Buru Quartet Marathon

This post, above anything else, is a confession post. The confession: I haven’t read much lately. Well, I do read, but what I read are just a bunch of academic journal articles assigned by my course conveners and news. Those don’t count, right?

I have no excuse for all of this. I could have read more, especially since the pandemic everyone has been forced to stay at home. Except, I had to work on my assignments during the semester.

Now that I am on summer break, I really run out of excuses. I guess, I better catch up of my reading.

Lucky for me, a couple months ago an angel gave away a bag full of Pramudya Ananta Toer’s books on Buy Nothing of my suburb. Not wanting to miss the opportunity, I immediately put my hands up, and like an angel, or perhaps Santa is the most appropriate name for the occasion, she gave all of them to me. Within the bag includes the complete edition of Buru Quartet and other books such as: It’s Not An All Night Fair, Fugitive and Arok of Java. If any gift can make me happy, it has to be books.

I have started the marathon. So far I have finished reading the first and second books. The point of this post is to document my experience while reading this masterpiece. I will write down my feeling and reaction while reading each book.

I am fully aware that Pram is a a big name in Indonesia and almost everyone says that his books are not that easy to absorb. Implying that it requires certain level of intelligent to understand his works. Well, it’s true to some extent. But I think the problem lies in the language. Indonesian language is always changing and the new generations are not familiar with the “old” generation of Indonesian language. The old version strikes them a bit stiff and too formal. So yes, it requires a bit of effort both to understand the language and the content.

Luckily for me, the book that I got are all in English and so far I have no problem at all. Except, there are parts that I find funny. I am not a translator, but I did take translation course back in the days. And, one of the thing the translation course emphasises is that we need to contextualise everything. We cannot translate everything literally. There is one particular character in the book named Minah who has “slut-ish” personality. In Indonesian language, we refer to such character as cewek gatel, which literally translates into an itchy girl. Rather than calling her a slut, Max Lane chooses to use “itchy girl”. There must be an intention behind it which I am still figuring it out.

So yes, in the next posts I will be documenting my whole experience reading each book. I am so excited!