Stephen J. Epstein
On Translating “S*lent” by Triskaidekaman
Triskaidekaman’s satirical Cad*l: Sebuah Novel Tanpa Huruf E (literally, Lisp*r: A Novel without the Letter E) takes as its starting point a dictator’s decision to ban the letter “e” in his country. Inventive, imaginative, and ambitious—as well as accessible, disturbing, and droll—Cad*l was selected as a Noteworthy Manuscript in the 2019 Jakarta Arts Council’s Novel Competition and longlisted for Tempo’s Best Prose Work of 2020.
When I received an offer to translate the text, the first lipogrammatic novel published in Indonesian, I was immediately intrigued and equally terrified. Literary translation is always challenging, but the limits that authors impose upon themselves with lipogrammatic works can grow in translation, as details must be retained while many target text choices are foreclosed. I was uncertain whether I’d enjoy the task or be left wanting to tear out what hair I have left.
I knew that translations of lipogrammatic texts exist, such as Georges Perec’s La Disparition from French, rendered in Gilbert Adair’s prize-winning A Void, and Charu Nivedita’s Zero Degree from Tamil, whose English version ignores the idiosyncratic source text restrictions. But as far as I can ascertain, no similarly constrained English-language version of a lipogrammatic novel from an Asian language has ever been published. As such, I felt that a translation would carry significance, and I got in touch with the author to discuss the project in further detail. Fortunately, Triskaidekaman speaks and reads English and appreciated the multiple changes necessary for the target text. Her open attitude and willingness to allow creative solutions has made addressing the numerous challenges posed easier. She and I have stayed in close contact throughout the translation process to consider the modifications, additions, and deletions required to bring the work into English. Our warm exchanges have reassured me that I am staying true to her wishes even in fancier flights of necessary departure from the original.
My working title for the English version, S*lent, itself suggests a crucial change from the original: the dictatorial decision to ban the letter “e” rests upon the fact that in Indonesian “e” is the vowel that carries the most clearly demarcated pronunciations and thus comes to represent two-faced action, hypocrisy, fickleness, and deceit. English, however, with a complex orthography that allows abundant pronunciations for every vowel, necessitates a different approach. Why might an overzealous dictator ban a letter? After discussion (and a hat tip here to fellow translator Brian Bergstrom for the initial suggestion), Triskaidekaman and I decided that the English version would eliminate the letter “i”, because its use alone as a first-person pronoun can readily represent negative traits associated with self-interest and selfishness, as well as the impact of global networks upon the text’s fictional republic. We jointly composed a few additional sentences for insertion early on to highlight this variant justification of the narrative. In addition, whereas in English the logic of the ban is orthographic, the removal of the letter “e” in the fictional world of the Indonesian text also points to phonology (the dictator himself had struggled with the letter’s pronunciations early in his life), and so a few later passages also needed to be deleted.
The challenges, however, only begin here. In Indonesian, “e” is the third most common letter, behind “a” and “n”. “I” is only the fourth most used letter in English, making composition without it perhaps slightly easier than without “e”. However, its elimination still imposes fierce constraints. Tabooed in my target text, for example, are “it”, “is”, “him”, “his”, “this”, “will,” all “-ing” forms, and the many words that end in “-tion”. Notably difficult for me has been the loss of prepositions “with” and “in”, the deficit making “to” and “for” work overtime. Some problems have proven easier to deal with than expected: creative reworking of sentence structure and the occasional less-natural-than-desired repetition of a name have generally served well in dealing with the loss of “him” and “his.”
