Desawarnana (Nagarakrtagama) by Mpu Prapa‚ca. Translated by Stuart Robson. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1995. 158 pp., maps. Reviewed by Matthew Isaac Cohen (University of Glasgow).

Classics-- those books we may or may not have on our shelves but know we should read, even if we don't-- are perhaps few in the field of Indonesian studies, but if there is one text that fits this category it is the N garak t gama of Mpu Prapa‚ca, completed in 1365 in Majapahit, east Java. This 1,536 line Old Javanese narrative poem is the major textual basis for "the myth of Majapahit," an historical charter for the imagination of Indonesia as a unified nation. It is also our most detailed and intimate portrait of court life in Majapahit at the height of its power, as seen and inscribed by the Superintendent of Buddhist Affairs (who writes under the pseudonym of Prapa‚ca) under King R jasanagara (also known as Hayam Wuruk). As such, it has been used as source material for innumerable treatises on history, politics, religion, economics, social organization, and performance since its initial publication (in Balinese script) in 1902.

Previous editions of the N garak t gama have been based on a single manuscript copy, saved or looted (depending on one's perspective) from a burning palace in Cakranagara, Lombok, in 1894. This inscription was long thought to be unique, until the discovery of two new manuscripts in Bali by H.I.R. Hinzler and J. Schoterman in 1979. Robson's annotated translation is a philological product of this find, based on a critical edition prepared by Hinzler accounting for all the manuscript inscriptions now available, and making full use as well of P.J. Zoetmulder's monumental Old Javanese dictionary. Robson's book is in many ways also a response to Theodore Pigeaud's five volume study of the N garak t gama, Java in the Fourteenth Century (The Hague, 1960-63), with its nearly unreadable English translation and rather fanciful speculations and assertions about life in pre-modern Java. Robson's 72-page translation and 55 pages of commentary, in contrast, are prosaic and cautious. The translator is of the opinion that Prapa‚ca is not a great poet and avoids improving on the original. "In places where the original is repetitious or ambiguous the English may be so too as there seems no reason to make Prapa‚ca's expression more beautiful than it is" (p. 15). The book is very much an edition for our time, an open text that does not try to resolve semantic ambiguities or fix meanings upon obscure architectural features or palace functions. When a translation is tentative, Robson informs us. The commentary appended to the translation provides learned suggestions for possible translations of terms left untranslated in the original, alternate interpretations of a passage, and problems in meter.

Rather than seeing it as a translation to end all translations, Robson understands his work as part of a tradition of N garak t gama scholarship that will continue to develop in generations to come. Or, more precisely, a tradition of De awarnana (Depiction of Districts) scholarship, for this is the title that Prapa‚ca actually uses for his text in his text and the one that Robson consequently prefers over the better-known N garak t gama (The Cosmic Ordering of the State) title, which occurs only in a manuscript colophon. A break is thus implied, at the same time as Robson leans upon the work of his distinguished predecessors in the field (Berg, Brandes, Kern, Krom, Pigeaud, Teeuw, Uhlenbeck, and Zoetmulder).

What emerges from Robson's translation with great clarity is the range of topics of interest to Prapa‚ca that the poet feels capable of poetic representation. The text is simultaneously a court chronicle, a panegyric dedicated to Hayam Wuruk, and a travelogue "which is not only centered around a royal progress but is in fact part of it" (in Geertz's words), corresponding in fact to no known genre of Old Javanese writing. The text is also a self-portrait of this Superintendent of Buddhist Affairs. There are many moments in the royal peregrinations described when the king goes one way and the chronicler another-- looking in on family, checking up on an old friend, making inquiries about local history. Self-critical of his inadequacies as a poet and in obvious awe of his god-king, Prapa‚ca writes an eloquent reminder of the simultaneous difficulty of capturing events in the process of unfolding and the utter necessity, indeed the religious obligation, of doing so. Robson's edition succeeds in making the text understandable, at the same time as not diminishing its generic and noetic complexities. It is an invaluable book for scholars of Indonesian history and culture, and would make stimulating reading for courses on pre-modern Southeast Asia. This classic, thanks to Robson's edition, has a long life ahead of it yet.