He and the Tree
That afternoon he apologized to the only tree in the company parking lot
which sheltered his car from the sun. He wanted to make amends for his grandpa
who owned the palm oil company, for his family who believed a carpenter
was the son of god. The tree began to weep and think of his childhood friend,
ripped from the ground because he was “too close to the foundation.”
From afar they would check on each other and wink and dream about being grownup:
the birds and butterflies would alight on their branches and leafbuds
and would help them send each other messages back and forth.
The tree regretted not telling his friend he loved him.
He wanted to bring him to a church. At the altar they would be joined together
before god, who had three branches—like a tree—and their children would fill
the parking lot, every square inch, so that one day everyone who passed by
would think a forest had sprung up in the middle of the city. The man hugged the tree,
the tree hugged the man.
Sergius Seeks Bacchus
Like a snake shedding a temporary skin
you embark/carry on your quest. Now the light overhead
passes through you. You glow translucent and far away in the west
in the dying city of Rome Galerius doesn’t know his end is near.
You are seeking someone who means the world to you
who came to your prison cell in his silvery body, whispering Don’t give up
I will always be with you. Together you will
ascend to heaven and feel familiarity
for the first time. The two of you will hold hands
and introduce each other in the full sight of all.
Inferno
what are You looking for in this dark place
besides the weeping and gnashing of teeth
Your face is so innocent
there is nothing in You at all
You come here crying Virgil! Virgil!
You’re in the middle of Your life
young and lost You want to
find a way to grow Old
reach an age where the world is no longer mysterious:
1) give up those who don’t understand You
because You will understand Yourself
2) give up those who don’t love You
because You will love Yourself
You want to stop reaching
stop choking on the water of life
and live a normal life so short already
You know pretty poems are only found in books
where the heaven they talk about Exists
in poems that don’t talk about You
Purgatorio
His father was convinced this was His punishment after everything that He had done
all the mistakes, obscene acts, and sins but He still loved the man
after everything that had happened to Him how labyrinthine feeling is!
He was sure of His life to come God would know He wasn’t wrong
it was a blessing from the Tree of Knowledge He was just following directions
He could decipher all the hieroglyphs about Himself from every cell of his being
Paradiso
He is here
is with all
Those Lost & those never
His
Curriculum Vitae 2015
The world I lived in had a soft voice and no claws.
—Lisel Mueller
1) Three months before he was born the Romanian dictator and his wife were executed before a firing squad. To this day his mother still talks about it.
2) When he was a boy he fell from a tree. Ever since, his earliest memory of his father was himself in school uniform, squatting on the toilet. The roots lay in his first day of school—he was five and right before they set off he told his father he needed to poop.
3) The first thing he learned at school watching all the girls during recess was that there was a girl inside him. He thought when he grew up his penis would dissolve and her breasts would sprout.
4) He didn’t say much and only learned to read when he was finishing second grade. In front of a friend of his mother’s, the mother of one of his friends called him “the stupid one.” His mother’s friend told his mother and when he was grown up his mother told him.
5) He was bad at making friends and spent most of his time reading and playing Nintendo and Sega. The first book he read was a book of Japanese folktales.
6) Some parents in his neighborhood refused to let their children play with him and his brothers because their family was Bataknese and Christian.
7) He had no friends and didn’t realize how sad this was.
8) His father beat him regularly. One day he eavesdropped on his parents—his father was concerned about the way he acted which he said was girly. He looked in the mirror, to the little girl within, and saw it was good.
9) One time his father kicked him and sprained an ankle. His father didn’t go to work. His mother said he was the source of all the problems in their household.
10) One Sunday morning his father took him and his brothers to jog and play soccer on a badminton court nearby. “You faggot,” his father screamed in front of everyone.
11) He accepted that he was a failure. His first suicide attempt occurred the day before he started middle school.
12) He got into the best high school in the city where all the government officials sent their children. His friends from middle school started avoiding him. The bud of loneliness blossomed into first love.
13) Not long after he graduated from college he discovered the rest of the Bataknese community called him “the faggot” behind his back.
14) When he was twenty-two depression hit. One night he lost his memory. His brother found him at a gas station near the shopping mall.
15) He ran away from home and found a book by Herta Müller in a bookstore in Jakarta. Herta wrote about Ceauşescu’s Securitate. It reminded him of his mother. He then read every English translation of Herta’s books and loved them all.
16) As he approached his twenty-third birthday, for reasons he didn’t understand, he felt he was male. And he saw it wasn’t bad.
17) He moved back in with his parents.
18) He went back to work and began writing again. In a novel-writing class he met you, the man who loves him.
19) His father sold the motorbike he was leasing from his workplace to marry his mother. He hoped to use the royalties from his books to marry you.
