Ronit Ricci

This anonymous and undated tale forms part of a corpus of stories narrating the conversion efforts and successes of the wali sanga, the nine "saints" to whom tradition attributes the spread of Islam on Java. The conversion of the Indonesian archipelago was a gradual process, and there is little unambiguous evidence of its earliest stages. The walis are said to have lived in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and to have converted local people by way of their special powers, miracle working, and willingness to accommodate local culture. This tale was written down by A. M. Noertjahajo, who heard it from elders at the Demak Mosque in the 1970s. The key to understanding this story lies in realizing that it is in dialogue with the Mahabharata, one of the two great Indian epics that were transmitted to Java and, in their localized forms, had a lasting and profound impact on its literature, performing and plastic arts, language, and social and political ideals. To this day, many of the shadow puppet performances in Java (wayang kulit or wayang purwa) are based on scenes from the Mahabharata, with the Great War (Bratayuda) constituting a popular favorite. Readers should pay special attention to the interface between the epic and the conversion tale. Prince Darmakusuma is one of the names by which Yudhishtira, the eldest of the Pandawa brothers in the Mahabharata, is known. In the tale he meets Sunan 56

In his insightful essay, "Silence Across Languages," (1995) A.L. Becker suggested that every language consists of a particular balance between speech and silence: between what can be expressed in words and what must remain unspoken. One important implication of this fact, he further claimed, is that the different silences between and across languages make translation very difficult, if not utopian. Taking Becker's essay as its starting point this essay explores the question of silence and sound in translation through a study of interlinear translation. An inter-linear translation in which each line is Arabic is followed by its translation into Malay constitutes a microcosm in which to view the act of translation from up close and in detail. The essay suggests that it is also a space in which silences are "not allowed," or must be overcome, as these translations do not offer the luxury of adaptation and re-tellings where words, idioms, grammatical and syntactical elements can be glossed over, ignored or remain unheard. An interlinear space forces the scribe, translator, reader and listener to produce and pronounce the sounds of different languages even when they are "incompatible" and thus may overcome the silences, in however small a way, and offer us a paradigm of "sound across languages."

Interlinear translations from Arabic into Malay and Javanese have been produced in Southeast Asia since at least the sixteenth century. Such translations included an Arabic original with its lines spaced out on the page and a word for word translation appearing between the lines, attempting to replicate the Arabic down to the smallest detail. This essay engages with the theme of World Literature and translation by (1) considering the interlinear text as microcosm: a world of intent and priorities, of a transfer of meaning, of grammar and syntax in translation, of choices and debates, and (2) by thinking of Arabic writing during an earlier period as a world literature sought after in many regions, whose translation in diverse forms and tongues had a vast impact on languages and literary cultures.

Gerard Genette's notion of the paratext as 'a threshold of interpretation' is employed in this article to explore a host of paratexts in late nineteenth century Javanese manuscripts from the Pura Pakualaman court library in Yogyakarta, Indo-nesia. Although paratexts were used in earlier years, especially in the form of illuminated opening pages, verse and metrical markers and some (often very brief) information about authors and scribes, the fijinal decades of the nineteenth century and fijirst two of the twentieth saw major shifts in the kind of paratexts employed, reflecting, I suggest, wider changes in practices of reading, writing and the transmission of knowledge.

Networks of travel and trade have often been viewed as central to understanding interactions among Muslims across South and Southeast Asia. In this paper I suggest that we consider language and literature as an additional type of network, one that provided a powerful site of contact and exchange facilitated by, and drawing on, citation. I draw on textual sources written in Javanese, Malay, and Tamil between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries to argue that among Muslim communities in South and Southeast Asia, practices of reading, learning, translating, adapting, and transmitting contributed to the shaping of a cosmopolitan sphere that was both closely connected with the broader, universal Muslim community and rooted in local identities. I consider a series of 'citation sites' in an attempt to explore one among many modes of inter-Asian connections, highlighting how citations, simple or brief as they may often seem, are sites of shared memories, history, and narrative traditions and, in the case of Islamic literature, also sites of a common bond to a cosmopolitan and sanctified Arabic.