Without translation I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. [The translator] introduces me to the world. Italo Calvino
As a youngster, “vacation” was for me an unknown term. Never once in my memory did my parents open an atlas and engage their children in a discussion of where we might like to go for vacation in the coming summer. Occasionally, they would speak of the need to take a day off—usually to attend a family-related event, a Schraufnagel reunion in Glidden, for instance—but the idea of going to a resort town and staying there for a night or two, even one as close as Wisconsin Dells, which was only thirty-four miles distant, was never an option.
Because there were cows to be milked both morning and night, the farthest destination to which we could travel in a day was determined by how far the car could take us after morning chores with enough hours remaining to return to Glynnspring in time for the evening milking. Even after I entered grade school in 1958 and my father had switched professions from farmer to mailman, the thought of a family “vacation” would have been ruled absurd. What with there now being eight children in the house, with ages ranging from 6 months to 16 years, there was simply no way the ten of us could fit comfortably in the family car with suitcases and provisions and cruise down the highway to Chicago to or up the interstate to Minneapolis. So it was that in my pre-adult years I lived in a geographically-enclosed world, almost an island of sorts, no more than 100 miles in circumference, always viewing the same kind of terrain, always interacting with the same kind of people.
My parents were avid readers and encouraged — No, demanded! — their children follow suit; the most frequent gift under the Christmas tree in our house was a book. One year it was for me Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates whose story made me dream of dikes, polders, and wooden shoes. Another, it was Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp which prompted me to turn a bandana into a ghutra, a bed sheet into a thobe, and to roam the desert sands in the attic of our home with an antique kerosene lamp. Even a book such as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn With a complete set of the World Book Encyclopedia on the bookshelf in the living room, my longing to cross the borders of lands more exotic than the one I inhabited led me to dive into its volumes, from Albania to Zimbabwe (still Rhodesia at that time), in order to learn more about the history, culture, and geography of places I’d first glimpsed in fictional tales.
My parents also subscribed to numerous periodicals—Newsweek, Time, Readers Home Digest, The Saturday Evening Post, and National Geographic among others—and my first memory of “Indonesia” is a pictorial spread of Dewi Sukarno in Life magazine after her marriage to the country’s president in 1962. To this day it puzzles me why such a memory would stick in my mind but I do recall thinking at the time that Indonesian girls must be very pretty (not knowing, until years later, that Dewi was Japanese).
From reading rose the desire to fill the pages of my non-existent passport with visas and entrance-permit stamps. Such was not to be for some time, however, because even after leaving home to go to college my newfound freedom from “home” came with strings attached: the only financial assistance I could hope to receive was that which I myself earned. Thus, the necessity of working at least halftime during my undergraduate years placed a clamp on dreams of travel, one that was only loosened during Spring and Summer breaks when I could manage to take enough time off to stick out my thumb and hitchhike somewhere.
Undoubtedly, I have mentioned in previous Ruminations that I began my academic career in 1970 as a student of theater and fine arts but after two years switched majors and enrolled in Southeast Asian Studies. How that came to be I will not relate here; I repeat this information only to say that as an art-theater major relatively little reading was required. Not so in this more academic field and in the courses that I took during the next two years —Literatures of Asia, Oral Literatures of East Asia, Survey of Indonesian Culture, Survey of Japanese Literature, Modern Indonesian Literature in Translation, History of East Asian Civilizations, Asian Epic Literature, Readings in Classical Malay Literature, History of Southeast Asia to 1800, and History of Modern Indonesia & Malaysia — I would not be able to count the number of pages I read. This was also true in my Indonesian language classes. Because there were few Indonesian-language textbooks at that time, my language teachers used literary texts as their primary teaching tool, starting with children’s stories and leading up to short stories and then novels. Two years later, during which time I crammed in the equivalent of four years of language study, I was able to read most anything put in front of me and had even tried my hand at translating a few stories.
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Pages from my first passport. On right, my first visa to Indonesia; on left, first entrance stamps.
In May 1976, a scholarship from the U.S. Department of Education brought me to Indonesia for the study of advanced Indonesian in Malang, East Java. In my diary, written on the Pan Am flight that stopped in Hong Kong and Singapore on the way, I remarked that finally — “Finally!!” with exclamation marks — I had crossed true borders and left “home” behind. Oddly enough, however, after my arrival in Malang, very little seemed to be truly strange or out of the ordinary. But then I remembered Hans, Aladdin, Tom, and Huckleberry, my fictional childhood friends who had taught me through words on the page that there are no true borders except the ones people construct in their minds.
Malang Teachers’ College Student I.D. Card.
John H. McGlynn
john_mcglynn@lontar.org