Destruction of Bekisar Merah: Antoine Berman’s Deforming Tendencies in The Red Bekisar

Christy Maya Uktolseya

doi:10.9744/kata.19.2.41-47

Abstract

Bekisar Merah , a novel by prominent Indonesian writer Ahmad Tohari, had been translated into its English version The Red Bekisar. Being a literary work that is thick with Javanese culture with all its depth and uniqueness to the global literary world, the original work is compared to the translated work and furthermore analyzed using Antoine Berman’s ‘negative analysis.’ Berman suggested that in translating a foreign text, foreign elements should be kept and not be destroyed by familiarizing them to the receiving culture. Using the ‘deforming tendencies’ in his concept, three foreign deforming tendencies can be found in The Red Bekisar: the destruction of underlying network signification, the destruction of the linguistic patterns, and the destruction of vernacular patterns or their exoticization. Through the samples taken and the analysis, it is found that the three deforming tendencies are making drastic changes and even loss to many elements in the novel, such as their meanings, unity, rhythm, degree, coherence in the line of thoughts, and the richness in the foreign elements.

Highlights

Bekisar Merah is a 2011 novel by Indonesian writer Ahmad Tohari, a writer famous for his 1982 work Ronggeng Dukuh Paruk which has been translated into four other languages, which are Japanese, German, Dutch, and English
The original work is very thick of Javanese values and ambience, and the values are reflected in how the characters think and act, which if brought up internationally, can display the value, depth, and uniqueness of Javanese culture and how it exists sideby-side with the culture in big cities, such as Jakarta
In Red Bekisar, three of Berman‟s deforming tendencies are strongly displayed, which are the destruction of underlying networks of signification, the destruction of linguistic patternings, and the destruction of vernacular networks or their exoticization

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Bekisar Merah is a 2011 novel by Indonesian writer Ahmad Tohari, a writer famous for his 1982 work Ronggeng Dukuh Paruk which has been translated into four other languages, which are Japanese, German, Dutch, and English. The original work is very thick of Javanese values and ambience, and the values are reflected in how the characters think and act, which if brought up internationally, can display the value, depth, and uniqueness of Javanese culture and how it exists sideby-side with the culture in big cities, such as Jakarta It would be interesting, to examine The Red. Bekisar, the English-translated version of Bekisar Merah, and see how the translator tries to do justice in translating this text. The first deforming tendency that appears in Red Bekisar is the destruction of underlying networks of signification As explained above, this would mean the ignorance of words that appear unimportant or inessential, which is not true because these words create a network with other words and help build the idea as a whole, as a unity. Another example in which unity is destroyed can be seen in the untranslated sekejap

CHAPTER 1

CONCLUSION