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DOROTHEA ROSA HERLIANY, Santa Rosa, edited and translated from Indonesian by HARRY AVELING, paintings by Mella Jaarsma, Jakarta, IndonesiaTera 2006, Rp 35,000 (approx. € 1,80)
an old man opened a window
for my unworldly children. His naked eyes
asked for simple innocence.
the small girls had only their smiles,
something they had not yet
fully learned from life.
I met Harry Aveling in July 2009, during a conference in Translation Studies held at Monash University, in Melbourne. We spoke about the conference, asked about each other’s research interests, and exchanged ideas on the panels attended. Harry’s interest and expertise in Indonesian literature, his activity as an English translator, his profound erudition, and his inquisitive eyes fascinated and inspired me. Sipping my coffee, I felt I had had quite an encounter.
The next day, Harry handed to me a slim book that he had edited and translated three years earlier. It was a collection of poems written by the Indonesian poet Dorothea Rosa Herliany. Harry suggested that I might have enjoyed these verses and the illustrations attached to them.
That night, I first read Herliany’s poetry. The strength of her language and the sexuality of her images struck me immediately. The way in which Herliany talked about herself, her body, and her suffering through sexual imagery was familiar to me. In her poems, womanliness, feelings, pain, pleasure, and memory are intimately connected. Language and sex are reciprocal metaphors.
my gigolo,
suck my nipples in your restlessness,
stab my vagina with your careful plans of death.
I will weave you a necklace of pythons
and stinging scorpions. I will watch time freeze
and be happy. The deer screams
under the leopard’s hungry breath.
to exhaust the burning
of my tiny wound.
stab me
again and again.
To me, what makes Herliany resort to sexual imagery, what obsesses her, and what compels her to connect sex, language, and creation is her being a woman, an artist, an oral traveller; and a poet in translation. Sex adds force to her poetry. Her poems are coarse yet feminine, nasty yet pure. Her work challenges presuppositions, and not contradictions
like a piece of cold meat I am burned by an electric current
passing through my trickling blood.
and the scream of my neck as a deadly wound opens.
the fifteen millimetre glass walls of the noisy city
crack. I make my way through the brief pain,
crawling to a dark hole full of light.
Herliany accumulates strong sequences of images. Suffering is the juice of life, and the engine of her poetry. The series of sounds hits me like an electro track. Everything is flesh, open, red, quick, and noisy. She smacks me violently, like a sudden loss.
I met you on no particular page
in a book of a thousand predictions.
walking through a story,
stuttering the words of a mantra
weeping in the language of prayer
Time and memory set the tone of Herliany’s poetry. Experiences are layered and intricately blurred, yet neat and coherent. The poet is travelling across life as a ghost of herself, as a shadow of truth and remembrance. I am not a spectator, but a participant to her distance. In the genital atmosphere of her poems, I wander and enjoy, letting her verses create a sediment over my own memory, on my own future body, language, and religion.
jesus crucified me on golgotha long ago
and buried my heart in the land of
canaan.
my desire turned to ash in sodom and gomorrah.
my love was trampled by thousands of travellers
across the gobi desert.
The imagery of travel that imbues Herliany’s poetry appears as a reflection of her physical journeys across countries, cultures, and cities. Each poem ends with the place and year where it was composed, as a signature in a travel diary. A multiplicity of references to Christianity, Indonesian religiosity, geographic translations, and mental associations reflect a physical and poetic wandering, in which toponyms are spiritual paratexts. Herliany’s poems are complemented by a series of illustrations, reproducing the artworks by the Dutch visual artist Mella Jaarsma, who lives and works in Jakarta. These watercolour-like images appear soft and delicate, but represent veiled women, mutilated entrances, and refugees. From this perspective, they seem to complement and complete the delicate strength of Herliany’s verses, evoking a sense of poetry that goes beyond appearances yet is strongly rooted in the physical world. I wish to thank Harry Aveling for his poignant gift. I did not suspect that a conference would give me such a generous and sensitive present. Herliany’s poetry is in my hands, like a trace of something that I am.
(Born in Magelang, Central Java in 1963, Dorothea Rosa Herliany is one of Indonesia’s most praised poets, both at home and abroad. Her collection Santa Rosa received the Khatulistiwa Literary Award for Poetry in November 2006.)
(Margherita Zanoletti)
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