post-colonial_translation

Composing the other 87
Where no native cloth fits the people’s limbs any more,
But inheritance and goods are spent on foreign state,
Where it sorely destroys itself through all that dalliance,
And, without scruple, scorns the customs of its fathers,
Whose frugality founded the state, which shortly
Will see itself thrown into perdition through so much luxury.
Haafner (p. 114) waxes more graphic, since the confines of his text
type allow him to do so:
especially dissipation with loose women, of which there are
many in the Kampon-Java or Javanese Kassies, deprive many
Europeans of their lives. And those who are fortunate enough
to recover from the illnesses endemic to the country, or from the
results of their dissipation, lead a languid life at best. You see
the greater part of the Europeans, pale as ghosts, with fat, swollen
bellies and thin legs, slink away with an expression of annoyance
and sadness on their faces, in spite of their often unnamable
riches.
Van Haren’s Agon, the mouthpiece of the enlightened ‘native’ ruler,
sees ‘going native’ as the eventual answer to all his problems (p. 235b):
Your well-being, that of my sons, and of their kingdoms
Requires that we should retreat a short time before time and
fate,
Until the Batavian, divided in his own bosom,
Made effeminate by the hot climate, and drunk by luxury,
Sees the urges of the East float among the Dutch,
And Europe’s vices intertwined with ours.
Then our vengeance nears.
If ‘going native’ is the worst that can happen to the Maatschappij, at
least from de Marre’s point of view, it follows that the ‘natives’ will be
painted in the worst possible light in Batavia. All ‘natives’ are ‘A people,
for which the fields weep at its laziness, / Given to murder in their wrath,
full of dissimulation, / Cowardly in their disaster, reckless in good times’
(p. 40), but, in keeping with the dangers of ‘going native’, the mestizos,
who are, of course, living proof of this, are the worst, and the foreigner
is given explicit warnings against them (pp. 68–9):