Three Poems

Nirwan Dewanto

Eden
 
Roads are not completely paved,
And homes are still whitewashed
With a limestone paste.
There are even kenari trees
 
Still throwing their shadows
On a pair of newlyweds
Who must seek at the river’s bottom
What scales remain of the Milky Way.
 
But this young couple prefers to fixate on
Ginger flowers in their lush foliage
And a hand of horn bananas whose sap
Can blind the tempter snake.
 
Their escorts, meanwhile, are still learning
To make knives from a chunk of obsidian.
That is the reason the barbarians from the city
Have yet to attack this place.
 
The sea is not far away,
But no one is interested in going there.
There’s more than enough salt here, says the chief
While snapping the end of his Chinese binoculars.

 

The Way to the Museum
 
All eyeballs dipped in the vinegar of the bourgeoisie will become pickled eyeballs.
 
Tonight I embrace my homeland. Being blind would not matter as long as I could give my eyeballs to you.
 
I have embraced all the railways and all trains are still on the way to you. I have embraced all the oceans and all ships are still on the way to you. I have embraced all books and all histories are still on the way to you.
 
They seek my eyeballs so as to be able to see the second revolution.
 
For years they have been on alert, and the overflow of tears from their eyes has turned to vinegar. You are the tapper. You are the one who readies the holding vessels.
 
But why do you sharpen your spurs if not to pluck out my eyeballs?
 
If I become blind tomorrow, you will only be able to sell your vinegar to the proletariat.
 
Therefore, come this way. Be the eyes for our blind love, me and my homeland. Break your vessels at the Museum of the Revolution, which is only half completed.
 


A Painter Who Meets his Ends in Bali
 
The old mountain he adores
looks not so old anymore,
what with only the peak he’s saved
in a textured expanse of blue.
 
But fire in the valley still burns,
and its flames still sneak beneath
the skin of the woman
who faithfully slits his sarong.
 
And the shining strait that separates
this island from his ancestral island
he permits to flow freely
between his fingers.
 
If his eyes seem blinded
when he turns towards the ocean,
it’s a sign that black is being smeared,
the black of his insomnia.
 
Sometimes the earth gives him
a tip of clear ivory,
which he quickly thrusts into
the navel of the goddess.
 
He approaches her naked body,
which has forever slipped away from his brush,
and then with a languid green circle
he turns her face towards the royal garden.
 
In the wrinkled bark of the poon tree
and the smoothness of the bricked gateway,
is always the curve of maestro Lempad’s lines,
which has always been beyond his ken.
 
On the canvas, in the night
a lotus blooms
white, the color of death
which he never painted.

translated from the Indonesian by John H. McGlynn

Read the original in Indonesian

Listen to "The Way to The Museum" read in the original Indonesian by the author:

Of the many Indonesian poets whose work I have translated, I have found few whose poetic output is as intriguing and wide-ranging in subject matter as that of Nirwan Dewanto. That Nirwan is erudite is evidenced in his work. He finds his source of inspiration anywhere, in works of nature as well as in human creations such as paintings, music, allegories, photography, literature, and religious texts. None, however, are treated as points of reference or symbols of something else. They stand by themselves, with their own individual character but, at the same time, raise questions about their original form and lead the reader to unexpected vistas. In his poems, Nirwan absorbs and reuses significant elements of Indonesia’s poetic tradition. He also incorporates elements from the international poetic vocabulary, as well as literary tropes that are more common to prose. All of this makes his poetry a minefield for translators who might have scant knowledge of the subjects he touches on—geology, painting, shadow puppetry, and mysticism, to name just a few—or are unable to decipher his subtle references to other poets, the visual arts, literary works, and so on. Fortunately, Nirwan is a living author whom I know and like, and therefore I am able to ask him point blank, “What in the world do you mean?” when coming across a particularly devilish passage.

Nirwan’s poems are a joy to translate precisely because of the challenge they invariably represent. His poems always force the translator to stop and reconsider what first comes to mind upon their reading and to consider an entirely different interpretation altogether; they create a state of tension between extreme juxtaposition and hidden logic, between childlike playfulness and calculated detachment—which makes their rendering in other languages a delicate and time-consuming task.

I owe a note of thanks to Zen Hae for his introduction to Nirwan’s poetry published in Museum of Pure Desire (Lontar, 2017).

Nirwan Dewanto is a poet, essayist, editor, and arts curator who once wrote, in a note on his poetic quest, “Should a blind swimmer decide whether he is to stop in the middle of the sea or to swim back to the shore? But poetry doesn’t try to resolve the matter. It stops short of that so that emptiness as well as meaning echo between the poet’s blindness and his seeing.” His publications include Jantung Lebah Ratu (The Queen Bee’s Heart; Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2008) and Buli-Buli Lima Kaki (The Five-Footed Jug; Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2010), both of which received the Kusala Sastra Khatulistiwa literary prize for poetry; collected prose poems Buku Merah (The Red Book; Penerbit Oak, 2017) and Buku Jingga (The Orange Book; Penerbit Oak, 2018); and collected essays Senjakala Kebudayaan (Culture’s Twilight; Penerbit Oak, 2015), Satu Setengah Mata-Mata (One and a Half Eyes; Penerbit Oak, 2016), and Kaki Kata (Footed Words; Teroka Press, 2020). His most recent publication, Dua Marga (Two Kin; Teroka Press, 2022), which includes the three poems featured in this issue, was named best poetry book of the year in 2022 by Tempo magazine. His poetry in English translation by John H. McGlynn is collected in Museum of Pure Desire (Lontar, 2017).

John H. McGlynn is Director of Publications at the Lontar Foundation, a nonprofit organization established in 1987 for the purpose of introducing Indonesia to the world through literary translations. Through Lontar, McGlynn has ushered into print close to 250 books on Indonesian literature and culture containing translations of literary work by more than 650 Indonesian authors. Also through Lontar, McGlynn initiated a film documentation program that has thus far produced sixty documentary films on Indonesian writers and more than thirty films on Indonesian performance traditions. As the translator of several dozen publications himself, he has garnered much international praise for his work.