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Ian Campbell's poem series about an age-old jacaranda tree in a university courtyard is an artistic venture across three languages: French, Indonesian and English. The series initiated with a French poem composed in 1989, followed by an Indonesian rendition published in the literary section of a newspaper in Bandung, West Java, in 2004, and concluded with an English version. Campbell's trilingual poetic exploration demonstrates how a single 'concept,' or the essence of a poem transfigures when articulated in the languages he is conversant with. His approach is reflective of his work in an earlier issue of PORTAL--Vol. 14, No 1, April 2017--which displayed thematic unity across poems in English, Spanish and Indonesian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This suite of short poems with Latin American references draws from original versions written in Spanish in 2008 and early 2011. It follows on from other poems with Latin American references written by the poet in languages other than Spanish as part of the poet's interest in 'trilingual poetics.' Spanish is not the first language of the writer nor is the poet of Latin American heritage. It is part of a corpus of poems which aims to explore the potentialities of multiple language perspectives associated with or derived from a single poetic theme or set of themes. It is also part of the poet's explorations of what can be derived from some identification as a poet 'of the south.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

Born in 1956 in Danang, Vietnam, Nguyễn Tiên Hoàng arrived in Australia in 1974 on a Colombo Plan scholarship. In writing poetry and literary essays in Vietnamese over more than thirty years he has generally used the pen name, Thuờng Quán. However, as Nguyễn Tiên Hoàng, his English language poems have been featured in the Poetry International Web series of Australian poets--https://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poet/item/20689--as well as in a number of Australian poetry book collections, the most recent being Captive and Temporal, published by Vagabond Press (Sydney & Tokyo, 2017) in its Australia Series--https://vagabondpress.net/collections/australia--which was short-listed for both the 2018 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and the Mary Gilmore Award in 2018. The poems published in this issue of PORTAL, 'Ngoài Giấc Ngủ' and 'Hiện Ra,' were included in the book poetry collection--also titled Ngoài Giấc Ngủ--published in California, USA, in 1990, which featured sixty-seven poems by Melbourne-based Nguyễn Tiên Hoàng, writing under the pen name Thường Quán. In 1994 the Journal of Vietnamese Studies (Melbourne) published the poem 'Ngoài Giấc Ngủ,' together with a first English language version co-translation, titled 'Beyond,' by Ian Campbell and Tony Chu. An adaptation of the poem was sung in Vietnamese ngâm style by Thu Huong Huynh, as part of 'A Spring Evening of Poetry, Translated Verse and Music' held in 1995 in Sydney to mark 50 years of post-war migration to Australia. The English language version later appeared in 1996, with the original poem in Vietnamese, in a Sydney-based Vietnamese language newspaper, and in 2002 the English language translation appeared again in Sunlines: An Anthology of Poetry to Celebrate Australia's Harmony in Diversity, edited by Anne Fairbairn (Canberra: Dept. of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, 2002). The English language co-translation of the poem appeared in Nguyễn Tiên Hoàng's collection, Captive and Temporal (Sydney & Tokyo: Vagabond Press, 2017). The poem, 'Ngoài Giấc Ngủ,' now appears in its Vietnamese language original form (1990), and in an English language co-translation by Chu and Campbell which varies slightly from all previous translations. An English language version of the poem, 'Hiện Ra,' has never been previously published and appears now in a co-translation as 'Becoming Visible,' together with the 1990 poem in its original Vietnamese language version. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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