Search

Puisi selatan is a small selection of Sydney poet Ian Campbell’s Indonesian language poems taken from the author’s larger collection titled Selatan-Sur-South of Indonesian language poems - which appeared in PORTAL in 2008 - but now supplemented, for the first time, with English language versions which have been rendered by the poet himself from the ‘starting point’ of these original four Indonesian language poems. In all there are here now eight poems – four in Indonesian and four in English – with the common thread, for the poet, of being written ‘in the south’. For the poet also, they now interact, across languages, as a set of poems which consider the ways in which the actions of ‘memorialising’ are often intertwined with specific responses to the natural environment. The poems ‘Semenanjung Bilgola’ and ‘Bilgola headland’ are poems reflecting upon the efforts the poet’s parents made in the late 1960s-early 1970s to restore the natural environment on a headland of one of Sydney’s northern beaches which had been donated to the National Trust. The Indonesian language original poem was read by the poet himself and by Indonesian poets in cities in West Java in 2004 and also at the first Ubud Writers Festival in 2004 by Indonesian female poet, Toeti Heraty, The poems ‘Berziarah di Punta de Lobos, Chile’ and ‘Pilgrimage to Punta de Lobos’ are also memorialising poems and reflect upon the idea of ’pilgimage’ to a natural location near Pichilemu on the Chilean coast which is popular with surfers. In contrast, the poems ‘Simfoni angin’ and ‘Symphony of the winds’ describe the sights and sounds of a rural area near Purranque in the south of Chile, but here too the poet reflects upon the ways in which present evokes past. The final poems ‘Buenos Aires’ - rendered as the title in both languages - explore the ways in which the Argentinian café becomes a place in which memories of the city are revealed anew through the processes of inversion of light and shadow, of internal and external shapes and sounds, as if through a camera lens. Puisi selatan can be rendered in English as ‘poetry of the south’ as all poems derive their impetus from settings in Australia or in Latin America, specifically either Chile or Argentina. They were originally written in Indonesian as part of the poet’s interest in using Bahasa Indonesia as a language of creative writing.

Introduction to the curated issue of PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, Cultural Works—Transitions and Dislocations. Some parts of this introduction contain material previously published in my review of Silvia Spitta's Misplaced Objects: Migrating Collections and Recollections in Europe and the Americas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), in The Comparatist, 34 (May 2010), pp. 201–7.

‘Charlie Chaplin di Ngamplang, 1927’ is an Indonesian-language poem by Australian poet Ian Campbell, and is a humorous meditation upon certain imaginary events that befell Charlie Chaplin at the Dutch colonial era hill station of Ngamplang in West Java in 1927. In historical terms Chaplin did in fact visit the Dutch East Indies three times between 1927 and 1932, including the area around Ngamplang. The poem was included in Campbell’s poetry and prose collection Tak ada Peringatan (Vivid Publishing, 2013). The Indonesian language version of the poem first appeared in 2012 in the literary pages of the Jakarta mass media daily Kompas. An English-language back translation is included here.

The three versions of Ian Campbell’s poem about Valle de Elqui (in Chile) presented here comprise a poem he first wrote in Spanish, then in English and finally in a more powerful version in Indonesian, which was published in 2012 in the literary pages of the Jakarta mass media daily Kompas. Campbell regards this whole process as emblematic of his explorations in trilingual poetics, namely what does a ‘concept’/poem idea look like if done in the three languages with which he has some degree of written knowledge or fluency: English, Spanish, Indonesian. This mirrors the ‘three-pronged’ title ‘Selatan-Sur-South’ that he adopted for the collection of his poetry in PORTAL vol. 5, no. 1, 2008. The Indonesian version, ‘Lembah Elqui, ‘was included in Campbell’s poetry and prose collection Tak ada Peringatan (Vivid Publishing, 2013). In each version now the reference is to Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature (1945), whose burial place lies in Monte Grande in the Valle de Elqui in northern Chile.