What & Why, Genre & Theme

So far I have taken poetry, short-story, essay, sketch, investigative reporting, social research, book-length stuff and translations as my playgrounds. I admit that -- like in everything -- I'm no specialist here, consequently I'm nowhere around being a past master in anything particular.

I think essays are where I'm a little bit good at, simply because I like writing them most. My so-called poems and stories have always been muffled when it comes to emotional utterance -- no matter how mushy I think I am, the outcome is nowhere near Emily Dickinson and closer to some way lesser copycats of Das Kapital. That's disastrous for a fiction writer. Education in journalism is among my unused archives, too -- I'm too wet to handle dry facts. It's the same thing with researches. I've spent the last few years in the publishing industry, translating and editing books on politics, sociology, philosophy, and such; it's where I belong to more than any poetic realm.

My themes, whatever the form is, come by themselves after a short line that drills through my head and refuses to leave even when the caffeine wanes. I've been trying to describe how it happens. But bewildered look is not what I expect to get, so I tend to skip this kind of question. But here's my last try. Let's say, I'm sitting here minding nothing, cats purr everywhere and some Joe Satriani is in the air. Then this flashes on my mind: "A car accident, a woman lays dead, red left shoe out of a plastic bag, just bought them across the street". This could, if I'm not too full of supper, cause the birth of a lousy poem about death in daylight, short-story about a broken heart, essay about economic disparity, sketch about the traffic. In another time, this sentence came to me: "Dusk was russet". That was all. And it became a nonsensical story about fatigue and zombies.

I won't blame Joe Satriani for any such a thing; or cats, or evenings; it really doesn't matter where ideas come from. If you don't follow them they'd come by some other time in different wardrobes. Something that has been in my mind for ages could suddenly come to the surface and onto the screen just by an accidental capture of a single line. I've never searched for them -- you know, like, rustling through pages and pages of other people's books with a conscious aim of getting at least whipped up to write anything. If I don't feel like what you feel when nature compells you to run to the toilet, I won't write. I'd make holes on the wall instead.

Origin of the Thing

Some people always told me I have been lucky because when I was 7, 13, 18, 21, 25, or virtually the entire course of this bumpy ride called Life, I always knew that I would grow up to be me instead of anything else.

Maybe they're right.

But because of this lifelong hunch I have never known what it's like to wait tables, wash dishes in shady joints, teach in classes, etcetera -- I never even knew how to write a CV to apply for jobs in a bank.

I got my first pieces (lousy poems) published when I was 7 years old. And even with some 'duh' episodes now and then along the timeline, writing stuff and get paid for it has become a profession to me from then on. I took to the road, flocked in a rock band, raced bikes, danced and sang and edited papers and such -- but as my diplomas accumulate dust year in and year out since the graduation day, I never even tried to change course. Writing suits me best because of everything that I am [click here for what the heck this means]. I never considered any other job, though I crave retirement programs.

The Bilingual Thing

I'm thinking in English half of the time, especially when it is something dirty -- whether Britney sings or what, for instance, or the U.S. elections, or this or that man. My English is of course very me -- just some haphazardous lexicon, only enough to say what I want to. But what else a language is for, anyway?

Translation & Such a Sinful Occupation

I don't translate fiction of any kind in any language into Indonesian. Because I don't really feel wow writing fiction myself, plus the demands there are maddening. Retelling non-fiction stuff is another story. If I agree with the publisher's opinion that the works are sort of useful in our context, I'll do it. I respect every original writer's prerogatives and I won't mess-up with their styles. But I'm a utilitarian, and that's what I apply to this job. Literary precision is somewhere out there -- on my screen, the one and only concern is how to make the text readable to Indonesians. Some may marvel at the Grecian urn on a pedestal; I'm for pouring water into it and let the horses drink some.

In this business, what stays annoyingly on is the average opinion that translating stuff is sort of sinful, literary speaking. It suffers the fate reserved for handicrafts in the visual art world -- ".....ummm, oh, and by the way, I translate things (make souvenirs) in slack season.....How's the weather?"

