I like to believe that my descriptions of textile techniques are accurate, but I don’t trust word-for-word translations. Do the words convey the right meaning and are they idiomatic? After all, translation is about giving a different culture access to what was written.
This time my quandary relates to resist-dyed stripes in the Karo cloth called ‘Batu Jala’. The stripes are made by stitching two lines of basting, gathering the cloth tightly along those lines, and then dipping it in dye. When the cloth is dry, the basting is removed, and voilá, where the basting was done -- provided the gathering was sufficiently tight -- the dye did not enter and the cloth has a white stripe. This is the Batak version of ‘stitch resist’. On Java it is known as ‘tritik’.
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| Batu Jala |
The translator of my text used the word ‘kumpulan’ for ‘gathering’ the cloth, technically correct if you consult any dictionary, but I didn’t trust it. ‘Kumpulan’ is used for gatherings of people or things. Could it possibly be that both English and Indonesian used ‘gather’ for crumpling up cloth along a line of stitching?
Another rabbit hole.
First, I turned to my well-connected friend, Mara, in Jakarta. She has lived in Indonesia for most of her life, has a broad circle of friends, and is a textile aficionado. As I didn’t know how to explain ‘gathering cloth’ in Indonesian, it was a relief to put the question to her in English. I described the stitching and gathering as ‘like smocking’.
To my delight, she came back quickly with an answer: ‘Tarikan benang supaya bentuk kerut2 kecil dan rata di kain’, ‘pull yarn so that little, even pleats are formed in the fabric.’ I am very excited and relieved with her answer. Where did she get it? She laughs and says, ‘google’ and sends me the link. I ponder this for a while. I like the phrase, but I see that it describes smocking more than tritik, and besides, can I trust google? I consult the link she sent, and note that the word ‘kumpulan’ was also used; my trust levels sink. So, I decide to cross-check with tritik practitioners. Only one small problem: I don’t know any!
This time I turn to my friend, Nia, who inhabits the textile world and lives in Yogyakarta, the heart of tritik country. By chance, she is with a colleague who is a tritik enthusiast. ‘Tritik’ is ‘sasirangan’ in her culture, Banjar from Kalimantan, she tells me.
Nice chat but we didn’t resolve the ‘kumpulan/gathering problem. I need to learn how the technique is described idiomatically, by a practitioner, so that the translation is a comfortable read for Indonesians. Suddenly I think of mas Huda, my new acquaintance, an enthusiastic batik student. I show him images of the Karo technique (as they appear in Legacy in Cloth 2009).
“How would you describe this?” I ask as neutrally as possible to give him latitude to respond as is comfortable for him. He spontaneously comes up with the word ‘sasirangan’ for the technique, as well as ‘jumputan’. I cross-check with my friend in Yogya. She is surprised at the use of the word ‘sasirangan’ in Yogyakarta claiming its Kalimantan origin, and she says that ‘jumputan’ means ‘tie-dye’. Probably neither will work for my needs. Mas Huda promises to get back to me after consulting the notes he took when he was a student learning the techniques.
In the meantime, I turn to my trusty photographer friend and colleague, mas Nashir, to ask if he knows someone who can help me. ‘Caroline Rika,’ he responds immediately, a craftsperson whom he admires https://www.wiruwirone.com/. She is delightfully and immediately responsive, even though she is on the fly. The word ‘tritik’ is used in Yogya, she says without any prompting, ‘sasirangan’ in Kalimantan, and ‘pelangi’ in Palembang. They are all ‘teknik jahit,’ techniques that involve sewing. ‘Biasanya disebut ikat celup dengan teknik jahit’, she says: ‘Usually referred to as ‘tie dye with a sewing technique’. There’s that notion of tie-dye again, clearly with a broader sense than in English.
In the meantime, mas Huda has found his notes:
‘Teknik tritik dilakukan dengan menjelujur pola pada kain, menarik jahitan erat-erat, mencelupkan kain, lalu melepaskan benang untuk memunculkan motif.’
‘The tritik technique is executed by basting a pattern in cloth, pulling the stitches very tight, dyeing the cloth, then removing the stitches so that the motif appears.’
Ah, thank you, mas Huda! His notes are probably his teacher’s words, without any interference from my questioning. I have gained the words ‘menjelujur’, or ‘jahitan jelujur’ which translate as ‘basting stitch’. In addition, I have confirmation that the notion of ‘gathering the cloth’ is best translated as ‘pulling the stitching tightly’, as Mara shared right from the start.
