HET INDONESICH DÉCOR – POETRY OF THE DUTCH EAST INDIES AND INDONESIA IN THE 20^TH CENTURY

Ian Campbell MA, Sydney, Australia

This paper was prepared for the ASAA2000 Conference held in Melbourne, Australia in July 2000. Through an examination of some of the poems included in an anthology ‘Indië-Indonesië in honderd gedichten’ edited by Joop van den Berg and published in Holland in 1984, developments in Dutch language poetry about the Indies/Indonesia from the beginning of the 20^th century are traced. The paper explores the approach taken in the anthology, but also focuses on: (a) literary merit; and (b) the question of relevance of the poems from a ‘non-Dutch’ point of view at the beginning of the new millennium. The poetry of G.J. Resink (b. 1911) and Willem Brandt (1905 –1981) receive special attention. Some Dutch translations of Indonesian poems in the anthology are also considered.

  

In 1984 a quite remarkable collection of poetry was published in Holland. The collection was titled Indië-Indonesië in honderd gedichten (The Indies–Indonesia in one hundred poems). It was remarkable in the sense that hitherto there had been few attempts by Dutch scholars and writers to gather together in one volume an anthology of poetry about the Indies–Indonesia which spanned the period from the turn of the 19^th century until the present. Even the title itself gives us an indication of how the compiler, Joop van den Berg, saw his task - to present to a Dutch readership in Holland a series of poems which described the continuity of the phenomenon ‘Indies – Indonesia’ through the eyes of the poets and translators.

Writing in the introduction to the anthology, Joop van den Berg quickly comes to terms with the central paradox of Dutch poetry and translations concerning the Indies – being written in Dutch but somehow ‘different’ from that written by poets whose sole experience was derived from metropolitan Holland itself. He draws attention to Rob Nieuwenhuys’ comments in a special poetry number of the literary magazine Oriëntatië, (Jakarta, May 1949), when the latter wrote concerning poems in that edition of the magazine as having ‘het Indonesich décor’ (Indonesian décor). These poems had characteristics about them that enabled the reader to grasp that they were different from the main stream of Dutch poetry, as well as being written in a historical period of great change and turmoil. This was poetry:

 

“situeerd is tegen een achtergrond van feitelijkheid – een slootkant, een zonsondergang, een ontbijttafel, de zee – van waaruit of waarover de dichter zijn ontroering uitspreekt.” (situated against a background of the real world – the side of a ditch, a sunset, a breakfast table, the sea – from which or about which the poet draws forth his emotions), (Nieuwenhuys, quoted in Van den Berg (ed.), 1984, 11).

 

What I believe Nieuwenhuys was trying to describe was the idea that the poems written in Dutch in the late 1940s - even in the midst of the revolutionary period in Indonesia - had a descriptive quality about them in the way they treated ordinary aspects of life in the Indies. This  set them for ever apart from those of poets writing in Europe, even if the language was still Dutch. It was this backdrop, or décor, that was different. The idea that whilst the language was Dutch, the scene, the scenery, everything was somehow different. This sense of the different permeated all that the poets had written, even if their own reference point was still a belief that they were part of the ‘metropolitan literary tradition’.

 

What is also remarkable is the fact that most commentators about cultural and literary life in the Dutch East Indies had generally come to the view that in no real sense could one consider that a poetic tradition  had emerged from the Indies. Niewenhuys himself considered that for poetry: “ de oogst aan Indische gedichten klein is.” (the harvest or yield in so far as Indische poetry is concerned is small).(Nieuwenhuys, quoted in Van den Berg (ed.), 1984, 11).

 

 There were various reasons, of course. In a colonial society such as that of the Dutch East Indies, in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, there was no real place for literature, let alone poetry. In order to be integrated into the society one had to be ‘something’ – a civil servant, planter, officer, housewife, governess, teacher, or even a scholar, but not a writer. (Nieuwenhuys, 1979, xxv-xxvi). True, there were such people who did write, but in order to do so they fell outside the ‘rules and regulations’ of the colonial society or returned to Holland to accomplish what could not be achieved in the colony itself. Sometimes pseudonyms were used and one should not be surprised for this very reason about the large number of pseudonyms used by those writing in a colonial society. Nieuwenhuys in his full-length comprehensive literary history, first published in 1972, of Dutch colonial literature called Oost-Indische Spiegel  (Mirror of the Indies) included non-fictional material which ‘erstwhile strictures would not have permitted as serious subjects’ (Beekman, 1996, 6). These included nature writing, the diaries of the early Dutch explorers and ‘letters home’. The latter was an enduring tradition throughout the Dutch colonial period but often examples of this writing did not emerge for generations to come. Nieuwenhuys devotes little attention to the poetry produced about the Indies, even if he was prepared to extend the boundaries, in other directions, as to what can be considered part of the literary output of the Indies society. For Nieuwenhuys, the emphasis was on story-telling and the genre of poetry often fits less comfortably into this mode of literature. (Nieuwenhuys, 1979, xxvi).

 

In his 1996 study of Dutch colonial literature, Troubled Pleasures – Dutch Colonial Literature from the East Indies 1600 –1950, Beekman also does not seek to highlight any of the poetry written in the Indies, and treats the poetry written by authors, such as Du Perron, as of only limited interest in its own right. (Beekman, 1996).

 

 Du Perron was regarded by Beekman as the ‘the most important figure for Dutch colonial literature in the 20^th century.’(Beekman, 1996, 413). Quite apart from writing his ground-breaking work of prose, Het Land van herkomst, (Country of origin) published in 1935, he also compilied an anthology of belle lettres published in 1939 called De Muze van Jan Companje – Overzichtelike  Verzameling van Nederlands-Oostindiese Belletrie uit de Companjiestijd (1600 –1780). (The Muse of Jan Company – A Collection of Netherlands East Indies Belle Lettres from the Company time).

 

 From the point of view of both Beekman and Nieuwenhuys, the latter anthology, whilst being an extraordinary summation of writing of all genres, including poetry, tended to pay little heed to the question of ‘literary quality’ in selection of material in its quest for comprehensive coverage. Du Perron, though, had argued that to ignore this verse was not “historically responsible” because “ though they hardly possess literary value these versifiers ….mirror their times better than what greater talents might possibly have done.”(Beekman, in Nieuwenhuys, 1982, xxvii). Beekman also goes further than this in saying that Du Perron’s choice was a strange one “since poetry was the least appropriate medium for rendering the tropical experience.”(ibid.).

 

But perhaps another reason for the lack of attention to poetry as a genre was due in part to the very great influence, indeed overwhelming influence, that some prose works of colonial authors had in the literary life of the metropolitan centre, Holland. Indeed:

 

“most of the major colonial authors are better known as masters of modern Netherlandic literature. There is little argument, for instance, that four colonial novels are masterpieces of  modern Netherlandic literature: Multatuli’s , Max Havelaar (1860); Louis Couperus’s  De Stille Kracht (The Hidden Force (1900); Du Perron’s Het Land van Herkomst (Country of Origin, 1935) and Maria Dermout’s De tienduizend Dingen (The Ten thousand things, 1955).”(Beekman, 1996, 6).

 

There is also the author, Helle Haasse who was born in Batavia in 1918. Her work, including the historical novel Heren van de Tee (Tea Lords, 1992), has been enormously influential in modern Dutch literature, although both Beekman and Nieuwenhuys have trouble regarding her as a colonial author, for the reason that many of her other novels of historical fiction were set in Europe. The work by Douwes Dekker, Max Havelaar , long considered the masterpiece of 19^th century Netherlandic literature, has been so dominant in the minds of the Dutch public as the supreme historical novel that it seems no other genres - apart from the story-telling genre referred to by Nieuwenhuys previously  - have merited serious consideration. And yet, even within the text of Max Havelaar, Multatuli resorts to poetry to set out some of the most touching episodes in the novel. The most famous of these is the episode known as ‘ Saidjahs Zang’ (Saidah’s song). (Multatuli, 1983 edition, 203-204).

 

           Part of the reason for the dominance of the colonial novel in modern Netherlandic literature is perhaps due to the point raised by both Nieuwenhuys and Beekman, namely the paradox that, whilst the socio-economic environment of colonial society is not conducive to literary pursuits as a matter of course, as Nieuwenhuys puts it:

 

“A life without a literary tradition does not have only disadvantages. While these are obvious  (the writer is too much thrown back on his own resources), the advantages are less self-evident, but there are some: the writer loses his pretensions and is less burdened by the obligation to create literature; his impulses are less inhibited, he feels freer and can write more spontaneously.” (Nieuwenhuys, 1979, xxvi).

