Transformation of Generic Features of the Original in Malay Version of Jean Webster’s Daddy-Long-Legs

Abstract

The paper focuses on a so far understudied and underestimated problem of contacts between early modern Malay literature with Western writing. Undertaken analysis demonstrates the modes chosen by the Malay author to adapt a well-known foreign novel to literary and ideological context of British Malaya before World War II. The message of Malay version is inspired by Islamic reformist thought and Malay nationalism, which in the first half of the 20th century strongly colored the atmosphere in the colony, producing a socially and politically engaged type of writing. Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster most probably attracted the Malay writer with its focus on the problems of women’s emancipation and education, actively propagated by reformist thought. A certain didacticism of the American novel must have also appealed to Malay audience, brought up on the edifications of traditional verbal culture and literature. The engaged character of the Malay rendering of Daddy-Long-Legs made the writer turn down epistolary form of the original and replace the first-person narrative with third-person. It also led to introduction of a new plot line, which contains the main conflict and partially sidelines the romantic topic. As a result, in Malay reinterpretation, the source text loses its basic generic features.