Critically-acclaimed, prolific author of our time, Eka Kurniawan, has been gleaning flatteries in recent years. The film adaptation for one of his books, Seperti Dendam, Rindu Harus Dibayar Tuntas only inevitably turns more curious eyes in his direction. In his intermingled accounts of Javanese oral folklores and historical alterations, readers are besieged with a staggering amount of violence and bizarre, almost comical happenings befalling the characters. The idiosyncratic deceit in his style, though, lies in the proses laden with semen, blood, excrement, and urine—and women begging to be raped by their lovers, with “Perkosalah aku, Mas!” that rings as a catchphrase throughout some of his works. The bold grotesquerie of a blend recalls to mind that good ol’ formulaic Hollywood action. Devouring his irresistibly tempting whole body of works, the concrete details may defeat one, but a single narrative excess resists such lapses in memory: inanimate objects voiced as having consciousness. One of them being his sentient breasts.
Many consider the spine his works to be of the same ilk as novel stensilan, viz., cheap, pornographic novels sold under the counter—incidentally also the precocious pastime that lands Kurniawan in his teacher’s office for discipline back in school. Insofar as the intensely voyeuristic depictions, the male characters have their fair share of being mauled apart, yet the abrasive and posturing phallus parades exclusively through scenes warranting a sexual intercourse. When contrasted to the prose replete with patchy waxworks of women’s bare bodies panned over in pornographic detail, the male seems to only be given a cursory glance. At my leisure, we will see whether this allusion to the female bodies translates over as misogynistic, or rather, an integral seam to the taut fabric of his clean, straightforward prose. There is no better place to unravel the threads than the actual translation of the novel Lelaki Harimau, rendered into Man Tiger by Labodalih Sembiring.
Poring over the first three chapters, there is a barrage of sordid portrayals that Sembiring opted not to impart in the target language. Laila, who is a teenager, is written as follows: “Pada umur enam belas tahun, ia sudah terlalu montok sebagai anak sekolah, dada dan pahanya jadi sasaran jahil teman lelaki dan gurunya …” (p. 18). Impervious to the minutiae, Sembiring evidently penned over “dada dan paha” (breasts and thighs) with “By the age of sixteen, she was an exceptionally curvaceous schoolgirl, and a target for the boys as well as the teachers …” (p. 18). A similar case betided Kurniawan’s gratuitous description of another character’s breasts as hidden, untouched treasures, “sepasang dada ranum merupakan kekayaannya yang tersembunyi, belum terjamah” (p. 153). Sembiring ably blotted out this conspicuously objectifying representation, referring to the character as “five foot two and slender.” (p.72).
In translating, one may ricochet between the strategies of omission and simplification. The former, Baker (1992) categorized into three, one of which is done if the meaning conveyed by a particular word or expression is not as crucial to the development of the text to justify the meandering derailment.¹ Simplification speaks for itself, defined as the tendency to simplify the language through shortened sentences, simpler structure, and less ambiguous expressions (Toury, 1995).² No matter, there exists an expansive array of translation methods and devices, and risqué images may be exempt for reasons pertaining to style. The rules and irregularities of language are at the mercy of the writer indeed. By the same token, it seems a forgone conclusion that Sembiring esteemed this dispensable.
The pattern endures with Sembiring discounting out the crude particulars. Immersed in his reverie of Mameh’s breasts, Kurniawan likened them to reddish balloons with brown buds, “Ia suka daging pejalnya … Gumpalan itu membuncit, ranum dan kemilau serupa balon baru diembus, kemerahan dengan kuncup warna cokelat.” (p. 71). Be it as bulging lumps or bloating flesh, his enthusiasm for breasts did not falter but escalate in his imagining of the teenager’s first brush with puberty. Mameh’s unwearied exploration of the changes in her body wends in the same fashion, with “dengan dada bengkak itu” (p. 71) and “gundukan dadanya” (p. 72), meaning “swelling breasts” and “the mound of her chest.” Yet again, Sembiring toned them down with “growing” and “new figure.” From this man’s pertinacity to portraying female characters becoming consumingly transfixed with their breasts, it is as though I have only learned girlhood myself as a woman.
Kurniawan generously assigned active words to the breasts, such as “bulging,” “swaying,” “squirming,” “shaking,” and “protruding.” Drably so in this passage of Laila, “Si sulung Laila … Cantik dengan dada yang menyerobot menggoda, kulit selembut potongan keju, dengan wajah lembab …” (p. 18) which Sembiring simplified as, “She was beautiful and full figured with a flawless, dewy complexion.” (p. 18). The explicitly obscene description of Laila’s chest “menyerobot menggoda” which can be poorly translated into “protruding like a tease” is substituted with “full figured,” assuaging the raunchy impression. Likewise, Kurniawan’s “dada yang bergoyang terguncang-guncang” (p. 72) is neutralized into “bold and curvaceous mature women” by Sembiring. Ergo, the message is seamlessly woven into without the wincing dregs of a sexual nature.
