Source Readings in Javanese Gamelan and Vocal Music, Volume 2

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN CENTER FOR SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES MICHIGAN PAPERS ON SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA Editorial Board Alton L. Becker Karl L. Hutterer John K. Musgrave Peter E. Hook, Chairman Ann Arbor, Michigan USA KARAWITAN SOURCE READINGS IN JAVANESE GAMELAN AND VOCAL MUSIC Judith Becker editor Alan H. Feinstein assistant editor Hardja Susilo Sumarsam A. L. Becker consultants Volume 2 MICHIGAN PAPERS ON SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA; Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies The University of Michigan Number 30 Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/ Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 82-72445 ISBN 0-89148-034-X Copyright ©' 1987 by Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies The University of Michigan Publication of this book was assisted in part by a grant from the Publications Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional funding or assistance was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities (Transla- tions); the Southeast Asia Regional Council, Association for Asian Studies; The Rackham School of Graduate Studies, The University of Michigan; and the School of Music, The University of Michigan. Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978-0-89-148034-1 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-47-203819-0 (paper) ISBN 978-0-47-212769-6 (ebook) ISBN 978-0-47-290165-4 (open access) The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ CONTENTS PREFACE: TRANSLATING THE ART OF MUSIC A. L. Becker ix PRADANGGA By Raden Tumenggung Warsadiningrat Translated by Susan Pratt Walton 1 Translator's Introduction, by Susan Pratt Walton 3 Wedha Pradangga, volume 1 21 Wedha Pradangga, volume 2 73 Wedha Pradangga, volume 3 101 Wedha Pradangga, volume 4 121 Wedha Pradangga, volume 5 137 Wedha Pradangga, volume 6 151 INTRODUCTION TO CIBLON DRUMMING IN JAVANESE GAMELAN By Sumarsam 171 SEKAR Compiled by Sulaiman Gitosaprodjo Translated by Judith Becker 205 GAMELAN By Raden Tumenggung Purbodiningrat Translated by Stanley Hoffman 233 Contents RAD^N INU MAIN GAMELAN: BAHAN UNTUK MENERANGKAN KATA PATHET By Professor Doctor Poerbatjaraka Translated by Stanley Hoffman 261 MENERANGKAN KATA PATHET By Ki Sindoesawarno Translated by Stanley Hoffman 285 NOOT GENDHING LAN TEMBANG (Introduction) Sponsored by Sinuhun Paku Buwana X Translated by Hardja Susilo 295 ILMU KARAWITAN (Volume 1) By Ki Sindoesawarno Translated by Martin Hatch 311 ERRATA, Karawitan, Volume 1 389 VI This work is complete in three volumes. Volume 1 Articles and monographs by Martopangrawit, Sumarsam, Sastrapustaka, Gitosaprodjo, Sindoesawarno, Poerbapangrawit, and Probohardjono. Volume 2 Articles and monographs by Warsadiningrat, Sumarsam, Gitosaprodjo, Purbodiningrat, Poerbatjaraka, Sindoesawarno, and Paku Buwana X. Volume 3 Appendix 1: Glossary of technical terms mentioned in the texts. Appendix 2: Javanese cipher notation (titilaras kepatihan) of gendhing mentioned in the texts. Appendix 3: Biographies of authors. Appendix 4: Bibliograph}7 of sources mentioned by authors, translators, editors, and consultants. For information on obtaining the original versions of these translated texts, write to the Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, Publications, 130 Lane Hall, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1290 USA. vn PREFACE; AN ESSAY ON TRANSLATING THE ART OF MUSIC A. L. Becker Art and the equipment to grasp it are made in the same shop Clifford Geertz Look at the picture for a while, if you will, even if you cannot read the Javanese writing on it. It is a picture on a calendar for the months of November and December 1978. I remember Judith and I were talking then about the like- ness between the structure of Javanese music, the way plots of shadow plays are put together, and the way calendars work. In them all, to put it very abstractly, simultaneous cycles regularly coincide, sometimes all at once, sometimes in partial coincidences. This single principle seemed to make these various things (music, text-building, and time-reckoning) resemble each other. It seemed then that this is the way cultural coherence works: a few deep metaphors bind various things together, make them resonate and mutually reinforce each other, and make the world seem orderly, reasonable, and harmonious. The picture on the calendar for the months of November and December 1978 was opaque for us then. We could sound out the writing and recognize some words, but we did not know what it was a picture of or what the language meant. At the bottom was written, "cuplikan, SASTRA GENDHING, 'quoted from The Art of Music'" Most of the words turned out to be some fairly well-known verses about music and musicians from the Serat Centhini, the great, early-nineteenth-century work of philosophical poetry attributed to Sultan Paku Buwana V.1 This essay is about translating those verses, as they are shaped and framed in the picture, with an eye to revealing some of the problems of translating Javanese writing. 