conceived in the reason. [The meaning of ‘non-existence’ (adam) here is ‘negation’ (nafi)]. The impossible is that of which existence is not conceived in the reason. The possible is that of which existence and non-existence are both acceptable in the reason.

In the cited instance, translation follows the source text rather closely. Same can be said for the rest of the text, although infrequent elucidations of Arabic terms can be still found between the lines. It is also remarkable that some of the Arabic terms are reproduced in the translation as loanwords while others are translated to Malay in quite a literal way (e.g. simpulan for ‘aqā’id). Plurals are conveyed with sekalian, Arabic past tense with telah, prepositions, sometimes mechanically, with one and the same Malay equivalent—the translation demonstrates certain consistency in conveying Arabic lexical units and grammatical categories. Being in line with the standardised ways of rewriting Arabic in Malay found in other texts from the region, these translation patterns demonstrate the manuscript’s belonging to the tradition—the tradition of translating from Arabic to Malay, and, more specifically, that of translating theological and doctrinal texts, and Umm al-barāhīn in particular. Not fully identical to other known Malay translations of the catechism, this version shares with them many translation solutions and lexical choices.    

The literal, word-by-word translation of the authoritative text appears to represent an exercise in relevance: it barely departs from the source, while the equivalence of rather small units of translation to those of the original text is visually manifested in their hanging arrangement. This arrangement, along with the smaller size of letters and lesser accuracy in handwriting, also seems to demonstrate the Malay text’s inferiority to the Arabic one. Faithful as it is, the translation still allows brief explanatory notes that, again, highlight the capacity of Arabic to convey a complexity of meanings with a single word and the inability of Malay to provide a proper equivalent. A superficial view of the page provides a reader with an idea of the high status of the text and the language it is written in, while closer alternate reading of the source and its translation would help students to memorise both the creed and the meanings of the Arabic words it consists of. In the educational milieu where memorising often preceded understanding, providing a text with interlinear translation might have been an endeavour to achieve the two with one exercise.     

Source:

https://www.hmmlcloud.org/dreamsea/detail.php?msid=1624, DREAMSEA digital collection, used under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0)

The manuscript remains a witness of the dramatic last stages of the Aceh War (1873–1913), as well as of Snouck Hurgronje’s academic interests. The text of both the poems and their translations was copied for the scholar, who was back then an advisor to the Governor of Aceh, from another manuscript brought from a campaign in Gayo lands by Gotfried C.E. van Daalen (1863–1930), an infamous military commander whose atrocities would raise heavy criticism a year later. This original manuscript, that had earlier belonged to “migrant Acehnese legal scholars and nobles,” was soon transported to Java and is nowadays stored in the National Library of Indonesia in Jakarta.

The poem under discussion, the first of the two, is untitled and consists of 38 lines. It is written in Classical Arabic and addresses a student (of an Islamic school, apparently) with instructions in the ethics and principles of learning. Classified as urjuza, a poem written in rajaz metre and paired rhyme, the poem presents an example of Arabic didactic verse that has been known in the Middle East since the medieval period and was used to assist memorisation. In the Malay-Indonesian world, this practice found its continuation in the genre called naẓm or manẓūm, which comprises didactic texts written in rhymed verse. The genre falls within the larger category of kitab kuning, i.e. various texts used for teaching in pesantrens and other Islamic schools of the region. The poem on the duties of a student is one of such texts and is still used for teaching in these institutions, being known under the title Naẓmu l-maṭlab.    

In Indonesia’s Islamic schools, teaching such texts often incudes their recitation in unison which is followed by the teacher’s translation and explanation, while students write those down between the lines. In the Leiden manuscript, the interlinear Malay text is arranged according to the traditional pattern described in Malay and Javanese traditions with the terms “bearded books” (kitab jenggotan) or “hanging meaning” (makna gandhul). Broken down into fragments, the phrase by phrase translation of the poem is placed diagonally under the line, its units hanging as if hooked to particular words or parts of the Arabic text. However, the Malay ‘translation’ does not always correspond precisely to the source: while some of the lines are provided with rather literal Malay equivalents, in other cases interlinear text diverges from the Arabic original to different extent. The borderline between translation and what a modern reader would call a commentary or interpretation appears to be rather vague, and one might wonder if this kind of distinction existed for the writers and readers of the text.  

As studying such bilingual texts seems to involve both memorising the original through its repetitive recitation, and obtaining an understanding of the content by listening to the teacher’s explanation, one could possibly speculate on the correlation between the form of the translation and its purpose. The interlinear translation of the urjuza is neither a literal one, fragmented into the smallest units in order to allow the students to scrutinise the structure and grammar of an Arabic sentence, nor is it a polished literary, not to say poetic, translation aspiring to become an equivalent of the source text. It appears to be something in-between, apparently aiming at teaching both the Arabic language through a meaningful text, and the meaning of the text, i.e. learning principles and ethics, through an authoritative language—the language of the Quran.