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Yasri: Saving Java’s old manuscripts
Glimpse of the past: A reader uses a magnifying glass to read an ancient manuscript from Yayasan Sastra Lestari’s (Yasri) collection
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limpse of the past: A reader uses a magnifying glass to read an ancient manuscript from Yayasan Sastra Lestari’s (Yasri) collection. (JP/Ganug Nugroho Adi)
The thick book is worn out with its fragile sheets already tattered along their outer edges, and a magnifying glass is needed to read the manuscript, because the ink has faded away.
The book, Babad Majapahit (Majapahit Chronicles), was published in 1901, over a century ago, and it is in Javanese.
Babad Majapahit is only one of the hundreds of old books and texts that are in such a poor condition they are hardly readable. It requires great care to turn the flimsy pages without causing damage. In fact, these antique documents are very rare treasures that deserve preserving.
“They’re invaluable traces of past civilizations that will be lost if totally damaged and illegible,” said John Paterson, one of the founders of Yayasan Sastra Lestari (Yasri), an institution for the recovery of vintage manuscripts.
Yasri was set up in 1996 by Paterson, an Indonesianist from Australia, and Supardjo, a postgraduate lecturer of culture at the March 11 State University (UNS) in Surakarta, Central Java. Paterson’s private funding has enabled the retrieval and preservation of the old documents.
In the last 20 years, Yasri has saved around 6,000 Javanese texts or more than 15 million words published in the 19th century and early 20th century, mostly from Central and East Java. They include handwritten and printed tembang (Javanese poetry) and prose composed by literary men from the Mangkunegara and Kasunanan courts in Surakarta, like Yosodipura II, Ronggowarsito, Padmosusastro and Sasradiningrat IV.
Yasri’s oldest manuscript is Serat Damarwulan (The Romance of Damarwulan), which was written in 1810.
Other old texts include Babad Pajang (Pajang Chronicles, 1910), Babad Majapahit (Majapahit Chronicles, 1901), Centhini in two versions (1912), Pararaton (The Book of Kings, 1912) and Sri Karongron (1912). The most recent documents collected are 1942 magazines in Javanese characters.
The literary works were bought from flea markets such as Triwindu, Sriwedari and secondhand book sellers in the northern square of the Surakarta court. Some were granted by collectors and others left by old book lovers for safekeeping.
Paterson himself has kept thousands of his texts in Yasri.
“It was saddening to see Ronggowarsito’s works lying in the market as if they are worthless in the mid-1990s, while they’re actually masterpieces,” he said.
Of the 6,000, 844 manuscripts are preserved through digitalized transliteration from Javanese characters to the Roman alphabet for further uploading to the website, so that everybody can download and
read them.
“Not all of those interested in studying the old texts can read Javanese characters, which requires transliteration. Their physical form as well as their substance is thus preserved,” Paterson said.
A Yasri staffer, Abdi Utami, said the digitalization process was being handled by five employees, including herself. This process involved manuscript arrangement, identification, cataloguing, followed by transliteration and editing, which is done twice, before the documents are uploaded onto the sastra.org website.
Of the texts already digitalized, 27 are the correspondences of Ronggowarsito from 1836 to 1844, and 40 others are letters from the chief minister of the Kasunanan Court of Surakarta, Kanjeng Raden Arya Sasradiningrat, to regional officials in 1837.
“This is meant to be read by the public. It’s no use to maintain and preserve the files without public perusal,” said Abdi.
Transliteration is not simple, the Batik University (Uniba) Surakarta graduate explained. It does not just involve changing the characters of a piece of text, but also adjusting any rhymes.
Moreover, nearly all old manuscripts take the form of macapat (Javanese poetry recited in song form).
“So transliterating demands a knowledge of macapat, not only how to recite rhyming verses but also to sense their meaning,” Abdi said.
The maintenance of documents more than a century old is no less intricate, as the collections are very vulnerable to even the slightest bit of friction.
Abdi revealed that Yasri was not engaged in detailed conservation, such as mending torn pieces or repairing detached volumes because of the unavailability of materials needed and the skilled personnel required.
“We’re doing simple maintenance work, like removing dust with brushes, mostly involving newly arrived documents. The important thing is to keep all texts and their storage room dry so as not to invite bugs,” Abdi said.
