Ruminations by John McGlynn: Poetic Suasion

The recent death of Sapardi Djoko Damono (20 March 1940–19 July 2020), one of Lontar’s founders, has had me thinking of the suasive role that poetry has played in my life.

Poetry was not a focus in any of my literature courses either in primary school or in high school. As a sixth grader at Saint Anthony’s, Sister Aurea gave me extra points for memorizing Longfellow’s “The Wreck of the Hesperus” and, as a junior at Weston High School, Mr. Gates (who suffered from muscular dystrophy and spoke with a tremor) had me record Shakespearean sonnets for our English literature class to listen to, but most all “assigned” poems were lofty in tone and meant to “elevate the mind”—whatever that meant.

It was my father, an avid and eclectic reader, who first showed me that poetry could be fun. His collection of brief poems by Ogden Nash, with such titles as “Fleas” (Adam Had ‘em) and “I Love Me” (I’m always my own best cheerer; / Myself I satisfy / Till I take a look in the mirror / And see things I to I) made me laugh with delight. And then, when I was a senior in high school, it was my sister, Eileen, an Ibero-American Studies major, who inadvertently got me hooked on the genre when she forgot to repack her copy of Pablo Neruda’s 100 Love Sonnets after a weekend home from university. When reading the poems therein, I found verbal expression for feelings I was only then beginning to discover. (I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.)

In my undergraduate years at university, as a habitutê of used book stores where dog-eared copies of poetry collections could be purchased for a quarter, Robert Frost got me thinking about what choices I would have to make in life through his signature poem, “The Road Not Taken.” In “Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes,” Lawrence Ferlinghetti voiced perfectly my notions about entrenched societal differences between the working class poor and the elite rich. Sylvia Plath, through her exploration of gender stereotypes and social pressures in “The Applicant,” gave grist to my mental mumblings about sexuality and parental expectations I would not fulfill. Bertolt Brecht honed these perceptions for me in his poem, “I Want to Go with the One I Love.” (I do not want to calculate the cost. / I do not want to think about whether it’s good. / I do not want to know whether he loves me. / I want to go with whom I love.)

In a creative writing course at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, I was fortunate to have as a guest lecturer the ever so diminutive but highly formidable Anais Nin whose poem, “Risk,” persuaded me that I must try to be myself, regardless of what others might expect. (And then the day came, when the risk to remain tight, in a bud, was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.) Finally, it was Walt Whitman, whose “Calamus” poems in Leaves of Grass celebrate “the manly love of comrades,” who made it clear to me that while I was different from most others, I was not alone in the world. (“I wish to infuse myself among you till I see it common for you to walk hand in hand.”)

I first met Sapardi Djoko Damono as a student at the University of Indonesia in 1977 and it was he—along with my other teachers: Widarti Gunawan and the late Boen Oemarjati—who renewed in me my enjoyment of poetry, this time Indonesian poetry whose non-gendered language gave love poems, especially, a new appeal. From Amir Hamzah to Toeti Heraty and beyond, unless poets specify the gender of their love object, their poems can speak for everyone, not just for one segment of the population or the other.

While the late 1970s was a time when the power of the New Order government was seemingly invincible and many poets were voicing their discontent through their work, Sapardi’s verses—unlike those of many contemporaries, whose allure was more political than poetic—subtly addressed issues such as love, loss, and longing that are, in the end, more important than a transient dictatorial government.

In mid-1978, when the All-ASEAN Poetry Festival was to be held at the Jakarta Arts Center (Taman Ismail Marzuki), Sapardi asked me to translate the Indonesian and Malaysian contributions to the catalogue. Through this enjoyable task, I came to know the work of a host of Indonesian poets.

Years went by—I obtained an M.A. at the University of Michigan, worked as an interpreter for the U.S. Department of State, then returned to Indonesia and began to work full time as a commercial translator—but never did my interest in poetry waver and, in 1986, when Sapardi received the SEA-Write award and he asked me to translate a collection of his poems for distribution at the awards ceremony in Bangkok, I welcomed the opportunity. With in-kind assistance from PT Temprint at the behest of Goenawan Mohamad (GM), a close friend of Sapardi’s, we published Water Color Poems and it was during this process that the three of us discussed Indonesia’s need for a literary translation organization whose output of translations would give voice to a side of Indonesia not often heard in the international media. GM invited two other writer-friends, Umar Kayam and Subagio Sastrowardoyo, to brainstorm this idea and it was several long conversations at my home (with the four of them often lapsing into Javanese) that led to the establishment of Lontar in 1987.

The cover of Water Color Poems whose publication led to the founding of the Lontar Foundation.

Goenawan Mohamad, Sapardi Djoko Damono, and Subagio Sastrowardoyo, three of Lontar’s founders, outside the home of JHM.

In the thirty three years that have passed since that time time, Lontar has published translations of more than 2,000 poems by more than 350 Indonesian authors, and just as I found words for my feelings in such Western poets as Plath, Whitman, it is my fervent and lasting hope that readers will find poetic suasion in the work of Indonesian poets as well.

John McGlynn
john_mcglynn@lontar.org