 

Perhaps as Beekman also suggests:

 

“The very indifference to intellectual imperatives in the Asian colony granted the writer a freedom that his European counterpart lacked.”(Beekman, 1996, 7).

 

However, it is true that, in so far as Dutch colonial poets of the 20^th century are concerned, it is only in Dick Hartoko’s reworking of Oost Indische Spiegel in 1979 into an Indonesian language version known as Bianglala Sastra – Bunga Rampai Sastra Belanda tentang Kehidupan di Indonesia, where we see the first acknowledgement of the work of a 20^th century poet in his own right.  It was G.J.Resink (born 1905). (Hartoko, 1979 and 1985, 320-329).

 

Even  Joop van den Berg in the introduction to the anthology Indië-Indonesië in honderd gedichten felt constrained to place primary justification for the anthology not so much on the literary merit or aesthetic qualities of the 100 poems chosen, much as Du Perron had done in relation to his 1939 anthology.  So, Indië-Indonesië in honderd gedichten was more to be seen as having value as a ‘journey through history’, including the momentous events, for the Dutch and for Indonesians alike, of the movement from colony through the Japanese interregnum to the Independence struggle and on to modern times. (Van den Berg, 1984,11).

 

But what exactly is that journey through time? In the Van den Berg anthology there is a sense of continuity between colonial times and beyond the creation of the modern Indonesian state. The poems are all in Dutch and the very wording Indië-Indonesië emphasies this continuity, as a literary construct. For the Indischse community in Indonesia – both those born of mestizo blood and/or the descendants of Dutch administrators and commercial men – with the coming of independence there was a need to choose whether to return to Holland or stay in the new Republic to face an uncertain future. Those who had spent much of their lives in the Indies, even if they returned to Holland, never really adjusted in so far as the first generations were concerned.  Some of the reasons lie in the fact that whilst ancestry was important, the defining characteristics of the Insdische community is more the sense of Indies tradition in mind and spirit. (Nieuwenhuys, 1985, 123). It has been this cultural concept which marked out the way people identified themselves to a far greater extent than solely a statement about ancestry, or place of birth.

 

For people who believed they were a part of the Indische community, the adaptation to Holland, paradoxically, however, involved the creation of myths and recollections about the Indies which have continued to this day to be a powerful, but gradually lessening, part of Dutch social and cultural life.(Beekman, 1996; also his introduction to Nieuwenhuys, 1982). Indeed, the Indies as a construct, or Indies-Indonesia as a variant of this construct, in so far as literature is concerned, can be seen as ‘the final literary transformation of colonial literature – from one based on historical reality to an ‘invocation of the country as a purely literary domain’. (Beekman, 1996, 599).

 

Often as not, the concept of  the Indies was also seen as inextricably linked with the idea of tempoe doeloe – past times. There appear to be at least three different points of emphasis in the use of this term. Firstly, as Nieuwenhuys states, it appears to have originally referred to the period of history before World War 1 in the Indies before the full impact of the industrialization of some of the urban centres had occurred.(Nieuwenhuys, 1982, 168). There was increasing migration from the Netherlands, and the life of the colonial elite in the Indies started to become ‘more European’. For some, this invoked a sense of nostalgia for the ‘good old times’. (ibid).

 

For the Indische generation displaced by the Indonesian revolution following the Japanese occupation, the ‘past times’ of the thirties and early forties were also gone, never to return.  But tempoe doeloe can also mean, and is more likely to refer, in today’s context, to the construction and creation of myths about the Indies in general, without being time-specific. Hence, the point made by Beekman that:

 

“By the end of the twentieth century it represents more than sadness at the loss of certain prerogatives: it refers to a poignant realization that an epoch is irrevocably past, never to return. At its worst the documentation of this period is sentimental indulgence, but at its best it is the poetry (sic) of a vanished era, of the passing of an age when issues, moral and ideological were firmer and clearer.”(Beekman, 1996, 8).

 

The anthology compiled by Joop van den Berg is also a cultural construct around the idea of Indië-Indonesië and it is to the examination of some of the poems included therein that I will turn. But my frame of reference will not solely be that of Dutch literature, or even the Indische community itself, as I shall explain.

 

A new approach to Dutch colonial poetry

 

In considering the anthology, Indië-Indonesië in honderd gedichten, and in discussion about the various poems it contains, I believe there are a number of points which can be made about the frame of reference that can be brought to the analysis of these poems. Whilst Joop van den Berg was specifically focused on bringing the poems to the attention of a modern Dutch readership – in 1984 when perhaps interest in Holland about its colonial past reached something of a zenith -  a review today of these poems by an Australian, such as myself, having no familial or descent links to the Indies, or emotional investment in ‘times past’ but rather with Indonesian language skills and interests, is likely to be different in some respects.

 

Additionally, at the beginning of the new millennium, there are new paradoxes on the horizon which those reading the anthology in 1984, in Holland, might not have considered at all. The violence-wracked relinquishing of East Timor by Indonesia in 1999 has some parallels with the experiences of the Dutch in leaving Indonesia – for ever.  At the same time there is the conjunction of this action of de-colonisation by Indonesia, with the phenomenon,  as Rudy de Iongh has pointed out (personal communication, 2000), of the passing of the indische generations, either into full integration in Holland into Dutch society or into Indonesian society (and not to forget, into Australian society as well), as the last persons born in the Indies or whose descendants came from the Indies ‘fade away’.

 

Consequently, I suggest that a Dutch literary historical or even Indische viewpoint are not the only not the theoretical approaches that can be adopted in reviewing the poems in the Van den Berg anthology. There are a number of approaches that I suggest can also be brought to the analysis of the Dutch language poetry about the Indies/Indonesia:

 

1)     the view that, as a whole, the body of work - which was primarily written by persons who were outsiders in their view of Indonesian society and times -  can still be of interest in our consideration of contemporary Indonesian society through the eyes of the poet, but as outsider;

 

2)      the view that some of the poems deal with universal themes which in many ways transcend the ‘provincialism’ of the Dutch colonial tradition, and/or the confines of colonialism; and

 

3)     the view that literary merit is a criterion that can be applied to many of the poems in the anthology and that increasingly it should be seen as a more relevant aspect for research into colonial literature.

 

Therefore, in analysing the poems in the anthology I am not solely concerned with their place in Dutch literary traditions , or more specifically the Indische tradition,  but rather more in any literary merit as well as explanatory power regarding insights into Indonesian society, land and life, past and present, from an Australian perspective, not to mention commentary upon the universalities of human nature. It is also my view that a lack of attention by translators to works of the poetry genre has meant that many of the poems of the ‘Dutch time’ have not moved beyond the confines of their original language world. Also, there has been too narrow a focus on the ‘problems inherent in colonialism’ on the one hand and the emphasis on what I term ‘tempoe doeloe-ism’ on the other, to enable serious consideration to be given to them as literature per se.

 

The anthology – a description

 

            Van den Berg divides his anthology into three distinct sections according to chronological order of the writing or publication of the poems: The first section is Indië 1900-1940, then Interregnum 1940-1950 and finally Indonesië 1950-heden (the present). This is a fairly understandable division and follows that adopted by most historical writing about modern Indonesian history. In the latter two sections not only are there poems in the original Dutch, but also translations of poetry originally in Indonesian. Thus, Chairil Anwar’s poem Aku (Ik) written in 1943 is placed alongside the poetry of Willem Brandt, writing of the Japanese prison camps where he was interned in 1944. In the final section, the more recent poetry written in the 1950s and 60s by G.J. Resink in Dutch appears alongside the poetry of Rendra in translation, for example.

 

Out of the 100 poems in the anthology, a total of 26 were chosen by the author of this paper for close translation.(Appendix A). Of these, 22 were originally written in Dutch whilst four were Dutch translations of poems written originally in Indonesian. Two of the poems written in Dutch, those by Noto Soeroto and R.O. Hanka, were written by persons who, although they could be considered as writing in and from the perspective of colonial times, were not Dutch by descent but indigenous Indonesians.

 

In so far as the translations into English of the poems selected from Indië-Indonesië in honderd gedichten are concerned, these were completed in draft form this year by the author of this paper. Because the author is not a native Dutch speaker, the draft translations of the 26 poems were reviewed by Drs. Rudy and Sophie de Iongh. Their suggestions and annotations are gratefully acknowledged and have been included in the reworked versions. A more final version of the twenty six poems, including four translations into Dutch of Indonesian poems, now appears at Attachment A. As far as the author of this paper knows, none of the poems written originally in Dutch have been previously translated into English. Of course, as with all translations of poetry, there is room for different views as to the author’s intent, as well as in regards to the balance between literal translation and comprehensibility in the modern era.

