Yuletide unofficial chat

I picked up The Epic of Bidasari (and other tales) during a book fair ages ago in trying to support a local publisher, Silverfish Books, though sadly since then said publisher has gone under, apparently due to business troubles during lockdown. The book is a 2012 republishing of a 1901 publication by The Colonial Press (actual name!) which was a translation work from Malay to English of the older text, though it's unclear if they also did the Malay transcription from the oral form.

Having grown up here in the 80s/90s, I know and adore the 1964 black-and-white film Bidasari starring Sarimah and Jins Shamsudin. (Shockingly, I can't find an upload of the full film on youtube to share here!) It's due to familiarity with that movie that I picked up this book, and I really enjoyed reading the full English-translated poem, which makes up the meat of this book, though I do wish I had a Malay original as well because you can just SEE glimpses between the words of what the original was, plus as with all translations the vibes would just be different. Also, the dialogue of the Bidasari film is almost entirely in verse, and I would've loved to see if they'd ported anything over from the poem.

Bidasari is a folktale/fairytale about a princess, Bidasari, who is abandoned as a baby by her royal parents when they (the parents) are chased by a garuda and have to flee into the desert. Bidasari is rescued by a merchant of another kingdom, who prospers as he raises her. Bidasari grows up beautiful and kind and flawless (etc etc) which puts her in the radar of the queen, who is beautiful but not that beautiful, and fears that her husband the king will take Bidasari as his second wife if he sees her. So the queen has Bidasari brought to her and locks her up to abuse in the hopes of ruining her beauty, eventually seemingly killing her, but due to certain magical shenanigans Bidasari isn't dead dead, but only partly dead. Bidasari's body is returned to her merchant father, who puts her in a secret house-tomb in the woods that the king eventually stumbles upon while hunting.

Obviously there's some similarity to Snow White, and the filmmakers of the movie saw that, too, and made the queen a witch of sorts who has a magic mirror that she uses pretty much the same way as the Snow White queen does. But the biggest change, which surprised me, too, is that instead of Bidasari being the queen's stepdaughter, she's the queen's rival for the king's love, and that just makes so much sense! Of course that only works in a folktale setting where polygyny is a thing, and vanity is a good enough sin for these kinds of stories regardless, but the queen's intense, preemptive jealousy just feels more organic this way, which I thought was neat. Like, the queen created her own problems by targeting Bidasari, more or less. (The Bidasari movie has the love interest prince be the evil queen's stepson instead.)

( Cut the rest for length. )