A CHAIN OF KINGS - Books and Journals

II The chronicle texts 27
of the chronicle’s language is their reliance on short, standardized phrases.
Linked together in long chains, the chronicles unfold as series of declarative
phrases. Graphically, the text of Makassarese chronicles is broken up into
smaller units by two devices: lines, designs, or boxes containing text that
mark a new ruler’s ascension to power; and characters composed of three
dots in a vertical or sloping line (.) that separate far shorter bursts of text.
No other punctuation or similar device is used to guide the reader. The first
kind of division is not found on every page, particularly as the accounts of
individual reigns become longer as the chronicle progresses. Nor is it found
uniformly in the various chronicle manuscripts. The second kind may at first
seem to mark the end of short sentences, but in fact its use is never consistent.
Each writer appears to have had his own preferences for how often to
insert these stops. Some texts contain many times the number of these breaks
as others, though the words themselves may be identical. In extreme cases,
almost every word is bracketed by these marks. On average, such breaks
divide the text into two-to-three word segments. Names, titles, and formulaic
devices are often written together in a single segment, though longer names
and titles are just as often split into two segments.
This prosodic structure corresponds to neither prose nor poetry, the
two categories in which westerners tend to lump written compositions. A
translation into poetic verse, even free verse, would fundamentally alter the
structure, style, and reception of the chronicles. Prose, however, is no less an
alteration, for it demands the arbitrary combination of separate phrases into
longer English sentences. Nevertheless, a prose translation is the better of
two poor choices, if only because of the implications and connotations that
poetry has for English readers. The prose translations of the chronicles presented
here strive to retain some of the rhythm of the Makassarese. So too,
to avoid awkwardness in English, I have occasionally changed word order
when the alternative was hopelessly awkward English.
In preparing this work I have strived to translate the Gowa and Talloq
chronicles in a way that does not obscure their principal features: the directness
and conciseness of written Makassarese, the serially phrased and genealogically
structured way in which chroniclers composed. Most importantly,
the translations lean toward the literal. In particular I strive to not make the
translation ‘overly poetic’ in comparison with the original. Another way of
stating this is that the translation tries to not let the suppleness and richness
of the English language overwhelm the text and transform it beyond recognition.
In this I follow Lawrence Venuti, who believes that natural, fluent, invisible
styles of translation that minimize the foreignness of the source text do
so at too great a loss of the character of the original. We should, in his words,
‘write and read translated texts in ways that seek to recognize the linguistic
and cultural difference of foreign texts’ (Venuti 1995:41).