ABSTRACT
Literary translation in Indonesia has long been tied to colonial projects enacted through forces of global capitalism. While it has shaped boundaries of the independent nation, Indonesia also retains its unbounded archipelagic identity as tanah air (“earth water”), a designation for a homeland which carries the doubleness of bounded and multiple imaginations. Through local-level negotiations and mediations of language as it materializes in ritualized and everyday forms experience, translational processes work to resuscitate the connected, rather than fragmented, archipelagic imaginary of Indonesia. This project looks at a small example from the agrarian heartland of Central Java. The task is to translate a Javanese song-poem composed to celebrate the rice harvest festival. It is a translation which engages with more than a single source text, but rather three interrelated forms—a song, a text, and a ball of clay—translated through three languages—Javanese, Indonesian, and English—together with three generations of women—a master of Javanese language, an American researcher, and a little girl. Together they explore the multiplicities of participatory translation as a decolonizing force put to work against practices of neo-colonial extraction, in order to trace the multiplicity of connections between song, text, and a ball of clay, which together constitute rasa, feelings and sentiments shaped and reshaped through participation in the materialities of translation.
