Posts featuring Chairil Anwar

From the Tale of Crafting a God: Afrizal Malna on the Afrizalian in Indonesian Poetry and Drama

July 3, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

In writing poetry, I experience this body-that-writes as a mutant in language; I feel a different person is present in myself.

In contemporary Indonesian literature, the writer Afrizal Malna has earned his own movement. Coined by Universitas Gadjah Mada professor Faruk HT, the Afrizalian has come to mean “seemingly disjointed images and ideas wrapped inside deceivingly simple phrases,” according to University of Auckland’s Zita Reyninta Sari, who goes on to elaborate the ways that it puts “everyday objects, especially those which in a glance are the most mundane … in the spotlight.” In his foreword to Afrizal’s Anxiety Myths, translator Andy Fuller also contributes to the definition: “An Afrizalian aesthetic is an engagement with the physicality of the city. How the body collides and rubs up against the textures of the city; of the varying intense urban spaces of everyday life.”

A SEA Write award-winning writer and artist sketched as “one of Indonesia’s best contemporary poets,” Afrizal’s works have been translated from their original Indonesian into languages such as Dutch, Japanese, German, Portuguese, and English, and have received accolades from literary award-giving bodies in Indonesia and beyond. To name one, Daniel Owen’s translation of Afrizal’s poems was the winner of Asymptote’s 2019 Close Approximations Prize.

 In this interview, I spoke with Afrizal—currently in Sidoarjo in East Java—with the help of Owen’s translation. Our discussion covers the Afrizalian literary movement within contemporary Indonesian poetry and drama; the terrains of linguistic hierarchies and reader reception; and his latest poetry collection Document Shredding Museum, originally published as Museum Penghancur Dokumen in 2013.  

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Your latest collection, Document Shredding Museum, is now out from World Poetry Books. Could you tell us about the collection’s journey?

Afrizal Malna (AM): This edition of Document Shredding Museum is actually a revised, second edition of the book; the first edition was published by the Australia-based publisher Reading Sideways Press in 2019. In Indonesia, it was published a decade ago. The answer I’m giving you to this question now is probably quite different from how I would have responded back then.

This book was written between 2009 and 2013, over a decade after the fall of the Suharto regime and the 1998 Reformasi. This regime ruled from 1966 to 1998 as a result of the 1965 tragedy—the massacre of members of the Indonesia Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia or PKI) and those accused of being Communists, alongside the overthrow of the prior president Soekarno—which is still full of question marks even now. 2009 to 2013 was a time when the Indonesian people began questioning: what resulted from the 1998 Reformasi? Has there really been a fundamental change? We wondered if the powerful in Indonesia will always be prone to nepotism and its corollary effects—such as legal, ethical, and human rights violations, as well as corruption.

It was also during this time that I lived in Yogyakarta, in a Javanese cultural environment, occupying the boundary between village and city as a blurred space in Nitiprayan, Bantul (still a part of Yogyakarta). This became the moment for me to start from zero, and to allow my activities to mimic the wind, moving to find empty spaces and lowlands. This blank slate could shift the past—which was filled with hope for political change, as well as hope for literature and art to respond the 1998 Reformasi.

Global society at that time was facing social upheaval and natural disasters. When the earthquake in Padang, West Sumatra happened, I was living in a house that I had rented from a family of farmers—an old, fragile Javanese house (rumah limasan) made of wood. The earthquake made the house convulse, and it was as if the house were dancing along to the earthquake’s rhythm in order to avoid collapse. When the earthquake stopped, not a single part was damaged, but many of the houses made of stone or cement had cracked or collapsed. It felt as if the wind had vanished. Leaves were stiff like in a painting, and the feeling of solitude, of quiet, was stifling.

That natural disaster, among many others, reflected the awareness that our bodies and our technology were paralyzed, powerless. Our ancestors, who had a long history of facing disasters, may have known how to read the portents of an upcoming disaster as an ancient form of mitigation, but this knowledge was not passed down to us. READ MORE…

Close Approximations: In Conversation with Poetry Winner Daniel Owen

April 10, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Timmer Harvey

It's like an exorcism and a prayer for long life in one breath.

