Daniel Owen on Translating Afrizal Malna From the Indonesian

Poet Daniel Owen's prefatory essay on translating Afrizal Malna's Museum Penghancur Dokumen (Shredding Document Museum) from the Indonesian is up at A Perfect Vacuum. "Stories and myths of Afrizal abound. He has been known to disappear for periods of time, to travel throughout Indonesia's villages and cities, and to write constantly, with his eyes and ears carefully attuned to the ever-shifting socio-political realities of the country," writes Owen. More:

...Afrizal claims that Indonesian is his first and only language. This assertion is particularly unusual for a poet from Indonesia, where most people have a “mother tongue” or “local language” as a first language; Indonesian, in which media and national discourse is conducted, as a second; and often either another local language or a foreign language, such as English, as a third.  

During the reformasi period following the fall of Suharto's New Order regime in 1998, Afrizal quit writing and literary engagement for five years, working instead with Jakarta's Urban Poor Consortium (UPC) as an activist supporting anti-eviction and self-determination struggles in communities facing loss of livelihood and home in the name of development. After eventually leaving Jakarta and his work with the UPC, Afrizal lived for eight or so years in Solo and then Yogyakarta, a period of time in which he desired to become “nobody,” maintaining a relative distance from literary and artistic community and living without books, endeavoring instead to write from his body and its immediate perceptions. It was during this period that Afrizal wrote, among other works, Museum Penghancur Dokumen. There are stories of Afrizal riding the Trans Jogja bus (Yogyakarta's public bus system) all day, from one end of the line to the other and back again, avoiding all conversation and writing in a little notepad.

While some elements of his literary persona may be apocryphal, the intensity and originality of Afrizal's writing is undoubtable. His poems are marked by repetition and variation, collage, parataxis, punning, dark humor, and alliteration. They often address Indonesia's colonial and postcolonial past and present through the objects and situations of day-to-day life in a perversely globalizing social climate, blurring the borders between embodied and semantic experience.

Read the full essay here; the translation can be found here.