Then Caroline Rika found a quiet moment to get back to me and recommended two Indonesian publications.
The first (Pengembangan Teknik Jahit Celup (Tritik) dengan Pola Geometis by Bintan Titisari, Kahfiati Kahar and Intan Rizky Mutias and published in ITB J. Visual, Art& Design 6(2), 131 (2014), https://journals.itb.ac.id/index.php/jvad/article/view/626) teaches me the umbrella concept of ‘tekstil kelompok celup rintang’, which I would translate as ‘resist-dyed cloth’. Just as in the standard academic textile literature. ‘Tritik’, just as ‘sasirangan’, are examples of ‘teknik jahit celup’, literally ‘stitch dye’. Their description of tritik is so close to the one that mas Huda shared, that I suspect a shared source. The Karo technique, although it does not appear in the textile literature except as a brief reference in Loebér’s work from the 1920s, is clearly a variant on the theme.
The second reference that Caroline Rika shared is Nian S. Djoemena’s well-known Batik dan Mitra: Batik and its Kind, (Djambatan, 1990).
I suspect, upon reviewing her work, that I have stumbled upon an area of conceptual syncretism in textile terminology. The splendid coffee-table book from 1976 by Jack Lenor Larsen, entitled, The Dyer’s Art: ikat, batik, plangi (Van Nostrand Reinhold), is probably the best-known reference to resist dye processes and textiles. His ‘The Classification of Resist Techniques’ (p. 15) has become the standard, and in it he cites Alfred Bühler (1946) as the source of that classification. (See also Buhler, Alfred. 1972. Ikat Batik Plangi: Reservemusterungen auf Garn und Stoff aus Verderasien, Zentralasiën, Südosteuropa und Nordafrika. 3 vols. Basel: Pharos-Verlag Hansrudolf Schwabe. 1972)
Dutch ethnography may have influenced Bühler’s work. If so, the standard textile jargon and resist classification in European languages derives from Java, and perhaps other places, and returned to the Indonesian textile literature via the English. There seems to have been a ‘back and forth’ in classification. In that case, the two young craftspeople with whom I spoke, Huda and Caroline Rika, have learned from the source as I. To verify this, I would need to go, once again, back to the villages, to learn the categories used by traditional makers and also trace the connections between the European researchers. That is beyond the scope of my translation work, but it remains a compelling puzzle.
At this point, I get in touch with Mak Sandi, br. Sitanggang, in her village in North Sumatra. She is not Karo, but rather Simalungun. She was the one who informed me years ago that the Batu Jala was also known and once made in Simalungun. She became quite excited by the technique and explored it with a grandmother, in her village, now deceased but an erstwhile maker of the Batu Jala. I ask her if she knows what menjulujurwould be in Simalungun and she says ‘mejjulujur’. I suspect it is the Indonesian term as it would be spoken in Simalungun, and not the word that would have been used in Simalungun in by-gone days when the cloth was still being made. She informs me that ‘les’, the word that the Karo maker had used for the stripes, is also an Indonesian word, meaning ‘edging’, and has no specific reference to the textile arts. In Simalungun, the words used for the white stripes would be garit garit and oret oret, again not specifically textile-related. However, oret oret na lang hona is, literally, ‘white stripes which did not absorb dye’.
I stop here. I am sorry that in 1986 my fieldwork focus was solely on the technique and not the Karo words for it. Is there anyone left who knows the words in Karo and Simalungun? Is the Javanese perspective on the techniques still available in the villages, or perhaps in the ethnographic literature? What about in Kalimantan or South Sumatra? Will it still be possible to track down the unique ways of looking at these techniques?
For my translation purposes, I have found the following vocabulary. That is enough for now:
Perintang warna - resist dye
Tekstil kelompok celup rintang – class of resist dye textiles
Jahit celup – stitch resist, including tritik, sasirangan and the Karo variant
Jahitan ditarik – said for ‘the cloth is gathered’
Kerut-kerut kecil – the little folds or pleats that result from gathering the cloth along the line of stitching
Jumputan – plangi, tie-dye
Thanks to Mara, Nia, Huda, Caroline Rika, Nashir and Lasma. I wish we could gather and talk shop. We are scattered all over the globe, but a community in a shared search for a few words.
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