In the formative years of a nation the life span of a story or poem can be fleeting. Literary works may blossom one season in cheaply made books or little magazines that pass from hand to hand, and vanish the next. Books go astray and are abandoned to insects and weather. Whole libraries are lost to upheaval. Authors often fail to save their own manuscripts and early publications.
HANS BAGUE JASSIN recognized that these early works of imagination and intellect are precious. As the struggle for daily existence and for viable nationhood imposed other urgent priorities upon Indonesians and their government, it was his inspiration to collect and save the early flowerings of Indonesia's literary life.
JASSIN, who was born July 1917 in Gorontalo, North Sulawesi, has devoted his lifetime to Indonesian literature. While in high school he immersed himself in the new Indonesian-language novels, stories and poems beginning to proliferate in the waning days of Dutch control of the East Indies. He was himself a student writer and editor.
Joining in 1940 Balai Pustaka, a government publishing house fostering indigenous writing, he was at the center of the emerging and vibrant national literary life. Writers of the new generation became his friends, and he made it his life's work to promote, write about and collect their output.
During the Japanese occupation, and through the struggle for independence, JASSIN edited a succession of literary magazines. From 1953 he taught Indonesian literature at the University of Indonesia, simultaneously completing his own degree there in the Faculty of Arts, and in 1958 studied comparative literature at Yale University. He gave his countrymen the first full translation of the 19th century Dutch classic about Java, Eduard Douwes Dekker's Max Havelaar, and translated the Koran into poetic Indonesian.
In time JASSIN became Indonesia's most prolific literary critic, an influential voice in determining literary standards and in advancing the cause of free expression. During the ideological debates of the early 1960s he promulgated the famous "Cultural Manifesto," denouncing art which served only one political voice. Later he risked incarceration by refusing to divulge the identity of a controversial author.
From his earliest days as an editor and critic JASSIN collected and scrupulously saved every book and magazine he could beg or buy, plus correspondence, manuscripts, bookreviews, clippings and photographs which might help him understand a short story, novel, poem or play and its author. These he filed and drew upon for his articles, books and lectures.
His growing collection, assembled entirely with his own funds, became Indonesia's most exhaustive library and archive for literary research. From the beginning he shared it openheartedly with students and scholars from around the world.
In 1976, after JASSIN's hoard of folders and books had overflowed his own house into his brother's, the then governor of Jakarta, Ali Sadikin, stepped in to provide proper facilities for his collection and a modest subsidy for its operation. Since then the city of Jakarta has housed the H.B.Jassin Center for Literary Documentation, now on one floor of a new building, and provided it with the accoutrements of a modern archive. The annual government subsidy covers the cost of utilities and staff salaries. As custodian and administrator JASSIN takes no pay and in part still finances new acquisitions from his university pension and royalties from his books. The collection, which now exceeds 50,000 volumes, continues to grow.
In electing HANS BAGUE JASSIN to receive the 1987 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, the Board of Trustees recognizes his preserving for Indonesians their literary heritage.
