In 2009, Benedict Anderson published an article in the New Left Review that sought to address the troubling fact that “over the 110 years of announcements of winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, there has never been an awardee from any country in Southeast Asia.” In exploring potential causes for this absence of recognition, he and other theorists pointed to ruling elites with little interest in supporting professional translations, the absence of influential literary agents, translators who prioritized political activism over literary sensibilities, and, importantly, the relative seclusion of national languages in the region, which, in Anderson’s words, has deprived literary works of a “transnational aura.” However, over the past decade, this context has begun to change. Attention has grown for Indonesian fiction in translation in particular, leading to an unprecedented rise in the country’s representation in international literary prizes. Combining critical reflections on personal translation experiences with analyses of recent prize-winning translations from the Indonesian, this talk attends to what is seen as the problem of the Indonesian language’s secluded nationalism and how contemporary translators have engaged the archipelago’s texts in such a way that challenges this description.

Photo Credit: Miguel Covarrubias, Pageant of the Pacific. Courtesy of the American Geographical Society Library Digital Map Collection.