 

Jan Prins (1876 – 1948)

 

The anthology opens with four poems written by Jan Prins (1876-1948) from his collection Indische gedicten published in 1932. The poems are: Soerabaja (undated), De Vulkanen (written in Den Haag in 1920), Zooals gij in de schaduw zat (written in Soerabaja, January 1908) and Het Dansfeest (written in Batavia in 1913).

 

The first two poems are descriptive poems. Soerabaja is a wonderfully controlled 12 stanza poem written in four line abcb rhyming sentences. The eye of the poet moves slowly, and the set rhythm adds to the sense of slow, deliberate infusion of the cityscape; first the bridges, and the river but no sooner does the eye absorb the meandering river’s course than streams of motor vehicles flow unceasingly past. Then the jumble of cattle and wagons and the atmosphere of hustle and bustle of the tropical city at turn of century are described.

 

                        Onder de bruggen van Soerabaja

slingert zich donker en diep de rivier

en door zijn straten, en door zijn stegen

wringt de verdichting zich van het vertier.

 

Driftige motors, versleten karossen

bellende trams, een bestendige drom

van al wat ratelt beweegt langs de wegen

en koms langs andere wegen weerom……..

 

Under the bridges of Soerabaja

meanders the river, dark and so deep

and through the streets and lane ways

the unrelenting traffic twists and turns.

 

Vehicles, seemingly out of control, and worn-out coaches,

noisy trams with bells ringing, a constant drumming sound

coming  from everything that rattles as it moves

along the street only to re-emerge along other thoroughfares….

 

            It may be that little has changed. The river running through Surabaya, more polluted, no longer ‘deep and dark’ but the vehicles, and the other sounds and sights of the city – it sounds familiar. Prins gives the poem spatial dimensions – our gaze moves from the bustle and chaos of the road to the sky and through his use of repetition – over …over – we get a sense of the mastery of the tropical sun over all that passes in the streets below.

 

                        En over alles, over de hoofden

over de huizen, over de straat

over het schamel ontwikkeld geboomte

over wat komt en wat gaat.

 

Over de zwoegende ruggen der koelies,

overal, - sedert de morgen begon

zich te verlossen uit schemer en nevel, -

schatert and schittert en davert de zon.

 

And over everything, over the heads

over the houses, and over the street

over the poorly developed specimens that pass for trees

over what comes and over what goes by

 

over the trudging backs of the coolies

everywhere, since the morning began

to free itself from the haze of the morning mists --

laughs and sparkles and frolics - the sun.

 

Stylistically there is little that is new in Prins’ poem. But still, it is a very finely set-out portrait of the turn-of-the century colonial centre.

 

Prins’s poem Het Dansfeest, written in Batavia in December 1912 is one of two poems in the anthology about dance performance. The six stanza poem, each stanza being of four lines rhyming in abab form, has an even more tightly controlled structure compared to Soerabaja. It is often the case  that what the poet, as ‘outsider’ to the culture in which the dance performance is embedded, considers worthy of consideration may be vastly different from the perspectives of those for whom the dance has symbolic meaning - where every step or gesture has a significance, often as part of a story or myth. Alternatively, there is also the view that ‘post –colonial’ Indonesian poets would not feel that a poem describing a dance performance was perhaps really worth devoting time and effort in creating.

 

Prins indicates, in the poem, that Het Dansfeest, as a perfomance remembered, lasts tot de morgen daagt.  But there is no indication that he was conscious of the symbolic meaning participants attached to the movements of the dancers. Instead, as the ‘outsider’ he experiences the dance scene and performance as an aesthetic experience only, but yet one that leaves a deep impression, as he relates in the last verse of the poem:

 

Dan komen zij het zonlicht ingeschreden,

geluk in ‘t hart en hoogheid in den gang.

Zoo gaat, wie schoonheids velden heeft betreden,

zijn dagen door, dit gansche leven lang.

 

Then they come striding into the sunlight,

with a joyful heart yet aristocratic in bearing as they depart.

That’s how it is, what beauty there is afoot in the fields,

such that it lasts and lasts, even a whole lifetime through.

 

            The anthologist Joop van den Berg sees the reference to de borsten ingebonden of the dancers as merely a reference to their physical attractiveness,  and indeed as an example of how “Bij veel Nederlandse dichters van voor de oorlog is er een overdaad aan de ‘geur van jasmijn’ en ‘de lenden smal, de borsten ingebonden’. (For many pre-war Dutch poets there is an over-emphasis on the ‘scent of the jasmine’ and ‘the narrow loins, the tightly-bound breasts’). (Van den Berg, 1984, 13).

 

                        De lenden smal, de borsten ingebonden,

beweegt de rake danseres alleen. –

Het zwijgend zien is om haar schreden heen

van hen, die uit dit uur niet scheiden konden.

 

Their loins are so narrow, and their breasts are bound tight,

the only movement discerned is that of dancers ever so slender –

those gazing in silence at the dancing steps are themselves

unable to bring themselves to leave from that moment on.

 

  But I think it is also points to, or rather more, emphasizes the finely balanced control exhibited throughout the performance. The emphasis in Prins’ reading of a dance performance is this sense of control, and the symmetry of the group of performers’ actions and movements, rather than upon any single performer. It is also quite different from the sense of fire and movement in other poems about Javanese dance from the same period of colonial rule, eg. Pablo Neruda’s poem entitled El baile(1929), in Spanish, concerning a Javanese dance performance which Neruda presumably actually saw in the late 20s. Or indeed, in a European context, German poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem, Spanische Tänzerin in his New Poems of 1907–8.

 

Noto Soeroto (1888 – 1951)

 

            Descended from one of the four ruling houses of Java, the Paku Alam, Noto Soeroto was sent to Leiden in the Netherlands for higher education studies. He was one of the many descendants of the royal Javanese families who experienced the difficulties of balancing the influences of  the two worlds of  the colonial metropolitan state and traditional Javanese values of an aristocratic bent. He was a prodigious writer of poetry. However, as Nieuwenhuys suggests:

 

“ Noto Soeroto wrote impeccable Dutch but his tone and style belong to classical Javanese. He unfortunately did not succeed in bringing about a synthesis of form and content. Instead of a synthesis, the two different worlds slide past one another. His use of the (Western) sonnet form, for example, does not go well with the Javanese form of expression. Still, there were people in the Netherlands, as well as abroad who were sufficiently convinced of the wisdom of the East to regard his poems as a precious gift.” (Nieuwenhuys, 1982,187).

 

The three poems of Noto Soeroto in the Joop van den Berg anthology do not include any examples of his use of the sonnet poetic form, so we are in no position to judge the specific correctness of Nieuwenhuys’ comment. However, I am inclined to agree with the general tone of it.

 

In the poem Wanneer heb’t ge ‘t luisteren geleerd (Whenever did you learn to listen), the poet is drawn back to the figure of his mother:

 

                        Wanneer hebt ge ‘t luisteren naar gamelan-tonen geleerd,

                        of naar ‘t rusichen des winds door de zwiepende tjemara’s?

                        ‘Als moeder met zingen me lachen en dansen en waggelen deed,

                        of geneurie me wiegelde in slaap, toen hebben mijn ooren geleerd

de zanger der wereld te horen.

 

Whenever did you learn to listen to the sounds of the gamelan playing

Or to the rustling of the breezes through the swaying cemara pines?

‘If mother was singing I would laugh and dance and prance around

or be gently rocked in my sleep, and so my ears were taught

to hear the singer of the world.

 

The sounds of the gamelan, the breezes through the pines – they evoke in the poet the memories of the mother-figure, as the all-encompassing zanger der wereld (singer of the world), as if in some way she is the key to understanding the complexity of the world. Noto Soeroto’s use of language, sounds over-sentimental, but in the fashions of the day, both in Europe and in the Indies, it may have been better received. But what is interesting is the observation I am tempted to make that for many Indische writers, such as Nieuwenhuys himself and Tjalie Robinson, there is a reverse process of  sentimentalising about the role of the babu – the maid-servant of the colonial household, almost invariably of indigenous background - also seen as the zanger der wereld, as the one who unlocks the secrets of the world and through whom all in the cultural universe of the Indies is comprehensible. 

