A Swatch of Twilight: A poetry collection

By Acep Zamzam Noor (author), John H. McGlynn(translator)

I give to you a swatch of rose-colored twilight, a bundle of clouds and a handful of intoxicating fog which I am yet unable to translate into poetry. Your smile is too mischievous for a woman of fine faith and your shoulders not stooped enough for you to be limping through Basra’s lanes with a staff. For me, solitude is insufficient to give birth to a poem because we have truly not been burned in fire.

Reformatted excerpt from the poem
“A Swatch of Twilight”

Sundanese-Indonesian poet, Acep Zamzam Noor, is a faithful bearer of what is known in Indonesian poetics as “silent songs” (nyanyi sunyi) whose language is especially distinct from the bureaucratized-sounding language of the mass media. Acep’s poems are a kind of wrapper for silence containing images of death and failure. Beauty is transitory, something that quickly passes, and while poetry may attempt capture it, the effort will be futile. The horizon serves only to overshadow the dreams of a fisherman in his final journey to the sea of destiny, and the viewers—we readers—who delight in this surreal scene in the end become aware of our own nakedness on a coral atoll.

Nonetheless, and as if even silence has a due-date, in Acep’s more recent poems he has allowed — even “invited” — noise and pollution to enter his poems. Irony, however, changes into a darkly bitter chastisement of the self. Acep appears to intentionally create a tension between lyricism and jargon so that we readers can take our own stance in the “democratic fiesta” that so frequently invites chaos instead.

But even as he tries to address the socio-political world around him, Acep’s poems are still anti-heroic. So it is, for instance, that his subtle eroticism (where the “I” in a poem is often harassed by his lover) is an alternative to the political machismo which is, by nature, corrupt. Or when his poems are playful or full of mischievous, it as if this mischievous is a challenge of equal force to the State’s arbitrariness and injustice.