Afterlives of Translation: Connective Memory in Cold War Indonesia and Latin America

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes twentieth-century literary translation networks connecting Indonesia and Latin America and traces their afterlives in the historical memory of Cold War military dictatorships. I argue that the political imaginaries and interpretive frameworks articulated through translation reverberate across a receiving cultural tradition even as the original translated material falls out of circulation—a phenomenon we can understand as “the afterlives of translation,” building on Walter Benjamin’s conceptual framework for literary afterlives. This optic on translation’s lasting significance in literary history places new value on political, activist, or otherwise overlooked translation practices that do not aspire to produce authoritative and “faithful” versions of a source text or attain the lasting influence of canonization, but that nevertheless create ripple effects in literary production. In the context of Indonesia and Latin America, the afterlives of translation have shaped how authoritarian histories are narrated in the post-dictatorship moment, producing a transnationally connective memory of state violence. Methodologically, the dissertation gathers original archival materials and interviews with translators, writers, and activists to build an evidentiary corpus of cultural circulation connecting Indonesia and Latin America from the interwar period to the turn of the twenty-first century. These materials offer a textual foundation for analyzing the afterlives of translation in Indonesian and Latin American literatures, with attention to authors including W. S. Rendra, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and Eka Kurniawan, in the Indonesian tradition, and Miguel Covarrubias, Pablo Neruda, Alfredo Sirkis, and Isabel Allende in Latin America. I trace how translation practices began connecting these sites in the interwar period and intensified following the Second World War, as intellectuals worked to articulate emergent, tricontinental solidarities. Indonesia and Latin American writers began to understand their experiences in parallel, first as a preoccupation about occupying a position peripheral to centers of colonial power in Europe, and later, as an expression of global, anti-fascist solidarities or as aspirations for postcolonial and Non-Aligned futures. The full significance of these cultural networks falls into relief with the staggered chain of rightwing coups that took place in Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), Chile (1973), and Argentina (1976), which established military dictatorships that were in direct conversation by way of transnational anti-communist networks. Many translations that had circulated prior to these coups fell out of print due to censorship or the upheavals of regime change. However, they created ripples of influence across national literary traditions. Ideas of solidarity and affiliation articulated in translation transformed into tools for witnessing state violence across vast distances or offered fugitive avenues for imagining emancipatory, post-authoritarian futures under conditions of state censorship. These afterlives of translation accumulated to produce relational memories of Cold War authoritarianism in the Global South. The dissertation opens with an introduction that offers historical context and a theoretical infrastructure for understanding the project’s central claims. The dissertation then proceeds in a roughly chronological structure, alternating between chapters focused on Latin American textual production and those focused on Indonesia. The first two chapters analyze the early sensibilities of affiliation that formed in translation practices between the Malay Archipelago and Latin America in the shadow of European colonialism and fascism; the final two chapters show how these emergent political sensibilities transformed with the political shifts of the Cold War, as writers witnessed and remembered local conditions of authoritarianism by way of transnational parallels. The dissertation concludes with an epilogue focused on translation and transnationalism between Indonesia and Latin America in contemporary movements for memory, truth, and justice.