Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Indonesian author, Eka Kumiawan

https://youtu.be/WKhgA-ejYBE
At the link above is a YouTube side show of photos I took on 17 September 2015 of Indonesian author Eka Kumiawan, appearing with one of his translators, Annie Tucker, at an interview, with readings, arranged by the Center for the Art of Translation, San Francisco, at Green Apple Books on the Park, San Francisco.

The powerful attached review from the 22 October 2015 issue of The New York of Books touches on Mr. Kumiawan's first novel but does not have the benefit of what Mr. Kumiawan reported at Green Apple Books:  
<http://www.nybooks.com/shared/d8e268a70da2d511e728f32fc9aa76cc>   
The fragmented style in his first novel, Beauty is a Wound, becomes understandable if you were present at Green Apple Books and learned that literature was not available to him in the Sukarno era that ruled his early life  -- only violent comic books and sentimental Western romance novels and other odd inspirations as ways to write about the horrific world he was born into during a period of extreme political repression, including mass murder, rape, etc.  His later novel, Man Tiger (a man possessed by a female tiger), is far more linear and unified.  At a session about translation, one learned how difficult it would be to give an English counterpart to the much different language structure of the original.