Interlinear Translation in Print (Part I)
September 2024
Ronit Ricci
The publishing of interlinear translations is part of the larger story of print within Muslim circles in the Indonesian-Malay world. The earliest Muslim printing in the region goes back to at least 1854 when copies of the Qur’an with notes in Malay were printed in Palembang, however it was Singapore that emerged as the leading nineteenth century center of Muslim publishing in Southeast Asia. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, beyond the presses of Southeast Asia, Malay and Javanese books were printed in Cairo, Istanbul, Mecca and Bombay (Proudfoot 1993: 27). Some of these books were in the form of interlinear translations, with an Arabic text and Malay or Javanese translations or glosses appearing between the lines. For example, approximately twenty such Javanese books were published in Singapore between 1890 and 1910 (Proudfoot 1993: 29).
One interesting aspect of early Islamic print in the region is that books were made in a way that sought to reproduce the graphic form of the manuscript. As regards our topic of interlinear texts, Proudfoot notes that “for kitab in particular, lithography reproduced interlinear glosses, commentary and the like, using customary devices of text layout and script size to express hierarchies of textual authority.” (Proudfoot 1993: 45). Nico Kaptein (1993: 357), in his discussion of a 1853 printed copy of the Mawlid Sharaf al-Anām from Surabaya with a Malay interlinear translation, also very much resembling a manuscript, suggested that this was the oldest known printed book from the Dutch East Indies to be produced outside European-controlled circles. The fact that this pioneering book was interlinear could point to the importance of interlinear translations in manuscript form at the time, especially within the Islamic religious-pedagogical sphere, and the need to include, from an early stage, those same translations with their particular format in the evolving realm of the new print media.
As an example of this genre, and as a step towards considering interlinear translation in print, this blogpost briefly introduces a small printed book containing an Arabic to Malay interlinear translation, while a followup blogpost will delve into its content. The book is a kitab titled Maslaku al-akhyāri fī al-ad‘iyati wa al-athkār al-wāridatu ‘an al-nabī al-mukhtār (“The Path of the Righteous regarding the Supplications and Remembrances Received from the Chosen Prophet”). As its title implies, it contains supplications (doa), chants of remembrance (dikir) and additional prayers attributed to the Prophet. The book carries no date, however on its final page appears a call to those “wishing to acquire books that are cheap and neatly printed to please get books from the book shop of Sulaymān Mar‘ī and Co. Surabaya, as all book shops across Indonesia acquire their books from Sulaymān Mar‘ī and Co. book shop in Surabaya-Java.” This appeal, which includes the designation “Indonesia,” indicates that the state had already been founded at the time of print, likely in the early 1950s.
Who was the book’s publisher? Sulaymān Mar‘ī, an Arab, was initially based in Surabaya and later (around the mid-1920s) moved to Singapore. He was a bookseller who for the most part carried out his printing offshore, much of it in Egypt. His offshore printing was “an immense technical advance” over the old Singapore lithographs (Proudfoot 1993: 45) and he also had an advantage over competitors in the Indies as the colonial government at the time levied import taxes on paper but not on printed books (van Bruinessen 1990: 233). Among the books he commissioned for sale in the Indies was the Qur’an, printed not in Egypt but in Bombay in 1928 (Hakim Syukrie 2023). Sulaymān Mar‘ī and Co. closed down in the early 1980s (van Bruinessen 1990: 233).
Figure 1. Title page of the kitab Maslaku al-akhyāri fī al-ad‘iyati wa al-athkār al-wāridatu ‘an al-nabī al-mukhtār
The title page of the kitab is written mostly in Malay, with two exceptions: the title is in Arabic, as is the note at the bottom of the page stating that the book was “printed at the expense of Sulaymān Mar‘i and Co. Surabaya with the permission of Sayyīd Muḥammad bin ‘Aqīl bin Yaḥyā.” The writing, excluding the note about the publisher, is surrounded by a double-lined thin black frame and a large X shaped sign made up of four thin lines divides the page into four parts, two of which “face” the reader while a third “faces” the right side of the page and the fourth its left side (see Figure 1). This type of multi-directional writing on the page is reminiscent of many interlinear manuscripts in which the translation is written upside down or facing a different direction than the main text, or to which various notes are added on various parts of the page. The bi-lingual nature of the book is evident on this opening page in two ways. First, in the top section, the title itself is appended with an interlinear translation into Malay. Second, in the bottom and largest section there is an explanation about how many of the reward-bearing doa and dikir are often written in Malay mixed with Arabic that does not indicate correct pronunciation (unvocalized Arabic?), perhaps implicitly pointing to the main reason why a full interlinear translation of such texts was necessary, and presented in the kitab.
References:
Anonymous. Maslaku al-akhyāri fī al-ad‘iyati wa al-athkār al-wāridatu ‘an al-nabī al-mukhtār.
Surabaya: Sulaymān Mar‘ī and Co., no date.
van Bruinessen, M. “Kitab Kuning; Books in Arabic script used in the pesantren milieu;
Comments on a new collection in the KITLV Library.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en
Volkenkunde 146, 2/3 (1990): 226-269.
Kaptein, Nico. “An Arab Printer in Surabaya in 1853.” BKI 149.2 (1993): 356-362.
Proudfoot, Ian. Early Malay Printed Books. A provisional account of materials published in the
Singapore-Malaysia area up to 1920, noting holdings in major public collections.
Kuala Lumpur: Academy of Malay Studies and The Library, University of Malays, 1993.
Syukrie, A. Hakim. “Pencetakan kitab-kitab Jawi di Bombay India Abad ke-19M.” Indonesia LivingQuran (7 April 2023).
https://hakiemsyukrie.wordpress.com/2023/04/07/pencetakan-kitab-kitab-jawi-di-bombay-india-abad-ke-19-m/
Accessed 8 September 2024.