 

Eddy du Perron (1900-1940)

 

Eddy du Perron, “the most important figure for Dutch colonial literature in the 20^th century” (Beekman, 1996, 413) lived his first twenty one years in the Indies, and spent a further three years there from 1936 to 1939. As Beekman suggests, “no matter how hard he tried to become a sophisticated European intellectual, Du Perron could never erase some fundamental aspects of his character that were and remained purely Indies… in 1936 he stated ..that if he had to belong to any group it would be those who had been born in the Indies.” (ibid., 418).  It was his ‘anti-novel’ Het Land van Herkomst which appeared in 1935 after he had returned to the Indies from Europe, which really established his reputation as the pre-eminent writer of the colonies, even if he was also a prolific writer of verse, especially in his twenties and thirties. His anthology of poetry mentioned previously, De Muze van Jan Compagnie confirmed his stature, as a literary  anthologist, even if there was dispute about some of the literary quality of the work itself.

 

In so far as his poetry is concerned, in 1930 he had collected his best poetry into a collection called Parlando – meaning ‘delivery of song in the manner of speech’. The poems in the Van den Berg anthology, however, all appear to have been written in the late 1930s. They are respectively titled Garoet bij Nacht, Kolonie and Mystiek Terrein , the latter two poems being in sonnet form. Garoet bij Nacht is at first glance an unremarkable poem. The poem written in October 1937, is in couplets, not in sonnet form. The poet’s gaze is fixed on the Drie palmen in het duister, drie palmen in de wind – the ‘three palms in the wind’ which both open and close the poem, establishing an atmosphere of coolness, the fresh tropical breeze. In the midst of this he describes the night scene, the tropical storm that breaks around him, then his view turns to the remnants of human habitation,  feelings of despair break and the solitariness of the watchman doing his rounds at night with the rattles ‘to ward off evil’ contrast markedly with the violence and strength of the forces of nature.

 

In some ways, this Du Perron poem is one of the most arch-typical of Dutch colonial poetry of the 20^th century. There is the tropical scene, the forces of nature, moving to the human settlement and the poet, the colonial poet, being ‘overcome by the solitariness and momentary despair’, then ‘beneficent nature’ surrounds all and restores the equanimity of the poet’s feelings. Nature, not humankind, does this - so often, in Dutch colonial poetry and verse.

 

Often as not, the poet’s ‘loneliness and feelings of alienation’ are matched by the image of the indigenous village watchman, also alone, with few weapons against the forces of nature and man, but secure in the knowledge that his function of protecting his community at night is a valued one.

 

More often than not, too, the colonial poet, however, was a man (and the Van den Berg anthology does not appear to included any poems written by women)  without community, a solitary figure who does not have a secure status either in the colonial hierarchy or in the community of the local society itself. Whilst it may be argued that this is simply a colonialist’s dilemma, it is also the universal poet’s dilemma to some extent, being of the community but outside its moral reach.  Of course, this generalization had does not hold good for all poets. Prins, for example, was apparently a naval officer with a solid career behind him, apart from his literary interests. Du Perron, meanwhile, was born into influential colonial families that used to rule colonial society, but he always considered himself something of an ‘outsider’ to that world, given his literary interests. 

 

In my translation of the Du Perron poem, Garoet bij nacht, I have tried to effect a more liberal translation of his poem, whilst still being faithful to the text. At the same time I have sought to reflect in English style the occasional ‘awkwardness’ of some of the original Dutch wording that Du Perron uses as there are aspects of the poem’s construction that do jar, and are not as easy-flowing as might be hoped.

 

                                    Garoet bij Nacht

 

                        Drie palmen in het duister, drie palmen in de wind

                        Gefluister, klein gefluister, klanken die men verzint.

 

De maan is door de wolken bedekt, bedekt: een sicht

treft, onder ‘t zwarte kolken, some ‘t hele nachtgezicht.

 

Damars, ketapang bomen zijn angstig saamgeplet

boven wat men hoort stromen, tot een kompakt boeket.

 

                        Daarachter zijn de bergen versmolten met de lucht

en wat zich moest verbergen is lang daarheen gevlucht.

 

Het dorp is hier gebleven, vervaald en uitgespreid.

Geloof toch aan het leven, het ons soms verblijd.

 

Nog klinken paardehoeven, nog doet hier wat hij kan,

met ratels voor de boeven, een soort van klepperman.

 

Vergaan doet elke luister, met de ogen van het kind.

Gefluister, o gefluister. Drie palmen in de wind.

 

            Garut by night

 

Three palms in the darkness, three palms in the breeze.

A whisper, just a whisper, these sounds imagination frees.

 

The moon is veiled, veiled by clouds: a flash of light

strikes, below black clouds, then at times illumines the sky of night.

 

 Damar, ketapang trees are huddled together

above the torrents one hears, the trees bent in tight bouquet. 

           

                        Behind it are mountains fused with the sky

and all that is hidden has long since taken flight.

 

The village is left here, tumbled down, strewn about.

Yet hold fast to the future, life’s cheer, sometimes, wins out.

 

The tramp of horses’ hooves, and he does what he can,

With rattles to ward off evil, this sort of watchman.

 

Each shining image passes, as when it is a child who sees

Whisper, o whisper. Three palms in the breeze.

 

Beekman comments upon Du Perron’s fondness for scenes at night – the paradox that whilst the moon illumines and throws into relief a scene, it also hides more than it reveals. He also   emphasises the importance of the symbolism of the colonial house,  based on Du Perron’s  memories of the house or mansion where he grew up as a child near Meester Cornelis, now Jatinegara, in the novel, Het land van herkomst:

 

“The house is in truth Du Perron’s first universe…it becomes the perfect metaphor for memory…”. (Beekman, 1996, 442)

 

a point to which I will return when considering Resink’s poem, Het Bezeten Huis.

 

Willem Brandt (1905 –1981)

 

It is not too far-fetched to suggest that it was in the poetry of Willem Brandt and G.J. Resink that creativity and a new sense of the poetic structure in Dutch language poetry of the colonial era received their finest demonstrations. Willem Brandt’s Javaansche Danseres illustrates many of the points made previously about how the colonial poet might approach dance performance as a literary theme. Yet whereas Jan Prins seeks to stress, by virtue of both the tight verse structure and the language used, the controlled nature of the occasion and the way in which the dancers are part of a group, the poetry of Willem Brandt is freer, more spontaneous in its style, and  focuses more on the individual dancer’s role.

 

For a start, even though sentences are rhymed there is in the less elongated sentence structure, a sense of the dancer, the individual movements of the body. There is a touch of ‘lightness’ in the first verse, for example, through both word use and verse structure, with often only two or three words per line. The structure in the second verse reflects the ‘writhing of the dancer’s body; the ‘colour words’ (red, blue) reflect both the aesthetic experience and the intensity of feelings felt by the poet.

 

 

 

Javaansche Danseres        (Javanese Dancers)

 

Hoe lacht bij ‘t zingen van de gong                       How it seems the flower in your

de bruidstraan                                                           dark hair bun is smiling too when the

in uw donkre wrong:                                      gong sounds as if in song:

een rose tuil,                                                 a pink bouquet,

een bloeseming                                           a touch of blossom

die argeloos uit                                             which hangs seemingly without intent

den hemel hing                                            from the sky

en opgevangen                                            caught in your lap

in uw schoot                                                   an adornment

een siergeschenck van Allah bood.                      which is bestowed by Allah.

Nu is het lichaam                                         Now is the body

als een rank                                                  like a slender tendril

verstrengeld                                                  in writhing in the dance as thanksgiving

den dans tot dank                                         to Him, who in a sense of pure desire

aan Hem, die in een puren lust                  fashioned you so;

zoo boetseerde;                                            and kissed

en gekust                                                       by a blue, sun-dazzling sky

door blauwe luchten heldoorzond              your lips bleed:

bloeden uw lippen: roode wond.                 red wound

O glanzend lijf                                               O shining body

in tropenzon                                                  in the tropical sun

en liefde die                                                 and love which is

mijn hart omspon,                                        embraced in my heart

en vreemdepijn                                            and the strange unexplained pain

als gij moest gaan                                        as you must leave

in ‘t bleeke wit                                                            in the pale white light

der moede maan,                                         of the waning moon

verdroomd uw dans,                                     vanish as if in dreams,

 de zoerte wijs.                                               the sweet melody lingers…

Verloren is het Paradijs.                              Paradise lost.