This year’s winner of the Poetry category in Asymptote’s fourth annual Close Approximations Translation Contest was Daniel Owen. Poetry judge Eugene Ostashevsky called Alfizal Malna’s text “intellectual poetry of the highest caliber,” praising Owen for his “elegant, reserved English,” and for offering readers “a beautiful thing of clear obscurity” in his translations of Malna’s Document Shredding Museum.

We recently caught up with Yogyakarta-based Daniel to learn more about his work with the legendary Afrizal Malna, the process of “unsomeoneification,” and what he has been up to since winning the Close Approximations contest in January.

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): I found your translations of Document Shredding Museum to be incredibly beautiful and inviting; no easy feat given the complexity of Malna’s writing. How did you first come to Afrizal Malna and his work?

Daniel Owen (DO): I met Afrizal at Kampung Buku Jogja, an annual literary event in Yogyakarta with a book fair, readings, and discussions. I had just come to stay awhile in Jogja to intensively study Indonesian language and to read and subsequently translate Indonesian literature. While my Indonesian was okay when we first met, I hadn’t yet read much and was quite ignorant of the literary landscape. We were introduced by my friends, the writers and small press publishers Lelaki Budiman and Tiaswening Maharsi, after Afrizal’s discussion on theater and poetry with Gunawan Maryanto. I bought a copy of his new book of short stories, Pagi Yang Miring Ke Kanan (Nyala, 2017) and we chatted a bit. Following our initial meeting, I started reading Afrizal’s work pretty intensely, the short stories along with poems I found on the internet, and then his book of essays Sesuatu Indonesia. I found myself entranced by the poems; it was like encountering something extremely familiar yet at the same time novel. That kind of tickling of the sensibilities that’s both troubling and pleasurable, takes you, as a reader, outside yourself while making you feel more yourself. I started translating these poems which I’d found online, primarily to see what would happen and to share them with non-Indonesian-speaking friends who asked about what I was reading, thinking about, engaging with. And then I borrowed Museum Penghancur Dokumen from Budiman, read the whole thing and started translating it.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

April 14, 2017  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carmen Morawski, Janani Ganesan, and Tiffany Tsao

The latest news from our bookish reporters on the ground in Indonesia, Spain, and India

Your weekly world tour kicks off in Indonesia this week, where we’ll hear about writers receiving special honors and new books out in Indonesian and English. Then we’ll jet to Spain because some of the biggest literary awards are being announced right now! And our final destination will be India, where…

Tiffany Tsao, Editor-at-Large for Indonesia, has some serious scoop:

In commemoration of the writer Sapardi Djoko Damono’s seventy-seventh birthday late last month, seven books were launched at the Bentara Budaya Jakarta cultural institute in South Jakarta: one new novel and six new editions of Sapardi’s previously published poetry collections. The novel, entitled Pingkan Melipat Jarak [Pingkan Folds Distance] is the second installment of a trilogy, the first novel of which is titled Hujan Bulan Juni [June Rain]. Sapardi is widely considered Indonesia’s pioneer of lyrical poetry. Well-known writer and journalist Goenawan Mohammad opened the evening with a few words about Sapardi’s work, followed by poetry readings—including musical renditions—by writers and musicians.

Several writers from the province of West Sumatra have put forth a proposal that the poet Chairil Anwar be officially recognized as one of Indonesia’s national heroes. Born in the Sumatran city of Medan in 1922, Chairil wrote poetry until his untimely death in 1949 at the age of 27. Critics consider his poetry to be revolutionary on several levels, notably his engagement with the Indonesian struggle for independence at the time, his introduction of Western-influenced themes into Indonesian poetry, and the groundbreaking way he wielded bahasa Indonesia, or Indonesian—the new official language of the nascent nation.

Feminist fiction writer and essayist Intan Paramaditha’s short-story collection Sihir Perempuan [Black Magic Woman] will be rereleased at the end of April by Indonesian publisher Gramedia Pustaka Utama. The collection was originally published in 2005 and shortlisted for the Kusala Sastra Khatulistiwa Award.

The English translation of the Indonesian bestseller Perahu Kertas [Paper Boats], written by Dee Lestari will be released on May 1 by Amazon’s literature-in-translation imprint AmazonCrossing. Paper Boats is one of the seven Indonesian works that AmazonCrossing announced it would publish at the 2015 Frankfurt Book Fair, at which Indonesia was the guest of honor. Last year saw the publication of Nirzona by Abidah El Khalieqy and translated by Annie Tucker, and The Question of Red, written in English and Indonesian by Laksmi Pamuntjak.

