Language clearly can be a barrier to common cultural ground in shared cultural spaces.  In a festival that I coordinated in Indonesia last year, the language differences and lack of interpretation meant that there was little possibility of sharing cultural ground; in fact, there was a kind of linguistic apartheid; only the fortunate bi-lingual few were able to appreciate sessions in both languages. 

Beginning from the challenges born of shared spaces led me to ponder shared issues.    Language aside, what issues do we have in common with our neighbors in the Asia and Pacific regions, and how can we enrich our own cultures by sharing them? 

A poem that Berni Janssen shared with me suggests that poetry is more natural to man than prose, and that poetry is the language of the imagination, the link between the mind and the heart.  Certainly we can appreciate the ancient rhythms of poetry in performance without having to access the meaning. And a poem has an essence that is beyond language, something that appeals to the sixth sense, that engages the intuition rather than reason and words.  I quote Willis Barnstone on the translation of Chinese poetry: “Is translation of poetry possible?  Is translation of Chinese poetry possible?  Of course not.  It is impossible.  And it should be understood that only the difficult, the elusive, and the impossible lines are worth translating”.  Therefore we can share our poetries, with the help, of course, of sensitive translators and spirited performers.

Another point of contact is that we all have stories, stories handed on from our cultures and our parents, personal stories.  The experience of a mother in Tasmania reading “The Magic Pudding” to her child will obviously be different to that of a Balinese community watching a shadow puppet performance late at night in the village hall. Is there a greater possibility of sharing the latter experience?  Through sharing our stories, can we leap the barrier of language, and communicate on the level of our common humanity? 

It is true that legends often transcend religion and history to tap into a mythological common ground.

Early this year I visited an art gallery in central Java and was amazed to see that among the works of a well-known Javanese artist called Widayat were a series of large paintings about The Deluge.  I was entranced.  The man in the pictures, a Javanese mystic and nobleman, had a different name, but it was unmistakably the story of Noah and his Ark.  The imagery in these paintings spoke directly to me, but strangely, were recognized by neither of my companions from Bali, an American anthropologist and a Chinese Indonesian poet.

Just a few months later a young writer from Aceh asked me to translate a story entitled “The Deluge”.  Again, it was a version of the Noah story transposed to an Indonesian setting, and with a political sub-theme.  Other common themes connected with creation have endless parallels across cultures, Earth Mother / Sky Father, the Goddess of Death, and so on.

The American editor of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Indonesia’s greatest novelist, responded to a comment that some critics found Pramoedya’s language less compelling than the stories, “I think that many critics miss the forest for the trees. What I look for in a book that I would like to have translated and published in English is first and foremost the storytelling because, more than anything else, that is what will come through in translation.”  While I do not agree with those who criticized Pramoedya’s language, the comments of his editor are surely a tribute to the universality of story telling, across cultures, beyond language. 

I have alluded here to non-verbal and non-literary, ways of conveying messages: the language of gesture through performance and the language of images.

Finally, let me quote from Doris Lessing’s autobiography, published in 1994. 

“For thousands upon thousands of years, we —- humankind -— have told ourselves stories, and these were always analogies and metaphors, parables and allegories; they were elusive and equivocal; they hinted and alluded, they shadowed forth in a glass darkly”.   

It is a fitting conclusion to a theme that I feel passionately about but when I try to put it into words it is like trying to catch the wind in a net: I hope that our poetries and our stories will create the common ground for future connections, beyond language.
 

HEATHER CURNOW / NOVEMBER 2005