 

            In the last verse the colours change to a pale white, signifying the pain associated with the ending of the performance. The final three lines emphasise just how contradictory are the feelings of the poet – about what vanishes, what lingers and what is lost. The strength of this poem is its immediacy, the awareness that the poet, though an ‘outsider’, is not just a bystander. There is colour, movement and dazzling light. Even the language is extreme in the way it attributes to Allah the creation of such a being in een puren lust.

 

In Trang bulan Brandt takes the theme of an Indonesian pantun but recastes it beautifully in Dutch. The strength of Dutch - in so far as it emphasises the short ij sounds, the long aa  - goes wonderfully in this context and reveals Brandt as a poet who can render with simplicity, but great effect, local traditions in a poetic form.

 

                                        Trang bulan

 

                                    …De maan is wit,

                                    wit over de rivier;

                                    daarin slaapt stil,

                                    als dood, de krokodil.

                                    Hij wacht op mij,

                                    Hij wacht langer dan wij,

De zwarte wreede

Kokodil……

 

The moon is white,

white across the river;

in which there silently sleeps,

as if dead, the crocodile

He waits for me,

he waits for me longer than we,

the cruel black crocodile……

 

The verse ends with the admonition that people are not to be trusted. Silence, as with the crocodile can hide evil intent, so the poet warns.

 

De Stoppelaar, Nes Tergast and Duncan Elias

 

The poems by de Stoppelaar, Nes Tergast and Duncan Elias in the anthology are all fine examples of the Dutch naturalistic poetic tradition ‘in bloom’. As I indicated in relation to Du Perron’s poem Garoet bij Nacht, the form of the Indies naturalistic poem in the 20^th century - seemingly without noticing - had come to adopt a convention regarding the logical progression of the poem’s content. First the natural surroundings are described, the poet’s feelings of alienation take over, the aspects of village life are referred to, then ‘bountiful nature’ restores the balance or sense of equilibrium.

 

The poem by de Stoppelaar, Sedep Malam, is in that conventional form, albeit with some departures. For instance, the greater use of words that involve the olefactory senses, rather than just those of sight and sound, as in the Du Perron poem. Some commentators, such as Joop van den Berg himself, see this overemphasis on the depiction of ‘sweet-smelling flowers’(de geur van de jasmijn ) as detracting in part from the move of the Dutch colonial poetry in a more robust direction, as Rendra headed with his poems in the sixties. At the same time, he acknowledges that this depiction of the sight and smell of the flora in the tropics is part of the décor – het Indonesisch décor – that transforms poems written of the Indies/Indonesia beyond the ‘metropolitan’ tradition of Dutch language poetry into ‘something different’.

 

De Stoppelaar’s poem, however, places the references to flowers at the almost overwhelming finish to the poem – ‘bountiful nature’ overwhelms all, including his uncertainties.

 

                                            Sedep Malam

 

                        De desa slaapt. De vuren zijn gedoofd.

Nog hangt een zweem van rook onder de bomen.

Ik heb vandaag in het geluk geloofd.

Hoe moiezaam sterft het harttoch aan zijn dromen.

 

De weg is stil. De donkere tamarinden

Buigen een koepel in de zoele nacht

Hier kan verlangen slechts verlangen vinden:

Een enkel mensch, die eenzaam is en wacht.

 

En langzaam ga ik, tot het plots gebeurt,

Een zwakke windzucht uit het roerlooze,

Zodat opeens de nacht naar bloemen geurt,

Adembenemend van de tuberozen.

 

The village lies sleeping. The fires have been doused.

Wisps of smoke still hang beneath the trees.

Today I think I can believe in happiness -

Not even my dreams can disappear and vanish away.

 

The road is still. The dark tamarind tree,

Forms a dome of foliage in the mild night.

Here wishes only lead to further hopes and desires:

There is only one man keeping a lonely watch.

 

Slowly I go, until it happens that, with

A gentle sigh of wind from the tranquil air,

All at once the night wafts with flowers –

The breath-taking scent of the sedep malam.

 

Or there is E.R. Duncan Elias in his poem Voorgalerij (On the Verandah):

 

                        De nachtwind komt met steeds dezelfde geuren

-          afval, heliotrope en vreemde kruiden –

en van de straatweg drijven dromerig de geluiden

der venters die met lekkerijnen leuren.

 

The night breeze comes always accompanied by the same smells-

rubbish, heliotrope and strange spices –

and from the main road drift dreamily the sounds

of the night hawkers with their delicious offerings.

 

Consider Nes Tergast in the opening lines of his poem De Nacht brak… (The night has broken…) describing the valleys in which the city of Bandung lies, across the changing hours of the day. It is a masterly piece of descriptive poetry in free verse form, with expressive use of verbs and the metaphor (een glans van oude porcelainen):

 

                        De nacht brak. Bandoeng sliep. Een fluit.

De hemel zocht naar zijn glazuren.

De bergen lagen in de rui

Van paars naar blauw, en met de uren

Zagen zij er weer anders uit.

De rode zon, naar Allah’s kuren,

Smolt tot een blank metaal waaruit

De dag de gladde schubben schuurde

Van sawah’s in het morgenlcht

Een glans van oude porceleinen

Betoverde het vergezicht…

 

The night has broken. Bandung is sleeping. A flute.

The sky has sought out its glazes.

The mountains lie as though they seem to be molting

From purple to blue, and with the passing of the hours

They appear, as if sawed into something completely different again.

The red sun, as if at the whim of Allah,

Has melted down into white metal from which

The day is scouring the smooth scales

Of the rice-fields in the morning-light.

A gleam of old porcelain casts its spell over the landscape……

 

R.O. Hanka – the poetry of prophecy

 

Poetry, as prophecy, finds its expression in the anthology in the poem Ik weet (I know) written around 1938.  Joop van den Berg rightly draws specific attention to the poem in his introductory comments. It is not clear who the writer was – there are few biographical details available - but it is likely to have been an Indonesian revolutionary political activist. Essentially, the poem uses the motif of the poet’s mother – mijn Moeder – to summarise all that is stable in the world and indeed about the nature of things to come. Perhaps, and I speculate, it is a direct response, within Indonesian pre-war revolutionary circles, to the kinds of sentiments being expressed by figures such as Noto Soeroto, wherein the moeder referred to is Holland – the symbolic provider of all to its subjects.  The poet, R.O. Hanka, starts the poem in a conventional way, using the symbol of melatigeur – the scent of jasmine – to portray the arrival of his mother when he recalls his early years:

 

                                    Ik Weet   

 

                        Toen ik nog klein was

en melatigeur mijn reukorgaan streelde:

Dan ik wist, Moeder zal komen!

Als ik die zwarte haarwrong zag

Met melatibloemen erin gestoken:

Dan wist ik, die vrouw is mijn Moeder…

 

When I was still small

and I could sense the scent of jasmine in my nostrils:

Then I knew, mother will be coming!

If I saw the black hair bun

Laced with jasmine flowers:

Then I knew that woman was my mother…

 

The last verse, though, is in a vastly different tone: no longer the sweet scent of jasmine, but the scent of battle and the smell of victory. The verse, particularly in the contrast to the poem’s opening, is strong and powerful in impact.

 

                        Zoo weet ik

Dat een glanzende tijd zal komen

Omdat ik de geur der overwinning ruik:

Zoo weet ik…

Dat een vreugde-tijd voor de deur staat

Omdat de donder van het volk mijn oor treft.

Zoo weet ik…

Indonesië, schoon en schitterend,

Zal haar kinderen uitnodigen,

Tot de worsteling der tijden,

Tot het slaagveld.

 

So too I know

That a gleaming era shall come.

Because I can sense the smell of victory:

This too I know…

That a joyful time stands at the door

Because the thunder of my people resounds in my ears.

And so too I know..

Indonesia, beautiful and shining,

Shall summon her children

To the struggle of the times

To the battlefield.

 

It is with that poem that Joop van den Berg concludes the first section of his anthology Indië 1900-1940. He calls his next section of the anthology Interregnum  1940-1950 which is the period of Japanese occupation of the Indies followed by the revolutionary period, until the final transfer of power to the new Republic. For the Indsiche population and their descendants around the world, including Australia, this the period of the greatest ambivalence and suffering, when the whole moral order of the Indische world was turned upon its head.

