A CHAIN OF KINGS - Books and Journals

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A chain of kings
word-play, effusive imagery, and other conventional hallmarks of what we
except to encounter in either ‘literature’ or ‘myth’. Their translations should
be so as well.
The Gowa and Talloq chronicles are also characterized by conciseness
in word and phrase. Partly this impression derives from the nature of
Makassarese in the eyes and ears of an English speaker. Articles and pronouns
are usually implied rather than inscribed. It is not desirable to be so
adamantly tied to the Makassarese in this case, however, for the resulting
English translation would confuse readers rather than make the chronicles
accessible.
This feeling of conciseness also stems from the nature of the written
Makassarese script. When Makassarese began to write in the sixteenth century,
writing recorded spoken words. But they did so incompletely: not all
sounds were graphically represented. Double consonants, glottal stops, and
velar nasals are not written, despite the fact that these features are both common
and essential in differentiating between words (Tol 1996). In a favorite
example of mine, bldtok could be spoken as either ‘Chinese temple
image’ (ballaq datoka) or ‘bald Dutchman’ (balanda tokkaq). As this example
suggests too, Makassarese wrote without consistent spacing between words,
often running several together in an unbroken series of letters. Reading
Makassarese requires adding all of these features to produce complete
expressions. The very way in which Makassarese wrote, therefore, was
graphically concise. A good translation of the chronicles must find a middle
ground between an English that is complete and familiar and an English that
is choppy and alien. My translation inevitably contains more words than the
original, and in so doing trades some of that conciseness for readability in
English without going so far as to completely elide the nature of the original
texts.
There is also the practical problem that Makassarese chronicles are not
easy to interpret, even if the script can be reconstructed without difficulty.
The terseness of expression and the writer’s assumption on the reader’s part
of a wealth of social and cultural context means that even comparatively
simple passages can validly be interpreted in two or more ways. Even for
specialists it is often difficult to be sure who is being discussed, whether the
narrative is going forward or digressing, and how one section or passage
relates to another. Some sections are narratively ‘thinner’ or more skeletal
than others, tending to move quickly from topic to topic without elaboration.
In this they almost resemble an outline when compared to sections that
narrate events in great detail. Where appropriate, I have included words or
phrases in brackets that either make implied relationships clear or explain
terse references, allowing readers to follow the narratives with greater ease.
In addition to being straightforward and concise, a third evident feature