Themes of Invention, Help, and Will: Joachim Campe's Robinson der Jüngere in Tagalog and Bahasa Melayu Translations

Abstract

Joachim Heinrich Campe's pedagogical work Robinson der Jüngere (1779/1780) represents one of the most important and popular educational works of the European Enlightenment. It is not widely known that this work was translated into Malay as Hikayat Robinson Crusoë (1875) and into Tagalog as Ang Bagong Robinson (1879) in the late nineteenth century. This paper attempts a preliminary comparative analysis of these translations with a particular focus on the problem of translating concepts from political economy into Tagalog and Malay.