 

Interregnum – 1940-1950

 

Nieuwenhuys, in Oost Indische Spiegel, calls his chapter on this period Niet meer aan denken which is translated in the English version of his book as ‘Best Forgotten’. This sentiment in English does not quite convey the complexity of the Indische world view. Essentially, this is more along the lines of Lest we forget in regard to the Japanese time- especially the experiences in Japanese concentration camps - although having to ‘try to forget’ in order to resume normal lives. Brandt, as mentioned earlier, is a poet who can use an economy of language but to great effect. This is a quality which poems about suffering and extreme loss often require. Indeed, one of the strengths of poetry, when compared to prose, is that in describing extreme suffering it is often this  quality of restraint which makes the object or time described even more terrible to contemplate. Understatement or paradox in suffering often serves to heighten the tension in the reader. Consider this poem of Brandt’s about a dysentery epidemic in Belawan Estate in August-September 1944.

 

                        Dysenterie Epidemië

 

Nu komt de zwarte wagen keer op keer

de lichte dooden uit ons midden dragen

wij moeten daagelijk houten kruisen zagen:

het hout is schaarsch, straks gaat dat ook niet meer.

 

Het wordt steeds vreemder ‘s morgens op te staan

en zich te rekken en zich levend weten-

en dan zijn waterige pap te eten

hoe lang zal hij mijn krib nog overslaan?

 

Maar ook dit went; wanneer enkele week

de lijkauto niet komt, staart men verwezen

naar de gesloten poort; wat zou er wezen,

laat ook de dood ons nu al in de stek.

 

Now comes the black wagon, time and time again

to carry out of our midst the light dead;

we have to saw wooden crosses each day,

the wood, becoming scarce, soon, it seems, there will be none.

 

It becomes more and more bizarre, getting up every morning

and stretching out and vaguely being conscious – of being alive

and there is that watery porridge to eat:

how long before he comes to pluck me too from my bunk.

 

But also this is something that we become accustomed to, whenever in any week

the hearse does not come, people start to mill around, dazed

staring at the closed gate; what is happening to us,

that even death leaves us in the lurch.

 

Brandt was not the only Indies poet to write in the Japanese time. But he was perhaps the most eloquent poetic voice, of the times. Resink’s poem De Dood in Ngawi , written about the Ngawi prison camp is another deeply-moving poem from this period – “De dood in Ngawi was de zachte dood…”(Death in Ngawi was gentle death ….) - in which understatement and attention to the minutiae make the poetry all the moving and powerful. Van den Berg’s placement of the Brandt and Resink poems alongside the translations of Chairil Anwar’s poems provides a powerful statement of the eloquence of both the Dutch and Indonesian language poets writing in the same chronological period which we only too rarely have appreciated. On the one hand, the most powerful rhetoric from the Indonesian poet, contrasted with the power of understatement from the Dutch language poet.

 

The loss of the colony after the revolutionary period (1945-49) has often been seen by literary critics as only giving way to the outburst of Indonesian language poetry and popular songs on the one hand and an over-sentimentality about the ‘good old times’ amongst those who left Indonesia to start a new life in Holland on the other. I believe that, for Dutch poetry about the Indies, at least, some re-evaluation of these polarities is timely, for a number of reasons.

 

First, there is the fact that whilst it may appear that ‘the end of colonialism’ is simply an historical event, there also is the fact that the experiences of those who have lived through loss and flight are often such that the genre of poetry can encapsulate. True, there have been floods of memoirs and novels about the Indische experience – in the story-telling mode - that Nieuwenhuys mentions in Oost Indische Spiegel. But poetry can provide a better, starker medium through its ability to summarise experiences and reflect them back through but a relatively few words.

 

Poetry can encapsulate loss and give literary expression to these feelings. Indeed, an evaluation of Indies poetry, with this in mind can move that poetry out of the ‘provincial’ into an area where the universality of loss becomes a paramount – not the colonial straight-jacket of tempoe-doeloe-ism which those of that background often unwittingly placed upon the categorisation of their experiences. The vanishing world – what is ‘out-of-date’ (and ‘decaying’ to pick up the points of similarity Beekman makes between Indies colonial literature and Southern USA literature) (Beekman, 1996, 8 and 599) – is not necessarily a sparse one in so far as literary creativity may be concerned. In fact, quite the opposite may be the case.

  

 Willem Brandt’s ‘early’ poetic response to the decolonisation experience, on a personal level, in the poem Verloren is a case in point. Indeed, the Dutch word verloren seems to me to be a far more expressive word, with its associations in the Dutch psyche, than the English word ‘lost’. Brandt is writing of the person, himself, who does not yet understand what he is experiencing. What is verloren, he is asking?

 

                             Verloren

 

Wij hebben alleen hier iets vreemds verloren,

Maar niemand weet wat hij verloren heeft.

Omdat het leven  zoo naar voren streeft

En wij stemmen achter ons niet hooren.

 

All of us here have lost something strange,

But no-one can put their finger on what he has lost

Because life too still stretches out before us

And neither can we yet hear the voices of the past.

 

For Tjalie Robinson, the story-teller par excellence, in his poem  Anders Niet (And that’s all there is to it), the experience of seeing the similarities between the landscape at Ancol (on the Jakarta bay) and that of Amstelveen (near Amsterdam) are uncanny. The reaction to ‘loss’ here is to focus on what seems similar between the physical landscapes in parts of Holland and that near Jakarta, so that they merge and remain as one in the imagination. Even though he spent most of his remaining years in Holland after leaving Indonesia, his wishes to have his ashes scattered in Jakarta Harbour, near Ancol, were fulfilled after his death. In this poem, his expression en anders niet, which he repeats, seems to give the impression that the poet does not care about what he has written or that it is not really important. But this serves to ‘hide’ the deeper emotions of the poet. A  characteristic ‘throwing up of the hands’ by this straatslijper (Beekman, 1996, 514)  - the verbal expressions belying the inner feelings.

 

                                    Anders Niet

 

                        Soms is het land van Antjol net

als Holland. Als het regent en de saien

regenswolken laag en donker overwaaien

Als de leien rawa –plassen met

Hun dodden, lis en riet

Polders zijn en anders niet….

 

Sometimes the land of Ancol is exactly like

Holland. Like when the rain and gloomy clouds

hanging low and dark, blow overhead.

Like the slate-coloured swamps –  marshes

with their uneven surfaces, the iris and reed

they are polders and nothing more…….

 

Some of the dominant themes of his short-stories, in the pseudonym of Vincent Matthieu, are evident here in the poem – the fascination with the symbolism of swamps, “that uncertain form of land between land and water” – as mentioned in his famous short story Tjoek.(Beekman, 1996, 532).

 

G.J. Resink (b. 1911)

 

G.J.Resink is the only Dutch colonial writer who, whilst he became an academic of note in Indonesia after living most of his life in the Indies, was primarily a poet in terms of his literary output. His publication in 1968, Indonesia’s History between the Myths, had sought to dispel the myth that Dutch political control before 1910 had spread as extensively throughout the archipelago as had commonly been hitherto believed. In so far as his poetry was concerned he started writing publicly in the thirties. Whilst the English translated version of Oost Indische Spiegel, (and I suspect the original book itself devotes little attention to his work), as has been mentioned, have the Indonesian language reworking of that book by Dick Hartoko entitled Bianglala Sastra (1979) includes a chapter (Chapter 30) Beberapa Unsur Kejawen Dalam Puisi Han Resink specifically on the poetry of Resink, the only poet to be so considered.(Hartoko, 1985, 320-329)

 

His collection of poetry entitled Kreeft en Steenbok (Cancer and Capricorn) published in 1968,  displays three key elements, or layers (lapisan), which Hartoko considers are present in Resink’s poetry. The first is the debt to the European symboliste tradition, exemplified by the French poets such as Verlaine and Baudelaire. Resink was “orang cendekiawan yang menimba ilmu pengatahuan dari benua Europa”. The second influence is the “orang Indonya dalam diri Resink” – that of the persons descended from Dutch living for many generations and years in Indonesia. The final element is his Kejawen aspects, what Hartoko regards as ‘his sixth sense’ in the way he responds to the world. Surprisingly, Van den Berg in his comments on the poetry of Resink does not allude in any way to the kejawen aspects of his poetry, even though Resink’s  Kreeft en Steenbok collection includes may examples of the poet’s interest in the myth of Segoro Kidul and other aspects of Javanese cosmology, including poems about the sea, as well as poetry “illustrating the four compass points of Javanese cosmology”. (Hartoko, 1985, 321)

 

Resink’s finest poems tend to be written in sonnet (or quasi-sonnet) form, but he also has a particular fondness for the short ‘stand-alone’ quatrain. Two widely contrasting poems – each in rhyming sonnet (or quasi-sonnet) form – demonstrate the strength of his creative output, although it is only in his finest poem Vrouwenfiguur op een Tjandi that we can see the breadth of his literary skills.

