Sunday, March 15, 2009

Gravy for a Kept Woman?

I lifted this from Facebook :
Silverfishbooks, Sang Freud Press dan Sindiket Sol-jah, dengan berbesar hati menjemput anda sekalian pencinta fiksi berbahasa Melayu untuk bersama memeriahkan sidang pembacaan naskhah DUA LAUK dan PEREMPUAN SIMPANAN.

Date: Saturday, March 28, 2009
Time: 5:30pm - 8:00pm
Location: Silverfish Books, Jln Telawi, Bangsar Baru

Readers include:

D'ianadi
Wani Ardy
Taf 'Tifani' Teh
Ila Syazwani
Dila Raden
Wahida Rahim
Alina Abdullah

Further enquiries : dvinecomedy@hotmail.com
Congrats to Sufian Abas and friends for getting this new collection off the ground. The title is a wee bit hard to translate directly into English. (But this bluff-full Mat Salleh will have a go anyway and mangle a beautiful language.) Lauk means the dishes, curry and so on, eaten with rice as part of a Malay meal. A perumpuan simpanan is a kept-woman = mistress. And in this case it seems she's only been left two dishes to eat with her rice. (But why? I am intrigued to find out the answer to this! And if they are delicious lauk, such as I feel perfectly capable of cooking myself, should she still feel deprived?)

No doubt Sufian will be along to tell me I've got hold of the wrong end of the stick entirely. Never mind.

We also have Readings@Seksan that Saturday afternoon, but I will try to finish early so that anyone who wants to walk up the road to Silverfish will be able to get a second dose of things literary that afternoon!

7 comments:

Sufian said...

Thanks, Sharon :)

bibliobibuli said...

did i translate ok???

Baronhawk said...

'Tinggalan Dua Lauk Untuk Perempuan Simpanan Itu' literally means 'leave two dishes for that mistress."

Yeah I guess you got it right.

As for the meaning, Sufian would be better equipped to inform us.

For my personal attempt at deciphering it, it is either like you alluded, that the misstress is only left the scraps...i.e. only two dishes...

or it alludes to the experience of being a mistress. The 'Dua Lauk' or two dishes being the fare or life that is accorded to a mistress. How society treats a mistress perhaps? Oh well, get the book and we'll now.

gnute said...

Do you think the "2" in the title is a fancy way of saying "lauk-lauk"? So, leave the "dishes" for the kept woman...

Anonymous said...

Nice cover but is that a typo? "untok" surely should be "untuk" from my old BM lessons.

Or is that meant to be that as it is? afterall as we know BM these days are really 'anything goes'.

Anonymous said...

I would use "cerita" for "fiksi" -- there's too much pollution in BM already.

Anonymous said...

Also, it's a very nice play on words, leftovers for leftovers :)