H. Maier Tales of Hang Tuah; in Search of Wisdom and Good Behavior
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H. Maier Tales of Hang Tuah; In search of wisdom and good behavior In: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Encompassing knowledgeIndigenous encyclopedias from ninth-century Java to twentieth-century Riau 155 (1999), no: 3, Leiden, 342- 361 This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 07:42:15PM via free access H.M.J. MAIER Tales of Hang Tuah In Search of Wisdom and Good Behavior This is an elegant Malay sentence: Ini Hikayat Hang Tuah yang amat setiawan pada tuannya dan terlalu sangat berbuat kebaktian kepada tuannya. It is the first sentence of a manuscript which, in its transliterated and printed form, is usually entitled Hikayat Hang Tuah and has become a manifestation of modern times. Hikayat Hang Tuah, 'The Tale of Hang Tuah': by giving that title to this text, its readers seem to have reacted upon the first words of this first sentence. Ini Hikayat Hang Tuah: it could be translated as 'this is the Tale of Hang Tuah', and that is how we now usually refer to this work in English. Hikayat Hang Tuah has been preserved in some twenty versions of which the similarities are so much stronger than the differences that they can be brought together under a single title, even though Hikayat Hang Tuah itself remains a distant object beyond these material appearances. An unreachable being, attractive and absorbing. 'The Tale of Hang Tuah' has an aura, in other words, even for some modern readers. Titles are shortcuts. Singling out some features from a longer or shorter series of words, they steer readers towards certain significations as much as they keep them away from others: we assume that Hang Tuah is to be the central hero of this narrative and that everything that follows should be made to accommodate him. But then, modern writing has made it abun- dantly clear that this assumption may turn out to be wrong: the tale that fol- lows may resist such a centripetal reading. Translations tend to be shortcuts, too. 'This is the tale of Hang Tuah' silences other translations, and if anything, this silence should make us aware once again of the exuberances and deficiencies in the two discursive formations or languages - Malay and English - involved. The Malay, ini Hikayat Hang Tuah, opens up to the English 'this is the Tale of-Hang Tuah'. Linguists teil us that Malay has neither tense nor copula, nei- ther article nor difference between plural and singular, all of them grammat- ical notions that we use to systematize European languages such as English and Dutch. Thus, ini Hikayat Hang Tuah also opens up to 'this is a tale of Hang Tuah', and to 'these are the tales of Hang Tuah', and to 'these were the tales of Hang Tuah', to 'this was the tale of Hang Tuah' and to 'these are tales BKI155-3 (1999) Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 07:42:15PM via free access Taks of Hang Tuah 343 of Hang Tuah'. And to 'these were tales of Hang Tuah' and 'this was a tale of Hang Tuah', for that matter. Needless to say that these different translations are connected with dif- ferent significations, different networks of meanings. By choosing one of them, we silence the networks that are evoked by the others. How to oper- ate? How could we read Hikayat Hang Tuah as one tale and a string of tales at once? How could we combine our appreciation of a narrator who summa- rizes a tale he already knows, pretended or not, with a narrator who is going to teil us a tale and pretends he does not know yet how he is going to work towards the end? How to accommodate the suggestion that in the following only one or some tales about Hang Tuah will be told with the suggestion that we will be told the definite tale or tales about Hang Tuah? The translation of the four Malay words could be extended into other directions. Towards 'these are the tales of the honorable Luck', for instance: tuah is the Malay word, Wilkinson's dictionary tells us, for 'luck', a word that not only in connection with 'fortunate' creates another number of silences and differences. Ini Hikayat Hang Tuah could even be translated with 'this is the tale of you, Fortunate', as hang refers to a second-person pronoun in cer- tain forms of Malay. At least, that is what Wilkinson tells us in his seductive dictionary. Ini Hikayat Hang Tuah: the efforts to translate the opening words of Hikayat Hang Tuah should make us conclude that Malay words evoke con- siderably more networks of signification than the English 'this is the Tale of Hang Tuah'. The sentence opens up to distinct interpretations at once, in themselves as well as in dialogues with other sentences more or less directly connected with them. In short, a polyphony of