Found in Translation: Mapping Budi Darma’s ‘People from Bloomington’

The Tulip Tree apartment building in Bloomington, Indiana, sits on the edge of the Indiana University campus, 11 stories high with over 200 units. I recently drove past the structure, which curves inward around a wide expanse of grass. I had just been tent-camping in the nearby forest beside Lake Monroe with my son and his Boy Scout troop, where we orienteered, hiked, and spotted turtles, frogs, and deer in the woods. After days and nights spent beneath towering pines and the stars for a roof, the concrete-and-glass Tulip Tree Apartments looked otherworldly.

These apartments make an appearance in the Indonesian writer Budi Darma’s 1980 story collection . The first English edition of the collection, translated by , was published by Penguin Classics in April. The book’s version of the Tulip 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.