One might wonder what these breasts would amount to given the chance, perhaps a somersault? Cartwheel across the room? Develop consciousness? Wreak havoc on earth and siphon off the cash as plagues rise and children perish? Orchestrate the fall of civilizations? Execute dominion over this realm and all existing pluralistic universes? Instances of sentient breasts abound, but the common denominator remains: through omission and simplification, Sembiring highlighted the plot without the jarring innuendo that scarcely carries its weight.
Laura Mulvey in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, introduces a drive known as “scopophilia” that is the sexual pleasure involved in the act of looking, redounding to women to be characterized by their “to-be-looked-at-ness.” The masculine scopophilia in films takes the form of generic montages creeping in slow-motion shots over mouths, pelvises, breasts, and other dismembered body parts. For the uninitiated, the theory of Male Gaze is defined as portrayals of women and the world around them from a cisgender, heterosexual, masculine point of view. Mulvey breaks down the Male Gaze into three components: 1) the person behind the camera who satisfies this need by dishing out, 2) the women as a spectacle for, 3) the male spectator or the “bearer of the look.” They go hand-in-hand, dilly-dallying through a flower field of male fantasies.
Women locked under the male gaze are rigorously dehumanized into an object whose values reside in their conventional beauty and sex appeal. French thinker Hélène Cixous dubbed this cosmic solipsism of the male “masculine writing.” Interchangeably termed “phallogocentric writing,” Cixous reasoned that men write with their “little pocket signifier” of the penis, phallus, and pen.³ Male domination is to be credited for masculine writing that spurs out of a man’s genital and libidinal economy to reign supreme over “feminine writing.” The foundation of the literary world, after all, is that of the white men—rendering writers and readers alike ill-equipped to dismantle the male gaze. Cixous urged women to “write out of the world men constructed for women” in her explication of “feminine writing.” Many literary witches have thence tipped the scales by their gutsy challenging of ideologically problematic narratives, necessitating for conversations on important issues through the female perspective. The nomenclature aside, “feminine writing” as such is one that transforms the way the world speaks, thinks, and acts⁴—much like the female gaze in film studies, which Hannah Wilke (1976) described eloquently so:
“I am concerned with the creation of a formal imagery that is specifically female, a language that fuses mind and body into erotic objects that are name-able and at the same time, quite abstract. The content is always related to my own body and feelings, reflecting pleasure as well as pain, the ambiguity and complexity of emotions. Human gestures, multi-layered metaphysical symbols below the gut level translated into an art close to laughter.”
Neither the female gaze nor feminine writing is a conservative, reactionary grievance to sexual liberation nor is it meant to develop a specifically female articulation that is ultimately problematized by biological determinism and essentialism, but rather, it is a tool to disillusion ourselves from the spurious magic of the dangerously shallow notion of agency. There exist facets to power, suppressed or repressed, with the erotic being one. At the dawning of capitalism, female sexuality was both seen as a powerful economic force and a social threat to the patriarchal, masculine structures. The restriction of women’s sexuality to marriage, procreation of labor workers, and wifely unconditional obedience was instituted in every country—embellished as the pillar of social morality and political stability. With female sexuality being painted as the instrument of the Devil, if otherwise unquestionably moral and a pristine representation of chastity, women were accused of bewitching men with their ‘glamour.’ Desires in women have been corrupted and stretched so far back into stifling distortions, into the pornographic, but the erotic and the pornographic are diametrically opposed and in an antagonistic relationship with one another.
Under the guise of female liberation, slobbering louts posing as authors and directors are given carte blanche to ladle out protracted, lascivious nude scenes murky with coarse vulgarity. Their brand of perversion gloats unchallenged, owing to the mainstream media’s coding the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order through docile and active complicity. As the pornographic reproduces the ideologies of domination by rote, women are further alienated from the erotic, the sensual, the emotional—consequently from their sexualities and connections to one another. For such reasons, Audre Lorde advocates for women to envisage the erotic as a resource within us, embedded in the power of the unexpressed and unrecognized. In the devastatingly brilliant essay Uses of the Erotic, Lorde wrote:
“The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.”
This power has been vilified, abused, and devalued by the oppressors as a sign of inferiority. To write outside the world of men is then to wrestle out of male models of power, to replenish this powerful force. Once women are deeply emotionally connected to all aspects of life, they become empowered to demand for themselves and life pursuits to be in accordance to the unbridled joy within their reach. If anything, reclaiming of the erotic liberates women from the shackles and illuminates their actions upon the world around them. It enables women to discard the oppressive lens coercing them into settling for conventional choices, for the shoddy, the merely convenient, the illusory safety.
¹ Mona Baker, In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 26–42.
² Gideon Toury, “The Notion of ‘Assumed Translation’-An Invitation to a New Discussion” in In Henri Bloemen, Erik Hertog and Winibert Segers (eds) Letterlijkheid Woordelijkheid: Literality, Verbality (Antwerpen and Hermelen: Fantom, 1995), p. 135–47.
³ Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clement, “Sorties,” in The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 65.
⁴ Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtviron (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 245.
