She Wanted to be a Beauty Queen
Compiled and translated by George Quinn
The Lontar Foundation: 2023
Javanese is a wonderfully expressive language with a proud literary heritage. Its literature flourished without competition until literature in Indonesian came along and overshadowed it after Indonesia’s independence in 1945. Although the two co-exist, literature in Javanese has long been considered to be dying.
Not so, says George Quinn, English language translator of this anthology of Javanese short stories, She Wanted to be a Beauty Queen. He should know; he’s been following contemporary writing in Javanese for decades. Born in New Zealand, Quinn went to Indonesia in 1966 and completed his bachelor’s degree at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta. His doctoral dissertation from the University of Sydney was published as The Novel in Javanese: Aspects of its Social and Literary Character in 1992.
Javanese is a language that revels in sound and word play. Javanese literature was traditionally conceived and sounded in melody. Written in poetic form in a wide range of metres, it was read aloud or sung in melodies inherent to those metres. Javanese language literary prose is a more recent phenomenon and uses forms—like the short story or novel—that are also popular in Indonesian language literature.
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- Tags: George Quinn, Indonesia, Issue 37, Jennifer Lindsay