Budi Darma came to Bloomington for a degree and left with pages of stories filled with Bloomington landmarks like College Mall, Fess Avenue and the Indiana Memorial Union.
The Indonesian absurdist writer observed Bloomington between his work as a graduate student in the English department. Darma finished his doctoral degree in Bloomington in 1980 with seven short fiction stories comprising the collection, “People of Bloomington.” He published his first novel, “Olenka,” in 1983.
This July, “Olenka" will be published in English for the first time by Penguin Classics.
“Olenka” follows the story of a man named Fanton Drummond’s encounters with a woman named Olenka Danton. After he first spots her in an elevator, he begins to see her everywhere until they begin an affair, and she suddenly disappears.
Darma was inspired to write the story after seeing a woman in an elevator in Bloomington who caught his attention.
“I took out my typewriter and began to type,” Darma wrote in the preface to “People from Bloomington,” describing his time in the town. “For nearly three weeks I’d say I hardly slept. Then, out of the blue, it was done.”
Donald Gray, a retired IU English professor, said he remembers Darma marching into his office in Ballantine Hall with the confidence of a “seasoned academic administrator” and asking for his help writing a dissertation on Jane Austen.
Darma returned to Bloomington a few times after completing his dissertation, and Gray said he remembers encountering him on several occasions.
One time, he said, he went to the opera, sitting down in the dark, and when the lights came up for intermission, he realized Darma was seated right next to him.
To this day, Gray remains an admirer of Darma’s writings. Darma published over 38 works including novels, short stories and essays. “Olenka” is his most famous work.
“I think the stories are mostly about loneliness, and I was moved by them,” Gray said.
“Olenka" also featured clippings from the Indiana Daily Student throughout the work in a collage-like style, Chinese-Indonesian writer and translator Tiffany Tsao said.
Tsao said she was drawn to Darma’s writings because of their “funny” and “weird” nature. She began translating his short story collection “People from Bloomington” in 2017.
Translation appealed to Tsao because she wanted to share Indonesian literature with the world, and she sees her translations of Darma as a way to help diversify the perspectives around the literature.
“We have, such a robust, literary tradition, literary scene,” Tsao said. “It's invisible if you're not speaking the language. But through the translations into English people can enjoy these works and these authors.”
Tsao said she was struck by how polite and gracious Darma was, and he often took a personal interest in Tsao’s own work and family. They often talked about Darma’s memories of his time studying in Bloomington, she said.
“It was really nice to revisit those times with him, because he has such fond memories,” Tsao said.
As Tsao translated “People from Bloomington" during the COVID-19 pandemic, she found a parallel world to Darma’s universe of characters. Both in his stories and real life, she found isolated people “yearning for human contact.”
Darma died from COVID-19 at 84 in August 2021, just before the publication of the translated “People from Bloomington.”
“I felt like a very strong, sense of duty and responsibility around the work, because Budi Darma wasn't there anymore,” Tsao said.
Tsao said it frustrates her for Indonesian literature to be categorized as just books set in Indonesia or about political issues in the country. She sometimes encounters this when recommending Darma to readers, with some saying he isn’t Indonesian enough because of his works set in the American Midwest.
Other difficulties Tsao faced in translation was Darma’s use of Javanese words sprinkled throughout his work, which she didn’t include. Javanese is a language mostly spoken on the island of Java in Indonesia, with 68 million native speakers.
Indonesian was declared the national language in 1945. Tsao said that while it is used by the government and schools, many people use Javanese or other languages among family and friends.
“Those little Javanese words are sprinkled here and there in the texts, and I like to think it would have made most readers who are from that background feel like it's a bit more homey, a bit more familiar, a bit more local,” Tsao said.
Tsao’s English translation of "Olenka” will be released on July 21, 2026, on Amazon as well as at Morgenstern Books and Café, Book Corner and through special order at Redbud Books.