So, is it easier than composing an original something of your own? Of course it is. Not only the basic idea; not only the architectural design; the whole mass of concrete, the rooms, furnitures and tenants are already there. That's why the reward for the inner self isn't like winning lottery. But not everybody is able to do it anyway. It requires more than just knowing two languages. An obese dictionary won't do any good. I think translators got to be writers themselves, and not people with diplomas in this and that linguistic studies. If I were a publisher or a foreign author, I wouldn't trust someone who majored in English Literature in some big university to translate my book. I would prefer someone else with no grand title following his name at all, but he writes articles for some papers or is a journalist.

It's impossible to put what I want to say into words, but it is, like, you're either a writer or you aren't. You either get the rhythm or you don't. If you're writing your own stuff too, translating others' works would be just another day -- things like what to keep and what to kick out, what to add and what to cut, what signifies style and what is a typo, down to copyright things, you automatically mind all this while doing it; you know how it feels to be a writer of something originally yours and this puts you into the others' shoes.

There's a danger of overwriting the original text, but it's not so great. Something in the original stuff would always pop up to remind you of the signature: if he or she tells it the way you do, the subject sucks; if he or she takes the issue you love to talk about, the style gets on your nerves; if he or she is for the things you ferociously advocate yourself, the reasons are wrong; and so on.

Downside of Heaven
[Click the name for explanation if you can make neither head or toe of the statement]

Santana might exhale along Kroeger's tomes, Baggio might relish Scholes' goals, Christie liked Chesterton's stories, Raikkönen might easily enjoy what they all have done, and as a grain of an audience of all of them, I cherish his winnings, too, as much as I like reading Mohamad's essays and Wijaya's stories (both are Indonesian writers).

There is no problem whatever to nibble on an original work of your fellow writer, footballer, stringwhanger, and so on, except perhaps if it is the work of your fellow lawyer or serial killer. It is just as smooth, the path to enjoy the works of people whose existence are nowhere around your prosaic realm of breadmaking. If you write stories, other writers' stories are surely different from yours, at times radically so, that you can't really get engaged in a study of comparison while you read them. You can't spot any real fault other than that it isn't your style. Even strange-looking words or those put in unusual places can't be wrong; they are protected by writers' prerogatives and personal quirks.

Translators aren't that lucky.

They work upon other people's words -- and the same works could be, and sometimes have actually been, reworded by other translators. The Bible, for instance; we don't even know how many versions of it in every language have been in circulation since Gutenberg. One single tome could get translated over and over by a dozen individuals and none of the results would be identical with any other.

And some of those might have been wrong. There is something like "wrong" in translation; in both the comprehension of the original and the grasp of the tongue in which the work is reworded. If you are accustomed to translating, you automatically scan other people's translations for these faults -- you can't help it. (And '...can't help it' is one of the zillions of English phrases that many translators can't Indonesianize correctly). While following the flow of Indonesian words there, at the same time your mind read the possible English or French or German words of the original, because that's the way your brain works in this job.

So I often feel like being Iron Maidened by the Inquisition when browsing some translated works in Indonesian. "This dope," the evil inside me would spit, "that must be what he reads, and he obviously have no idea what it means, that he translates it into this --" and so on. If such thought occurs more than thrice at the first page alone, it would completely castrate my appetite, and I would get disabled to do anything with the book except to put it into exile. And this tragedy has been happening too often. Total ignorance of Christendom -- and, as is always an Indonesian disease, complete aversion to learn anything about it -- commonly ruins a translation. So is a wholesome incomprehension of any English word outside the basic English-Indonesian dictionary, as if these translators never watch movies or listen to song lyrics or chat with foreigners. And a truly saddening mastery of Indonesian language itself, which seems to exclude anything coined after 1928. (1928 is the year Indonesian's made official for the nation)

Pustaka Jaya's best-selling Seratus Tokoh Yang Paling Berpengaruh Dalam Sejarah (translation of Michael Hart's The 100, A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History), translated by Mahbub Djunaidi; Gramedia's Pembunuhan Terpendam (translation of Agatha Christie's Sleeping Murder) by Sudarto are examples of what really broke my heart.

Ghostwriting

Say, you are some sort of society's Something, you have a lot in your mind, you want to tell the world (i.e. your constituents, your colleagues, your employees, your students, etc.) about it, you put it down in words, and the result upsets your wife, angers your mother in-law, annoys your kids, gets your cat die laughing, and drives your dog to suicide -- the entire heartbreaking enterprise is, you then find out, not unavoidable. You got me.