 

In the first sonnet, the atmosphere of ‘Tempoe Doeloe’ is created by his use of very specific Indische language and terms. The first verse is the recreation of the scene of colonial ‘frivolity’, then the recognition that it was a time of adolescent exploration. The poem ends by acknowledging that the colonial ranking and caste system was often seemingly turned upside down when it came to psychological dimensions of interaction in the Indies household.  Indeed, there is a progression from outer aspects of the Indies house to the innermost, but with status issues being reversed.

 

                                   

 

 

 

Tempoe Doeloe

 

Het is de trap, waar zij elkaar begroeten;

de galerij, die hen in het tijdverdrijf

van etentjes en dansie-dansie stijft

met Greikese zuilen, vol van het heilig moeten.

 

Het is marmer aan warme voeten;

de vruchtenbowl, wier reuk aan het beklijf;

de stoelendans, waarin zij lijf aan lijf

elkaar in tuberozenbries ontmoeten.

 

En het is meer: de welrust op haar borsten

en in hun schaam, waarom de beo lacht.

 

En het is minder, minder dan de korsten

der voeten van de minsten der bedienden,

maar die in het aanvoelen hun naaste vrienden

zijn, want zij masseren heerlijk – zo zacht.

 

It is the steps, where they greet each other;

the verandah, on which they  indulge in the past-time

of the dinner-parties and dancing about,

then the Greek columns, not forgetting the sacred ‘must dos’.

 

It is the marble meeting their warm feet;

the punch with the smell of sea weed still lingering

            the musical chairs, where body touching body

they meet each other in the flower-scented breeze.

 

And it is more than this: the delight of resting on her bosom

and as they blush, even the beo–bird laughs.

 

And it is less than that, less than the callused feet

of the most lowly of the servants

but which in their feelings are their closest friends

for they massage so beautifully – so soft.

 

            Resink’s use of the present tense throughout the poem reinforces the idea of the ‘immediacy’ of the past. Another point to mention is his fondness for the sonnet form once again demonstrated her, and also his tendency to try to end the poem with a sense of softness – whatever the subject matter – zo zacht , (so soft), he says, of the actions of the servants he remembers. 

 

By way of contrast – not the self-indulgent life in the tropics – the finest poem in the anthology, Vrouwen op een tjandi, is also in (quasi-) sonnet form. It has a depth that other poems do not match. It reminds me of some of the poems by Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, describing the statues of Siva and Parvati on the island of Elefanta, near Bombay, in his poetry in Spanish in the poem, Domingo en la isla de Elefanta.

 

Perhaps it is the sense of equilibrium of feeling which the Resink maintains, as he describes the ravages of time, over the stone sculpture, of a woman. Perhaps it is the sense of timelessness, contrasted with and the coarseness of the actions of ‘humankind’ desecrating the sculpture, which an earlier civilization has created. Perhaps it is the sensuousness of the language, where the softness of the Dutch consonants g,, d, z, t and so on, is given full rein. Perhaps it is the idea – rarely expressed in poems – that the poet of today can touch and reach beyond time itself - to the living people and the creators of the statue in the past. Perhaps it is the first line – where the image of the rain, slowly seeping, over the statue expresses all that is inherent in the idea of the meeting of the elements and human civilization.

 

                        Vrouwenfiguur op een tjandi

 

            Regens zijn aan haar voorbijgegaan,

            weerlicht en zon, nachten met volle maan.

            schaduwen, wind, - en mensen,

            wier vingers langs haar voeten zijn gegleden,

            haar wreven van de welving hebben beroofd

            en die hier mischien hebben gebeden

en in andere werelden geloofd.

 

Ik heb haar alleen maar aangeraakt,

haar lichaam afgetast met de gedachte,

dat zij niet door goden is gemaakt,

maar door een mens. En in haar tederste leden

tintelt mijn vingertoppen de druk tegemoet der zachte

handen van iemand van duizend jaar geleden.

 

The stone figure of a woman at a temple

 

Rains have flowed over her,

summer lightning and the sun, nights with a full moon,

shadows, the wind – and humankind,

whose fingers have slid over her feet,

so that no longer is the curved shape of her instep intact,

and who perhaps have prayed here

whilst putting their belief in other worlds.

 

I have myself but touched her,

her bodily form explored with the thought

that she was not made by the gods,

but by humankind. And in her most sensitive parts

my fingertips tremble, as if feeling the soft hands of

someone from a thousand years ago.

 

In the poem Het Bezeten Huis (The Spirit House) Resink picks up the theme of the Indische house as a metaphor for his inner self. Here this develops and reflects a theme used by Du Perron in his novel, Het land van herkomst. But also the three layers of influence (previously mentioned) upon Resink’s poetry all seem at play here.

 

                                               

 

Het Bezeten Huis

 

            Mijn geest is als een heel oud Indisch huis,

            aan alle kanten naar de verten open

met galerijen en met overlopen,

waarover varens, vogels en geruis

 

van winden binnenkomen om hun thuis

te vinden. In mijn ruimten huizen hopen

bedienden, vrouwen, vrienden enverlopen

kinderen en niemand, niemand blijft er kuis.

 

Maar soms ben ik mijn liefste wezens moe.

Dan gaan de deuren naar mijn donker toe

en weer ik uit mijn nachten mens en beest.

 

De tijd wordt dan door stilte opgeschort

en in de reuk van kembang bangke word

ik van mijn eigen huis de bonze geest.

 

My mind is like a very old Indische house,

on all sides it is open to the distances

with verandahs and with corridors,

across which ferns, birds, and the rustle

 

of the winds enter to try to find

a place to settle in. In my spaces live lots of

servants, women, friends and seedy-looking children

and no-one, no-one staying there remains in a pure state.

 

But sometimes I am tired of my most treasured beings.

Then the doors open to my darkness

And I prevent humankind and animals from entering my thoughts.

 

Time is suspended in the stillness

and through the smell of the bangke flower

I become an evil spirit in my own house. 

 

There are clear echoes of what might be now called ‘magic realism’ or surrealism - traces of symboliste writing style eg Baudelaire.  It is a far cry from the more naturalistic style of so much Dutch colonial poetry of the first half of the twentieth century.

 

Indonesian poetry in Dutch translation  

 

The political death of the Dutch East Indies did not mean the end of the Dutch poetic response to the archipelago. I believe there have been three general types of responses. In the first place, an anthology such as the Joop van den Berg anthology allows its Dutch readership to consider the construct Indië- Indonesië as if it is a unified theme, albeit acknowledging the three time periods. It includes examples of a ‘tempoe doeloe’ response, but also examples of Dutch translations of poems first written in Indonesian. As mentioned before, the compiler includes in translation Indonesian poets, particularly Chairil Anwar, in the Interregnum 1940-1950 section of the anthology in translation by A. Teeuw, including the famous poem Aku (Ik).

 

In his introductory remarks Van den Berg draws attention to the poetry of Rendra. He contrasts the distance travelled between the poetry of Jan Prins writing around 1900 about the Javanese landscape including the volcanic highlands which he saw as “werelden van rouw tussen het onmeerdoogend blauw” with Rendra’s ‘modernë Indonesië, where in reference to the Ciliwang River, Rendra writes (in translation):

 

“ Zo zingt de kali, terwijl zij zich in bochten kronkelt en langs Djakarta met haar billen strijkt.”(Van den Berg, 1984, 12).

 

Of course, post-revolutionary Indonesian poetry had a harder edge, than much of the Dutch writing, even in the 1950s. Indeed, Resink himself, (and Joop van den Berg comments on this), points out in a short poem, that poetry can also be a means of trying to hold on to the universals even if the world is going up in flames. In Resink’s case, the response to ‘loss’ and violent social upheaval can mean a return to the constancy of nature, particularly flora. There is the poem, Sunda:

 

Sunda

 

Een enorm plat en reeksen eilenden zijn naar mij genoemd,

rijken en koloniën werden hier tot ondergang gedoemd,

boerenopstanden, communisten rellen, Darul Islam

en vulkanen – alles heb ik met mijn flora overbloemd.

 

An enormous plateau and a series of islands have been named after me,

empires and colonies were fated here to fall.

Peasant revolts, the communist uprisings, Darul Islam

And volcanoes – but all this time my flora overwhelms all of this.

