Southeast Asian Literature: Indonesian poetry

Showing posts with label Indonesian poetry. Show all posts

Sunday, 3 March 2013

Diplomacy through poetry | Khairani Barokka

Gulf Between Australia and Indonesia a Lot Narrower When We Take a Stanza

“Late last year at a Canberra cafe I led an improvised poetry workshop. In the spirit of creative writing, I asked five Indonesians to each shout out a word they associated with Australia. Out came “barren,” “desert,” “barbecue,” “kangaroo” and “Corby.” In contrast, the five words Australians chose to depict Indonesia were: “spicy,” “steamy,” “islands,” “intricate” and “batik.”

Keep in mind this was not your everyday Australian setting. It was a gathering organized by Australian National University’s School of Music Poets and Australian Poetry, titled “Meet Your Neighbors,” where academics and writers discussed all things poetic beneath sarongs that hung across the Biginelli Espresso Cafe.

Doesn’t it make you wonder what words others would use to describe the country across the water, if you asked a random assortment of warung-goers in Semarang or pub-goers in Sydney?”

Thursday, 3 January 2013

“Introduction / Pengantar: Crossing Bloodlines” by Deborah Cole, Cordite Poetry Review: Indonesia Special Issue

“The poems in this collection trace the overlapping cycles of the human journey from birth to death across the space/time habitat we measure in footfalls and poetic metre. Travelled in the company of family and community, our journeys enact the species’ heritage and legacy of kinship and violence – two sides of the same struggle towards a longed-for intimacy that might negate the spatial, temporal and psychological divide between the other and the self. Through commingling languages and intertwining elocutions, this issue explores the distances and intimacies between a varied set of human journeys by poets writing in Indonesia and Australia. As these two countries are so close on maps – but oftentimes, sadly, only on our maps – these poems invite the re-arrangement of our conceptual geographies.

This collection began as a conversation between Kent MacCarter and Sapardi Djoko Damono (arguably Indonesia’s best-known contemporary poet and leading literary scholar). The goal was to create a translation exchange that would showcase established poets whose work was still very much on the rise with a balanced representation of gender, ethnicity and region in each country. A second conversation between MacCarter and John McGlynn (leading translator of Indonesian literature into English and editor-in-chief of The Lontar Foundation) led to an invitation to McGlynn, poet Dorothea Rosa Herliany and me (Deborah Cole) to join the project – an invitation that we accepted enthusiastically.”

Sunday, 30 December 2012

Notes about the INDONESIA Special Issue | Kent MacCarter

“When I approached major Indonesian poet Sapardi Djoko Damono – godfather of that sprawling nation’s contemporary poetics and a renowned translator of English-language works into Bahasa Indonesia – about working with me on a kind of ‘translation exchange’ to then publish online and promote in our countries, he e-replied enthusiastically that ‘we must’!

But it was with a slight twinge – the kind of cogent relish fork that skewers your mood (just enough, but none too deep) when you learn your most recent great idea is not as original as its first eureka promised you – that I read further into Damono’s email to learn that he’d done exactly this back in 1991 (sans the online angle). Mendorong Jack Kuntikunti: Sepilihan Sajak Dari Australia collects one to two poems from 41 Australian poets; together, the works form an anthology with Indonesian translations published side-by-side with the English originals. Co-editor for the project was Canberra-based poet R F Brissenden. Damono sent me a well-loved copy of the book immediately (I imagine it’s well out of print).”