Ni Made Purnama Sari: three poems, translated from Indonesian by Norman Erikson Pasaribu

Read the these poems on the Modern Poetry in Translation website: modernpoetryintranslation.com/poem/three-poems-5/

Norman Erikson Pasaribu writes in the translator's note:

The translation source of these poems was published in Ni Made Purnama Sari’s collection, Kawitan (2016). The title is a polysemant; it can mean (1) the ancestors, (2) the beginning, (3) the ceremony to celebrate the ancestors, (4) the chronology of how our ancestors became our ancestors. Ni Made Purnama Sari navigates the vast space that confines and connects these definitions.

Transporting Purnama Sari’s poetic game can be a challenge. Often she freely breaks from the rules of meaning, by erasing subjects, or switching to older Indonesian literary forms or expressions. For example, the poem ‘A Farewell from Paslaan, Apeldoorn’—which is about the great Toba Batak poet Sitor Situmorang—instantly shifts into the pantoum form in its fourth stanza.

Bali is one of the most culturally exploited areas in Indonesia. It’s a global tourist destination, historically designed by the colonial Dutch regime. This has led to extreme settler problems. The native Balinese have lost their well-being to the dramatic rise of prices, losing their land over the massive demand for villas built on their ancestral lands. Meanwhile, widely published narratives about Bali in the English-speaking world have mostly been produced from the perspective of the privileged Western eyes that romanticise Balinese culture as ‘the last paradise’ to eternalise the capitalistic tourism industry. Ni Made Purnama Sari’s Kawitan, on the other hand, rebels against these dictations. Her poems discuss Balinese lives by refusing to be ‘a Balinese’. She’s not a Balinese who’s being visited; she’s a Balinese who’s visiting. She traces a connection between Bali to the greater Nusantara and the rest of the world to produce a form of global poetic empathy.