Of course, the rationale for the elimination of “i” imports into the English version a major challenge absent from the original: first-person narration becomes a formidable hurdle and, as the excerpt published in Washington Square Review suggests, the text contains extended passages in this mode. One way I’ve dealt with the loss of “i” has been to focus on the body rather than a conscious actor as the subject: “I saw” becomes, for example, “my eyes landed upon”, and “I took” became “my hands reached for”. Likewise, a reversal of voice from active to passive yielded useful paraphrase: “I realized” equated to “The thought occurred to me”. Even when fluent, though, these circumlocutions inevitably give the text a stylized and often formal, but hopefully not stilted, tone. Other solutions to deal with the loss of “i” include permitting the dictator to speak with the royal “we”. In the novel’s last sections, which are told in quasi-journal form from the perspective of a character called Pete as he awaits his death sentence, I largely engaged in subject omission—as often occurs in diaries. Over the course of a 60,000-word text, will these methods for addressing the problem lose effectiveness? The jury is out.
Difficult issues also came from less expected quarters: the word “time” proved especially thorny; when its Indonesian equivalent waktu appears, changes to sentence structure were often needed. Dealing with pertama (“first”) also necessitated imaginative reworking. English has no obvious “i”-less synonyms here, and the word crops up often. Perhaps surprisingly, “first” appears in the 100 most frequently used words in English. Turning to a thesaurus regularly provokes frustration: even when two dozen synonyms for a given word are presented, all too often they contain an “i”, and the one or two remaining options do not suit the context. A typical strategy I employed here was to compose a suitably “I”-less paraphrase while trying to limit departure from the original as much as possible.
These intractable words often led to diverse solutions. One character, for example, is likened to a durian in the way he incites polarized reactions. What to do here? Its nickname, “the king of fruits,” does not work in the target text, nor any use of the word “fruit”, and my imaginations of “i”-less descriptions became hopelessly arch: “a food found on local trees whose creamy texture and sweet taste was beloved of some but whose powerful odor repelled others.” A simpler solution? Perhaps another polarizing food, even if it lacks tropical “flavor”, and so I turn to “oyster.”
Conversely, English at times can readily use words that elicit coinages in the original. One way Triskaidekaman dealt with some inadmissible common words in the original Indonesian text was to create new terms with explanatory footnotes, a strategy I have so far chosen to avoid. For example, because Indonesian is a language that enjoys acronyms that borrow syllables from a term’s component parts, a “text message” (pesan teks) becomes a sansing in Cad*l, explained as a surat singkat (“short letter”) in a footnote, which avoids the “e” of pesan while still recalling the word. But I had no need to travel this route: “SMS” or “text” work just fine with the English constraints.
As in the world of the novel itself, the initial decision to make a letter taboo has multiple flow-on effects, and almost all characters’ names, often deliberately chosen for sardonic meaning, were changes for the English because they contained an “i”. The opening section of the novel introduces the dictator, whose regnal name in the original—Zaliman Yang Mulia—derives from zalim (violent, savage, fierce), with the ennobling epithet yang mulia (glorious, august). Zaliman called to mind Solomon as a name source to be played on in translation, Sulaiman being common in Indonesian. Triskaidekaman herself suggested the even more appropriately autocratic Soloman. I began riffing on absurd epithets, reaching “Soloman the Most Totally Awesome, Yet Approachably Humble”, but wound up dialing the silliness back. Given the text's interest in hypocrisy, however, the oxymoron works well and the author and I decided to retain a fuller regnal name for Soloman’s decrees.
The original text’s Ivan Barbarovich Barbarov underwent a simpler change of first name to Sasha, but Russian patronymics simply do not carry into the new constraints—one of many lesser details unfortunately lost at the cost of some humor. Sasha also moves from Russia to an “i”-less state in the former Soviet Union, Kazakhstan, which, as a multicultural, oil-producing state with an Islamic connection, works well as a substitute. Several names in the original satirically derive from mildly obscene Indonesian words in which syllables have been omitted, often containing the letter “e” to highlight Luhurjaya’s idiosyncratic naming practices. The protagonist, for example, is Lamin, derived from kelamin (“genitalia”) with the “e” dropped. Given Solomon’s ban on such names, as well as the letter “i”, our main character now sees an “r” lopped off his proud Peter, leaving him as just Pete, a lesser version of himself.
