Translator's Note

These poems come from Farhanah’s first poetry collection, Masuk Toko Keluar di Tokyo (Enter a Shop, Come Out in Tokyo), published in 2018. Hailing from Bogor, a highland suburban city south of Jakarta, and initially finding herself as a public poet through the free interplay of online poetry communities, Farhanah is one of the defining voices of a new generation of Jakarta-oriented poets. Her work departs from the staid abstraction, watery universalism, and aesthetic conservatism of the Indonesian literary establishment. Farhanah’s work is deeply personal (almost hermetic at times in its references) and full of longing, yet situated in a shared middle-class urban sociality. The poems are rife with intimacies played out across commuter lines and computer screens. Many of them evince a sharp sense of humor coupled with cultural critique. Even in their most ironic or self-reflexive moments, they always retain a certain playfulness.

Farhanah’s lines are full of surprising shifts and elocutions, deft sound-play, and an urgent sense of movement. Puns, word-play and references to social and political life in Jakarta pop up throughout. For me, these elements propose some very interesting translation questions. “Istirahatlah Kakak-Kakak” / “Take a Load Off, Brothers and Sisters” is a poem that addresses the current cultural moment among Farhanah’s generation in Jakarta with great vividness and specificity. Satirizing both the titular kakak-kakak (older siblings) of the Reformasi generation and the adik-adik (younger siblings) of Zaman Now, the poem’s title is a pun on “Istirahatlah Kata-Kata” (usually translated as “Rest, Words”), the title of a 1988 poem by Wiji Thukul (“Istirahatlah Kata-Kata” subsequently became the title of a recent feature film about Thukul as well). Wiji Thukul was a working-class activist and poet who was involved in a variety of people’s struggles against the oppression of Suharto’s militaristic New Order regime and its pro-corporate, CIA-approved policies. Thukul was last seen at a rally in 1998, very likely “disappeared” by government forces. After the end of the New Order and the beginning of the Reformasi period, Thukul became a widely-known figure for those disappeared by the government. Images of his face and lines from his poems are commonly depicted in social media memes and on demonstration posters calling on the current government to investigate the crimes of the past and bring to justice their perpetrators. 

The richness of association in Farhanah’s punning reference consistently confounds me in translating the title. Likewise, the references to Rangga (an angsty teen poet character from the 2002 film Ada Apa Dengan Cinta) and Amien Rais (a complicated and significant player in Indonesian politics from the 1990s to now) are saturated with connotation. In translating Farhanah’s poems, I’ve tried to focus on the immediacy of feeling, the movement of the thoughts and sensations and their evocation of complex sociality, rather than attempting to elucidate the particularities of her references. Without harping too much on ever-insoluble questions of translation, I think it’s important to note that, in literature (as, perhaps, in life) it’s often important—particularly in the face of “world literatures” and “global cultures” that desires to flatten out and appropriate differences—to let knots of meaning be knots, rather than data to be “expertly” unravelled.

Daniel Owen

In the Classroom