Indonesia is the guest of honour at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair, and in The Jakarta Post Endy M. Bayuni notes one of the obvious lessons learnt: Translation is key to Indonesian literature going global:
Regretably, it's not all smooth sailing:
"Translation is everything," remarked John McGlynn, the chairman of the Jakarta-based Lontar Foundation, a small outfit that has painstakingly struggled to introduce Indonesia to the world by translating works by Indonesian writers.(I have a nice big pile of the wonderful titles in Lontar's Modern Library of Indonesia -- some already reviewed, with more reviews to follow; see all the Indonesian titles under review at the complete review in the index of South East Asian literature.)
Regretably, it's not all smooth sailing:
McGlynn is not all that optimistic about the future [...] McGlynn's doubts about the way bureaucracy works is not unfounded: He had a bitter experience working with the government in preparing the translations for Frankfurt.