Muhammad Salim

Muhammad Salim, the scholar and translator of classical Bugis literature who spent years of his life transliterating and translating Sureq Galigo, the world’s longest text (consists of about 300,000 lines), from Bugis into Indonesian and it was his translation that served as the basis and inspiration for the creation of the lyric poem, The Birth of I La Galigo, by Sapardi Djoko Damono. The version then rendered into an equally poetic work in English by John H. McGlynn, a noted American translator.