The Hidden Force

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

The first English translation of Couperus’s novel appeared in London in 1922 and was followed by an American edition in 1924. The translator was Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (1865–1921), a naturalized Englishman of Dutch extraction, who knew the author and translated several of his best-known works.

In 1985, for the scholarly Library of the Indies series published by the University of Massachusetts Press, the editor, E.M. Beekman, produced a revised, extensively annotated version. Most of Teixeira’s text is retained on the grounds of its “congruence of tone with the original” (p. 40), but a number of slips are corrected, the confusing British Raj-linked terms of address “sahib” and “memsahib” are abandoned and a number of suppressed, sexually explicit passages restored. A full glossary of Malay terms is provided. Readers requiring a fuller historical, political and ethnic background to the story are referred to Beekman’s very useful edition. However, for all its many virtues this is a compromise translation, in which the language of 1900 occasionally jars with contemporary (American) idiom, while the plethora of Malay terms slows today’s reader down, without, in my view adding greatly to the immediacy or impact of the narrative.

In this translation I have chosen not to annotate, but to explain terms in the body of the text on first occurrence. Two important Dutch official titles have been paraphrased: “resident” (potentially misleading in English) as “(district) commissioner”, and “regent”, denoting a hereditary Javanese noble employed by the colonial authorities to assist the commissioner, as “prince”. For the sake of consistency, “Eurasian” is used throughout to refer to mixed-race individuals, and “Creole” to designate those of European ancestry brought up and resident in the Indies. Current Indonesian spelling has been used throughout for Malay words, titles and place names. Historical geographical names associated with Dutch colonial rule, like Batavia and Buitenzorg, have been retained in preference to their modern equivalents, Jakarta and Kota Bogor, respectively.

The Dutch text used is that of the critical reading edition in volume 17 of K. Reijnders et al., eds, Louis Couperus. Volledige Werken, 50 vols (Utrecht/Antwerp: Veen, 1987–96).

P.V.