People from Bloomington

Something learned while away in New Jersey: Indiana pops up in the strangest places. 

Skimming The Millions site, I noticed Found in Translation: Mapping Budi Darma’s ‘People from Bloomington’ and decided this I needed to read.

Glad I did, too.

These apartments make an appearance in the Indonesian writer Budi Darma’s 1980 story collection People from Bloomington. The first English edition of the collection, translated by Tiffany Tsao, was published by Penguin Classics in April. The book’s version of the Tulip Tree reaches 50 stories high, “capable of swallowing five hundred large families whole,” as the story “Charles Lebourne” begins. The characters in People from Bloomington are isolated by their living situations, whether it be an apartment with many units or a rental house with a disagreeable landlord, or neighbors who confront a man who indiscriminately brandishes a gun (“The Old Man with No Name.”) The universal problems of the stories’ titular “people”—loneliness, longing for connection—could be set anywhere. Yet they are distinctly and precisely here, in this southern Indiana town. 

People from Bloomington was largely written during Darma’s time as a PhD student in English literature at IU, with far-ranging influences that include Jane Austen, Franz Kafka, and William Faulkner, among others. Austen was the subject of Darma’s dissertation, and as he waited for his advisor’s feedback on drafts of each section, he took walks around Bloomington. Most of the stories in the collection were inspired by his observations of the “old timers,” students, and others he encountered while walking around town. This is also when he wrote his novel, Olenka, which likewise features a Bloomington setting. (IU’s Wells Library lists one copy in its catalog, in Indonesian.) He wrote that novel in only three weeks, and the short stories arrived very quickly, too. “There were times when, to my surprise, I ended up writing an entire story without realizing it,” he describes in People from Bloomington’s preface, where he congratulates Tsao for a successful translation. The realist mode of the Bloomington-based work is a departure from his mostly absurdist fiction. 

“After finishing the stories I wrote in Bloomington, I realized that even though my method, style, and subject matter differed, I was still writing about the cruelty of life, as I had done in my previous stories,” Darma continues in the preface. “The difficulties that people face in relating to each other while negotiating their own identities—it is this that has always colored my fiction.” 

 Think about this: the people of Indonesia had this book about Indiana for decades before we could get it in Indiana. What did they make of Bloomington?

sch 8/27/22