1The Serat Centhini {Serat Tjentini) was published in four volumes by the Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen in Batavia in 1912-1915. The verses discussed here appear in the fourth volume, page 203 (canto 276, verses 43 and 44). They are translated and discussed in Jaap Kunst's Music in Java (1973, 267-69). See also Pigeaud's Literature of Java (1967, 1:228-29), and R. M. Ng. Poerbatjaraka's Kapustakan Djawi (1952). IX A, L. Becker There are two major ways of translating poetry from a distant language: looking up the words in dictionaries, and asking people for whom the poetry is transparent to explain it. Both seem to be necessary in that they correct each other: dictionaries are often too abstract, while people are often too particular. Both methods are used in figure 1, below. In that figure, beneath the words from the calendar, which have been transliterated in roman letters (itself a major kind of translation),2 I have listed some of the definitions of these words given in various Dutch, English, German, and French dictionaries. Also included are the explanations of several knowledgeable Javanese scholars, given to us informally when we asked about this particular picture. As is common when one defines words informally, they frequently used similes to sharpen their definitions. (See, for example, in figure 1, the explanation for one of the first words, "[It is] like a kite on a long string, out of control.") Dictionaries, on the other hand, seldom use similes at all. Similes are very helpful in that they connect words to particular contexts. I hope the similes and other personal glossings included in the figure will be useful to the reader, to whom I am going to present the raw materials for a translation rather than the translation itself. I hope you will see many possible English poems emerging from the Javanese words written on our calendar. The first verse is found in the box at the top of the picture, with double- tailed cakra arrows on each side. The verse is in a Javanese poetic form called kinanthi, but even to call it a poetic form must give us pause. In modern English, highly serious, important things (such as science, philosophy, history, and the news) are presented in prose, a prose in which much of the potential aesthetic impact has been intentionally restrained. Further, it is not a prose that the reader is expected to memorize verbatim, and hence to hear as well as to see. In most of Southeast Asia, on the other hand, learning until recently was first of all memorizing, and scholars were also poets in the ever}^day sense of the word: they expressed themselves with skill in well-known poetic forms. Indeed, a basic test of the validity of a notion, I often was told, was its suitability for shaping in a traditional poetic form. Until it was so shaped, it was not knowledge. One glimpses here the tremendous political power implicit in traditional forms of language. The traditional form of language called a kinanthi is six lines long; each line, in principle, is eight syllables long. Each line must end with a syllable that contains a certain vowel sound: the first line must end with a syllable containing the vowel u, the second with i, the third with a, the fourth with i again, the fifth with a, and the sixth with another i. As one hears kinanthi over and over, one comes to recognize the sound of it: u,i,a,i,a,i . u,i9a,i,a,i, . u,Ua9i,a,i. Because 2For a discussion of the ways meaning changes under transliteration, see A. L. Becker (1983). Translating the Art of Music traditional Javanese verse is meant to be sung, several melodies also are associated with the kinanthi form.3 Figure 1 is a poetic paradigm of the kinanthi at the top of the calendar picture. Dictionary definitions of problematic words are rendered in italics; personal glosses by Javanese readers are in quotation marks.4 Figure 1 Line 1 (eight syllables, u vowel) KODHENG ANDHENDHENG GUMENDHUNG wall-eyed, stubborn, obstinate "conceited" bewildered "follows own wishes" to boast "lost memory" grand, etendu "show off" niet (meer) weten wat er "like a kite on a mal, ijdel van te denken, long string, out of grootspreken er niets van control" begrijpen zich in de lengte "lost mind" uitstrekken, en traag, langwijlig, voortmaken 3See, for example, Prawiradihardja (1939, 11); Tembang Djawa (1943, 14, 78); Tjitrosomo (1949, 89); Hardjasubrata (1951, 21, 22); Wignjosoeworo (1957, 7); and Kodiron (1968, 5). 4The dictionaries used are: for English, Elinor Clark Horne, Javanese-English Dictionary (1974); for Dutch, Th.

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