20) He will grow old. You will grow old. You both will grow old and be wed before the Three-Branched God—the tree-like God—and have a child named Langit. Your descendants will fill the Earth so that whenever anyone is walking in the dark by themself they will hear, from every window on every building on both sides of the street, voices reaching out—“Salam!” “Salam!” “Salam!”
from Sergius Seeks Bacchus
Norman Erikson Pasaribu
translated from the Indonesian by Tiffany Tsao
Read the original in Indonesian
It’s hard to be queer in Indonesia. Government officials often make offensive and absurd public statements about gayness and transsexuality. A movement is currently underway to criminalize same-sex relationships. LGBT Indonesians regularly face violence or threats of violence, and the police turn a blind eye. Many commentators are even saying that 2016 has seen an alarming and unprecedented escalation of anti-LGBT sentiment nationwide. Yet, this is the stage onto which Norman’s poetry has made its entrance, and the circumstances under which the collection Sergius Mencari Bacchus was awarded the prestigious Jakarta Arts Council Prize at the end of 2015. These six poems hail from this collection.
Titled after two, fourth-century Christian martyrs whom the gay community has adopted as icons, and comprised of thirty-three poems (the number of poems corresponding to the age at which Christ was crucified), Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s collection draws upon various aspects of his own life—his sexual orientation, his ethnic Bataknese background, his Christian upbringing and grappling with the beliefs thereof, his familial history, history at large—to furnish readers with a new kind of gospel, a bittersweet and tragicomic good news, pieced together from encounters with ridicule, violence, and also, happiness.
Corresponding with Norman has been a vital part of the translation process, and I mean “vital” in the truest sense of the word. It’s been a privilege to have the poet himself provide feedback on the translations, and our exchanges have enabled the English versions of these poems to take on lives of their own. Yes, of course, they seek to replicate the style and structure of their Indonesian counterparts; but they also take advantage of their new, English medium to magnify their Indonesianness (as in the closing lines of “Curriculum Vitae 2015” where the words Langit and Salam are left untranslated) and augment their playfulness (for example, the allusions to tree-huggers in the “hugged” of “He and the Tree” and to personal ads in the “seeks” of “Sergius Seeks Bacchus,” which aren’t as obvious in the originals). These and many other translation choices may never have transpired if it weren’t for our lively back and forth. Norman and I would also like to express our gratitude to the poet Mikael Johani for his assistance in translating the poem “Inferno.”
Titled after two, fourth-century Christian martyrs whom the gay community has adopted as icons, and comprised of thirty-three poems (the number of poems corresponding to the age at which Christ was crucified), Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s collection draws upon various aspects of his own life—his sexual orientation, his ethnic Bataknese background, his Christian upbringing and grappling with the beliefs thereof, his familial history, history at large—to furnish readers with a new kind of gospel, a bittersweet and tragicomic good news, pieced together from encounters with ridicule, violence, and also, happiness.
Corresponding with Norman has been a vital part of the translation process, and I mean “vital” in the truest sense of the word. It’s been a privilege to have the poet himself provide feedback on the translations, and our exchanges have enabled the English versions of these poems to take on lives of their own. Yes, of course, they seek to replicate the style and structure of their Indonesian counterparts; but they also take advantage of their new, English medium to magnify their Indonesianness (as in the closing lines of “Curriculum Vitae 2015” where the words Langit and Salam are left untranslated) and augment their playfulness (for example, the allusions to tree-huggers in the “hugged” of “He and the Tree” and to personal ads in the “seeks” of “Sergius Seeks Bacchus,” which aren’t as obvious in the originals). These and many other translation choices may never have transpired if it weren’t for our lively back and forth. Norman and I would also like to express our gratitude to the poet Mikael Johani for his assistance in translating the poem “Inferno.”
Norman Erikson Pasaribu was born in Jakarta in 1990. He holds a bachelor’s degree in accounting from the Indonesian State College of Accounting and worked for Indonesia’s tax office for almost six years before resigning in 2016 to pursue writing. His first short story collection, Hanya Kamu yang Tahu Berapa Lama Lagi Aku Harus Menunggu (Only You Know How Much Longer I Should Wait), was shortlisted for the 2014 Khatulistiwa Literary Award for Prose. His debut poetry collection, Sergius Mencari Bacchus (Sergius Seeks Bacchus), won first prize in the 2015 Jakarta Arts Council Poetry Competition and was shortlisted for the 2016 Khatulistiwa Literary Award for Poetry.
Tiffany Tsao is a writer, translator, and Asymptote’s Indonesia editor-at-large. After spending her formative years in Singapore and Indonesia, she moved to the US where she received her Ph.D. in English from UC-Berkeley. She now lives in Sydney, Australia. Her writing and translations have appeared in LONTAR, The Sydney Review of Books, the anthologies Contemporary Asian Australian Poets and BooksActually’s Gold Standard 2016, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, The Oddfits (AmazonCrossing), was published in 2016.