By making the fictional republic Luhurjaya heavily influenced by English, much as Indonesia is, the potential incongruity of Anglophone names is removed, but I faced yet another challenge: Triskaidekaman uses anagrams for some key names in the source text. Zaliman, for example is born Gandhi Praburasa. Triskaidekaman had chosen Gandhi for plot reasons because, despite the sanctification that Gandhi has generally experienced, many have regarded him in antithetical fashion. As a youngster, Gandhi writes poetry under the pen name Bagus Prihardana, an anagram of his real name, and Bagus figures prominently in the text, as seen in the novel’s opening. A logical problem arose here, however: Triskaidekaman considers anagrams to be so unusual in Indonesian that the character potentially outing himself by choosing an anagram of his real name to write under does not have the jarringly illogical effect it does in English, where many—conspiracy theorists not least among them—regularly seek anagrams. In the end Triskaidekaman agreed that it was best to forgo the anagrams entirely; I did not object!
My approach overall, then, has been to aim at equivalence of tone and style rather than capturing a particular correspondence. In the source text for the novel’s opening, Lamin (Pete) refers to a tycoon named Bob Dinosauros. This is Triskaidekaman’s transformation of Bob Sadino (Bambang Mustari Sadino), a fabulously wealthy Indonesian entrepreneur known for his unpretentious, avuncular style. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk may forego the “i”, but don’t call to mind Sadino. Inspiration took hold with an opportunity to add to the humor: given that Sadino started from a small business and was eager to motivate others, the English version characterizes Pete as wanting “to become the next Warren Buffett—made of money, the sort of man who could do parents proud. A Warren Muppet, so to speak.”
The dystopian text intersects with aspects of contemporary Indonesian society and politics even as it distorts them through its fictional lens, thus critiquing the corrupting nature of power and the perils of callous bureaucracies. As the author developed the storyline in early 2019, Indonesia was in the run-up to its largest general elections ever (recently overtaken in the 2024 round); the frenzied atmosphere highlighting a reality in which friends could suddenly become enemies because of careless word choices. The novel thus recalls 1984 in invoking the deformation of language, but with a twist in which form reflects content.
As a way of responding to this mood, Cad*l is set in a literal “banana republic”, whose inhabitants have a preternatural interest in the fruit and consume it as the primary staple of their diet. Zaliman ostensibly acts to enhance the prestige of his nation and embarks upon a series of reforms to elevate his people’s culture. Through a series of flashbacks, readers discover secrets from his past and come to understand his shame over two-faced behavior that leads to the radical edict: as Bagus, the angry young dissident poet, he had railed against an intrusive government until he too was caught up in its machinery and co-opted. In his poetry, Bagus had skewered the prior regime’s excesses through vivid banana metaphors and the elimination of the letter that, for him, symbolized hypocrisy and egotism. He now desperately seeks to bury knowledge of his past and his earlier poetic work. Some related aspects of the text here landed in the too-hard basket, however. Triskaidekaman, in fact, had composed lipogrammatic poems in Bagus’ voice, and a collection was published as a limited bonus for pre-order purchase of the novel, with five other poems included as an appendix to the full novel. With Triskaidekaman’s approval, my solution has simply been to remove this ancillary aspect of the original—at least for now. Lipogrammatic poetry translation truly would leave me without hair.
Ultimately, the process of “translation” for S*lent, which has so often required rewriting and creative adaptation in partnership with the author, makes it a useful case in literary translation studies. In consulting for solutions, the author and I have necessarily made our priority a text that works in the target language and retains fidelity to her overall creative vision rather than the original text. The time-consuming process has been occasionally exasperatingly difficult and left me too feeling tongue-tied and s*lent, but there is also no question that it has been rewarding and fascinating.
Associate Professor Stephen J. Epstein teaches in the School of Languages and Cultures at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
Triskaidekaman writes speculative fiction and has been nominated for numerous Indonesian literary awards. S*lent was originally published in Indonesian as Cad*l by Gramedia Pustaka Utama.