Editor-at-Large Carmen Morawski reports from Spain:

April is an important month for prizes in the Spanish literary world and as such, let’s begin with the most prestigious. Equivalent to the Nobel Prize for Spanish literature, the 2016 Cervantes Prize, will be awarded on April 23 to  Eduardo Mendoza for his contribution to Spanish letters. Created in 1975, the prize is awarded on April 23 to coincide with Día del Libro (World Book Day), the day selected by UNESCO to honor both Shakespeare and Cervantes, who died on the same calendar date though not on the same day. At 125,000 euros, it is Spanish literature’s biggest award for Castilian language writers, with recipients alternating each year between Latin America and Spain.

Also of note, the 2013 Cervantes award winner, Elena Poniatowska, presided over this week’s announcement of the 2017 Alfaguara award for the novel, Rendición, by Ray Loriga which, according to ABC, was described by Poniatowska as both a “Kafkaesque and Orwellian history on authority and collective manipulation.” Citing Juan Rulfo among his influences, this multitalented author, screen writer, and director, Jorge Loriga Torrenova, who is better known as Ray Loriga, chooses to describe his dystopic science fiction novel as having “little science.”

Also worth mentioning is the 2017 Premio Azorín awarded to the Basque author from Bilbao, Espido Freire, for her novel, Llamadme Alejandra [Call Me Alexandra] about the last Russian Tsarina. Created in 1994, as a joint venture between the provincial government of Alicante and the Spanish publisher Editorial Planeta, the prize carries the pseudonymous name Azorín, used by Augusto Trinidad Martínez Ruíz of the “Generation of 98,” to sign his work. To learn more about this important member of the Generation of 98 don’t miss ABC’s tribute to Azorín in this week’s culture section commemorating the 50th anniversary of his death.

Finally, and certain to be of interest to Asymptote readers, is Laura Salas Rodríguez’s Spanish translation from the original French of Bosnian writer Velibor Colic’s Manual de exilio [Manual of Exile], available from Periférica. Based on his experience as a Balkan war refugee in France, Colic’s novel is particularly relevant now given the global refugee crisis. Be sure to read this Letras Libres interview, “Exile is Apprenticeship”, in which Colic discusses the paradox of writing in French, a language he didn’t begin to learn until the age of thirty.

And Assistant Managing Editor Janani Ganesan checks in with us from India:

As festival season wraps, it’s becoming clear that one festival in particular made its mark this year. Not one of the literary heavyweights in the country (like the Jaipur Literature Festival), but the lesser-known Bookaroo, a children’s literature festival in its ninth year, came into the limelight when it won the Literary Festival of the Year award at the London Book Fair (LBF). You can read an interview with the organizers of the festival here.

At a time when, not only in India but also in countries across the world, there is a noticeable shift towards tightening borders and a clinging on to an “ahistoric” nationalism, this in-depth interview with historian Romila Thapar provides an understanding of the new phenomenon. In a five-part conversation with the India Cultural Forum—an organization that focusses on issues of concern to writers, educators, and cultural practitioners—Thapar says about nationalism, “We are at the moment today when nationalism means territory. We are all nationalists in our own way and our debate on nationalism in a post-independent nation like ours is yet to be broad-based and public.”

Vivek Shanbag’s Ghachar Ghochar, the first book translated from Kannada to have a release in the U.S (in February), has had  a grand reception with a 1000-word New York Times review—a welcome sign for translated literature from the country.

On the other hand, Indian language writing faced a sad month with the passing away of the legendary Tamil writer Ashokamitran in late March. A prolific writer with 200 short stories, 20 novellas, and 8 novels to his name, he brought into being a unique literary history in the country. This exhaustive tribute by one of his translators, N Kalyan Raman, compares his work and life to those of his contemporaries, shedding light on what distinguished Ashokamitran from his colleagues. As the translator notes, his 200 short stories “belong to one indivisible world and can be experienced as the one big story in which we may all find ourselves.” Other tributes to Ashokamitran have also pointed out and lamented the obscurity of a writer, who should be read and reread much more widely.

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