A text for elementary surau students

August 2024

Fadhli Lukman

Fig 1. Adab al-mutaʿallim, DREAMSEA DS 0043 00014 f. 4v

This current blogpost features a text called Adab al-muta‘allim (“Ethics for the learners”), which is part of a compilation of texts in DS 0043 00014 (digitised by the Dreamsea Project) of the Surau Simauang collection, located in Sijunjung, West Sumatra (see Fig.1). As a part of surau collections, it is evident that this text was created within an educational setting. The text provides broad moral guidance for Muslim students, encompassing learning principles and life choices, a theme that further testifies to its didactic nature.

This text fits the basic visual characterisation of interlinear translation, namely that the translation is written between the lines of the source (Ricci 2014; 2016). Figure 1 shows that the line is spaced out to allow the translation to hang diagonally below the original Arabic text. However, when seen closely, not every translation hangs below the particular Arabic word that it renders. This line is the opening sentence of the text, which includes a reference to God with a few of His names or attributes. The translation for al-bārī (“the Creator”) is written in two diagonal lines “lagi menjadikan” (“who creates”) and “segala makhluk” (“all creatures”), with the latter positioned beneath the next word, al-mu‘min (“who provides security”). Furthermore, the translation for al-mu‘min (“who provides security”) itself, which is “lagi menyentosakan(?)” (“who bestows tranquillity”), is moved further left below the next word, al-muhaymin (“final authority, guardian”), and is combined with the translation of that word, namely “lagi memelihara” (“who cares for”). The text, thus, displays a ‘distant-interlinear translation’, being an interlinear translation that does not hang directly beneath its corresponding word.

Aglaia Iankovskaia (2023) observed this distant-interlinear feature in another copy of the same text (Leiden MS. Or. 7075). MS. Or. 7075 is a copy from MS. ML 341 kept in the National Library of the Republic of Indonesia. Additionally, there is one other digitised copy with Aceh provenance available on the EAP platform. Each of these manuscripts displays this ‘distant-interlinear translation’ at some point. Could it be that this feature is quite common in Malay manuscripts?

Another important observation from this manuscript is that it demonstrates that the translator did not consistently pursue the smallest detail of Arabic grammar and syntax in translation. Such meticulous attention to the details is what makes interlinear translation associated with word-for-word translation and literalism. This manuscript, however, shows that the words of the translation are organised into a coherent sentence that can be comprehended on its own. Even without the original text, the translated version, although it may not sound entirely natural and idiomatic to modern readers, is still understandable. It is tempting to assume that the interlinear translation in this text works at the level of the phrase, but combined with the aforementioned distant-interlinear feature, I would say that the translation works at the sentence level instead.

With the distant and sentence-level translation, the text might be taught to students at the elementary level of their surau education, while they had not yet learned to read an Arabic text. The provided example clearly demonstrates that translation in this text is not only put at a distance from the specific word it renders, but that it is also frequently placed beneath a different word. This format may not be suitable if students were expected to connect each word of the original text with its corresponding translation. Additionally, with the translation that works at the sentence level, students were invited to understand the text in its Malay version. We can imagine the translation and original text standing alone, but they are stitched together on paper because they were read in the classroom.

This way, this text is comparable to the layout of the printed Qur'an translation in early twentieth-century Indonesia (see Fig. 2), where the Arabic text occupies the half-right side of the page, while the Malay/Indonesian translation occupies the other half. The audience for this Qur'an translation was the new growing Muslim intellectual class who had a Western education and was unfamiliar with Arabic (Pink, 2017). The inclusion of the Arabic text—and thus the Arabic recitation—in both layout formats apparently serves as an indication that the text's authority lies in its original form rather than in any translated versions. The distinction between the readers of our manuscript and those of the printed Qur'an translation lies in the fact that the surau students who read this manuscript would go on to read and translate the actual Arabic text later in their education.

 

Fig. 2. The Quran translation of the Ministry of Religious Affairs (1965) that follows the popular parallel layout of Quran translation since the early 20th century. 

The available descriptions of interlinear translation provided by scholars, combined with the traditional pesantren or surau model of oral translation of Arabic texts that still exists today, have led me to believe that interlinear translation is a highly complex enterprise. A further consequence of this perception is the notion that interlinear translation bridges the language of the original text, Arabic, to the language of the translated text, in this case Malay, in a way that is intended for learning the original Arabic text, and hence, learning Arabic. It is therefore not surprising that Iankovskaia, in her analysis of MS. Or. 7075 and MS. ML 341 concluded that these texts combine moral education for students as well as an Arabic language education. However, the text discussed in this blogpost does not fully attest to this complexity, leaving us to consider a more nuanced description of this tradition, including its role in Arabic language learning.

 

References:

Iankovskaia, A. (2023) ‘Between translation and commentary: an interlinear text from the collection of Snouck Hurgronje’, Archipel, 106, pp. 89–124. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4000/11wu6.

Pink, J. (2017) ‘Form Follows Function: Notes on the Arrangement of Texts in Printed Qur’an Translations’, Journal of Qur’anic Studies, 19(1), pp. 143–154. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3366/jqs.2017.0274.

Ricci, R. (2014) ‘Story, Sentence, Single Word: Translation Paradigms in Javanese and Malay Islamic Literature’, in Bermann, S. and Porter, C., A companion to translation studies. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell (Blackwell companions to literature and culture, 86), pp. 543–556.

Ricci, R. (2016) ‘Reading between the Lines: A World of Interlinear Translation’, Journal of World Literature, 1(1), pp. 68–80. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-00101008.