voices and a cacophony of meanings emerge from a simple sentence. In this act of translation, the act of transforming one sentence into another, we are made aware that we say less than we wish to, and that we say more than we know (Becker 1995:5). And in this welter of deficiencies and exuberances - Becker gave these words of Ortega y Gasset new wings - there are the silences which may well be the most essential feature of every form of languaging. These very silences should make us aware of a great loss: in 'this is the Tale of Hang Tuah', parts of the concert of significations of ini Hikayat Hang Tuah is made invisible and inaudible. Perhaps Malay heterogeneity is best expressed in 'these are tales of Hang Tuah' for the first sentence, 'Tales of Hang Tuah' for the title. The feeling of loss, however, remains with us. Never again will we look at an English or a Malay sentence with the same self-con- fident eyes. Every act of translating feels, indeed, like moving up and down the rungs of our experience, as on a ladder that extends to the interior of the earth and disappears in the clouds at once. Our awareness of these silenced echoes is only expanding when we con- Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 07:42:15PM via free access 344 HM.]. Maier neet the Malay phrase with the following words yang amat setiawan pada tuannya dan terlalu sangat berbuat kebaktian kepada tuannya. The phrase or sentence could be instantly transferred to 'the one who was very faithful to his lord and performed very many services for his lord'. However, mind the shortcuts again. Should it be presented in the past or in the present tense? We could wonder if perhaps 'loyal' is a more appropriate word than 'faithful', and what the difference is between these two words.' And does the term 'appropriate' not make an appeal to commemoration and tradition, two notions that seem to be more relevant in the dynamics of Malay writing than in those of English writing? 'Lord' or 'master', 'ruler' or 'boss'? And as for the word kebaktian: what do we gain and lose by the translation of 'services' instead of 'honorable deeds'? And once again we can only be overwhelmed by an anxious awareness of the black holes - a more appropriate term for writing and seeing - that we are bound to leave unfilled in Malay as well as in English. Most linguists would argue that a single sentence such as the one in the above is a personal speech act, a performance that could (and should) be judged and interpreted in terms of a set of rules, a grammar, a vocabulary which comprises the Malay language, in itself a self-contained abstraction. The sentence invites us, so to speak, to construct a hierarchical network of oppositions and correspondences, differences and similarities, which on a higher level would form part of the structure of the Malay language as a whole. Every individual sentence that is thought to be a manifestation of Malay can be reduced and analyzed in terms of this stucture of abstract forms - and thus it can be adequately translated. Frorri that perspective, we read the sentence ini Hikayat Hang Tuah yang amat setiawan pada tuannya dan terlalu sangat berbuat kebaktian kepada tuannya in terms of the impulse towards a configuration of rules, an order, a grammar, a dictionary which, in the absence of a more appropriate term, could be called 'the Malay language'. It has become almost self-evident to look for correspondences to this self-contained system of language, and con- struct concurrent systems of literary, moral, ethical, esthetic, judicial, political norms and fprms, equally constructed by a network of correspondences and differences, similarities and oppositions (and eventually identities). Altogether they would comprise 'Malay culture' - and the major features and fragments of this 'Malay culture' we will find represented in modern ency- clopedias. In the Encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch-lndië, for instance, and in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, to mention only two of those massive mam- moths of information and knowledge. •. • , The impulse towards a categorization of words, towards taxonomies, classifications, structures, and systems can be found in many fields of pres- ent-day life, and altogether they could be called an encyclopedie impulse, to Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 07:42:15PM via free access Taks of Hang Tuah 345 use the felicitous term Day and Derks have coined in their essay for this vol- ume. Within contemporary Westerns paradigms, this encyclopedie impulse takes the shape of a drive to shape a circle of learning, a construction that is based on certain rules of correspondences and differences, with distinct bor- derlines and clear-cut boundaries.