People -- writers -- that I know keep telling me I've been committing the ultimate sin -- against myself -- by taking up ghostwriting. I never agree with them in this.

This is what a ghostwriter does: he or she is paid to extort everything someone (let's call it a client) wants to say to whoever might browse it, out of the client's head, and onto the screen. Then the client submits the file to a publisher, or in many cases to him or herself, and the thing is then printed and distributed, with the client's signature -- as far as the audience is concerned, he or she is the writer of that piece, and no one suspects that there is a ghost rocking the keyboards.

I've been doing it for years and I don't intend to growl with remorse.

First of all, I don't take just any client -- I'm lucky enough to be able to slam the phone down if the would-be client doesn't meet my requirement -- which is very simple: he or she must have something to say.

It's a dangerous game to have a client with an absolutely vacant mind; like a final thesis in the last year of sedentary collegial terms, the client must be able to 'defend' the writing later in public. It is, at any rate, his or her stuff, not mine. He wants to say this and that; I don't. I would only help him to have his own say. I demand the presence of at least a few lines tailing three or four asterisks, itemizing what he or she wishes to say. Then I waste some time talking with him or her about the subject. Only after that I write the piece for him or her. Whatever I type there wouldn't stray from his or her own arguments, even if those are against my own view of the matter. I use his or her lexicon wherever possible -- his or her style if perceivable from the discussion, even if it was entirely absent from the written clues he or she handed to me. So, you see, the essay is nowhere around mine.

Secondly, since clients tend to get stuck with me, I raise greater demands as ghostwriting days go by -- next time, from the client, I pull out ten asterisks instead of three, then a full paragraph, half a page, a whole page, and one day an entire body of essay. This is a maddening part of the self-inflicted ordeal, but I just can't call it off. I wish, no matter how much against commonsense it seems at times, to make them actually write for themselves, even if it costs me migraines to try to read the stuff.

One of my clients is a writer by himself now, after four years or so. I really hope all of them will be in time. I never care a fig about arguments such as that I cheat myself of intellectual rights, etcetera -- oh, please. My vanity lies somewhere else. And I need cat food.

Perhaps ghostwriting is why I couldn't condemn lip-sync too hard. There're some real crooners behind the screen, and it is their song I enjoy or dislike, in a way nevermind the mute onstage.

On Keeping Notes

You can work anything out of anything, that's how it's done on the planet of scribblers. I'm a "just in case" person - you know, like some unshaven faces you saw loitering downtown devoting their entire lives saving strings. I don't even have a bank account, but I save strings - of words. Not "difficult words", "foreign words", "keywords", or what have generally been the thing responsible for "readers' block", but simply words - something I overheard in the street, something from somebody's writing, a crumb out of a song - words. But I also collect meanings. You know, like, just an impression about something, not a description of the thing itself. And a few lines that I wrote on whatever was available at the time, out of my own head, which usually look like this:

"Pigeons. Pedestrian commonsense. E.B. White. Chrysanthemums. Cocksure prophets - see Armesto. Truth this year. Nurse Hopkins - arsenic. Feudal lords - "Homes and Other Human Blackholes" - numerology. Nothing is a thing that happens slowly. Garage. Corn fields. 4771. Collective truism. Shanghai 1935. "One dollar a minute". "Sour Time". Alto sax sucks. Californication. Mike."

That's what happened when I more or less already got a complete body of writing under some theme in my head. Otherwise the note is more likely to look saner. But either way notes are necessities if you do write. Not that you have to keep the whole town's junkyard - I know someone who writes five essays out of one Post-It - that's the beauty of recycling.

Notes are just passwords. All entries are supposed to be stored there inside our skulls. Tons and tons of notes won't help a mind that is completely vacant.

How Good Do I Think I Am?

I'm not good.

Whether it is my own work or a translation of others', I'm just average.

The minimum to be attained in communicating ideas is that you can say what you want to say so your soul can get a nap. That's all that I can do; it's not even an achievement, it's the way it should be for everyone.

Since at the bottom of the junk bin lies some standard too, I'd say I fail better in non-fiction, be it mine or a translation. Then there is mediocre #1, mediocre #2, mediocre #3, and so on; I guess I'm just not too bad. I don't displease myself all the time after each "project" is done, and I haven't killed myself because of an unbearable disgust of whatever I've written.

In this world, that will do.