 

Van den Berg also draws attention to the contrasting stances taken by Dutch and Indonesian poets – the ‘harder edge’ voice of the Indonesian poet coming through, even in translation. He contrasts the poem of Willem Brandt, Prapat, with that of  Sitor Situmorang, Dataran Tinggi, both writing about the high plains of the Toba region of Sumatra. But in Sitor Situmorang’s case, he is returning to his home village, after being in Europe.

 

That poem shows a masterly use of language. Apart from the exquisite use of the Indonesian, for me at least, there are also traces of the poetry about the harsh, high country of Castille, Spain, so well depicted by Spanish poets, Machado and Unamuno. The Dutch translation of the Dataran Tinggi, translated as Hoogvlakte (High Country), captures this harshness most effectively and it appears that the poet himself also assisted Linda Voute in this fine translation of the original poem in Indonesian.(VADO-projekt, 1987,111).

 

Hoogvlakte                                        Dataran Tinggi                                  High Country

 

Eenzame velden                              Padang-padang sepi                                   Fields without people

In de hoogvlakte                               Di dataran tinggi                               In the high plateau of

De steenactige streek Toba                       Daerah Toba batu-batu                   Of stony Toba region

 

Geef me je lied                                 Beri aku lagumu                               Give me your song

Doel van het leven                           Hidup bertuju                                                What your purpose is

Het lied van de gierende wind        Lagu angin mendesing                   Song of howling winds

Met droge lippen…..                                    Di bibir kering           …..                              Out of parched lips…..

                                               

            The original Indonesian of Sitor Situmorang above is placed with the Dutch translated version. Each is powerful, although an English translation is hard-pressed to do justice to either. Van den Berg contrasts Brandt’s poem, Prapat (where the poet also sees the villages deserted) with the more declaratory, more impassioned yet at the same time despairing tone of Sitor Situmorang quoted in part above:

 

In the Brandt poem:

 

Het ruikt naar lente en witstromend water,

de dorpen luisteren in het ravijn;

aandachtig neergehurkte kampongs zijn

zo stil als waren zij voor goed verlaten.

 

There is the scent of spring and the sound of the gushing white waters,

and villages that appear to be listening in the ravine,

and attentive, and the squatting kampongs are

so still, seemingly, they have abandoned, for good.

 

Instead, Brandt does not develop this theme, but moves to comment on the Toba Lake itself, “het meer wat laten glijden langs zijn huid” (where the waters of the lake pass smoothly over the skin) returning to the naturalistic theme alone.

 

A second direction in which Dutch consideration of the continuity of the Indië construct has been continued is represented in the collection Wind ademt in zijn eentje – Poëzie uit Indonesië, Oost –Timor en Nederland, published in 1987. Here, the collection contains, from the colonial period the Saidjahs Zang by Multatuli as the only poem from this period represented.

 

The Sitor Situmorang poem in Dutch translation mentioned above is also included in the latter anthology along with other well-known Indonesian poets such as Rendra and Toeti Heraty in translation. One such poem of Rendra’s, translated as Gedicht van het eiland Bali (Poem of the island of Bali) is a satirical look at Bali in the ‘classic’ Rendra style, and includes in the ‘Dutch’ version a fascinating mixture of both Dutch and some ‘tourist English’ phrases:

 

            Oh look honey dear!

            Kijk, die inboorlingen eens

            ze klimmen als apen in die kokospalm

            Fantastic! Wij moeten een foto van ze nemen.

            Pas op! Geef ze geen hand

Glimlach alleen en zeg hello.

You see, hun handen zijn vuil.

Wie weet hebben ze wel wormen

 

 But the collection also includes poems written in Dutch from West Papua, East Timor (in Portuguese) and also poems by political refugees in Holland as well as poems in Dutch by poets of Moluccan background now resident in Holland.

 

To return to idea that although the political death of the Dutch East Indies occurred the   construct of  Indië-Indonesië continues, a third response is typified by Paula Gomes (b.1932) whose haiku-like poems are in the van den Berg anthology. This response is described by Nieuwenhuys as ‘Indonesia revisited’, with sense of confrontation with the past as well as a reappraisal.( Nieuwenhuys, 1982, 307).Those persons born in the Indies return to the country of their birth after many years. The poetry derived from this experience of visiting their birthplace has a particular poignancy as we can see the inner struggle of the poet to reconcile the new and the old aspects of their identity. Sometimes, this leads the poet, as with Paula Gomes, to place the poems in a bilingual setting. Indeed, her Dutch poems in Ik kom en ik ga (I come and I go) are placed together with Indonesian translations by Toeti Heraty. (Gomes, 1996).

 

Discussion

 

It is appropriate to consider a few general observations that can now be made regarding the poetry of the Dutch East Indies and Indonesia in the 20^th century. Of necessity, there are limitations concerning these observations. In part, they derive from the fact that the poems I have considered mostly have been those selected by Joop van den Berg for the 1984 anthology Indië-Indonesië in honderd gedicten. Indeed, of those poems I have closely translated only twenty six of those poems appearing in the anthology and I accept that this is a limiting factor regarding generalisations.

 

 Regarding the poets originally writing in Dutch there are the poems by Jan Prins, Noto Soeroto, E. du Perron, Willem Brandt, Nes Tergast, J.J. de Stoppelaar, E.R. Duncan Elias, R.O. Hanka, G.J.Resink and Paula Gomes. For reasons solely to do with time available for the task, I have not closely translated work by other poets included in the anthology, such as Leo Vroman, Johan Fabricus, Adolph ter Haghe and T. Volker, for example. Nevertheless, I feel that much of the ‘flavour’ of the total selection of the hundred poems in the anthology can be detected from the twenty six examples I have chosen for close attention in this paper.

 

I am also conscious of the fact that I have no way currently of knowing the criteria for selection (and rejection)  in the anthology that Van den Berg had, apart from a general wish to include a wide-cross section of poems written in or translated into Dutch over the 80 or so years since 1900. I believe he has chosen from a wide–cross section of the poems, but he has relied primarily upon published books of poetry, rather than extend his search to newspapers (both in Holland and in the Indies) or more ephemeral publications, such as political or voluntary associations’ publications.

 

We have no way of knowing whether any poems, written in satirical style, in the colonies might have found their way into such an anthology if Van den Berg’s sources had been more extensive. As it stands, the absence of satire and sarcasm is a feature that does distinguish the Dutch poems in the collection from some of the Indonesian poems in translation, particularly those of Rendra. Indeed, it is central point of contrast that Van den Berg makes in his introduction to the anthology between the naturalistic style of the colonial poetry of Jan Prins in 1900 with that of Rendra in the 60s. It is clear that, on the face of it, much of the Indonesian poetry has what I would term a ‘harder edge’ than that of the Dutch colonial poets.

 

Even allowing for these limitations, I would suggest that it is now possible to detect what Nieuwenhuys called ‘het Indonesisch décor’ in the collection. Although, I have not provided examples of ‘mainstream’ Dutch poetry of the 20^th century within the scope of this paper, I believe one can see the ‘Indies/Indonesian’ background intruding either very directly eg. the landscapes described or even the terms used, such as the ‘borrowed’ Malay words especially for flowers, wind and other natural phenomena, as well as words like ‘adat’, gamelan and so on.

 

The dominance of the tropical sun and the monsoon rains as ever present in the poems is also something which marks these poems out from that which might be written in Dutch by authors with no experience of living in the Indies.  The characteristics of the tropical night, as I have mentioned before, as a potentially threatening and uncertain part of the day - when Rust en Orde is at its most vulnerable -  both in the individual psyche of the colonial settler as well as the social order itself, find no real parallel in Holland proper in the 20^th century in peace-time.

 

What unifies the poems in the Van den Berg anthology is the construct Indië-Indonesië. As I have mentioned, the political death of the Indies, did not meant the death of the myth or construct of the Indies. As Beekman points out the reality of the Indies was replaced, at least in the context of Dutch literature and society with various extensions of the original ‘thing’. For Van den Berg, there is a unity between the poetry of Jan Prins and the poetry of Rendra, through the crucial medium of translation. The Dutch readership can see the continuity of the ‘colonial story’- how it has ‘turned out’, without any necessary sense of their being a vacuum, or sense of time stopping.

 

The removal of the Dutch colonial enterprise from Indonesia did lead to the development of what I have termed tempoe doeloe-ism which can be seen to describe the whole cultural apparatus of remembering times past, on the part of those who left the Indies and its colonial social order. Beekman is correct in demonstrating the strength of the business of myth-making, amongst those from a vanishing culture, a culture which is fading from existence. (Beekman, 1996, 599-602). The crucial role of the Indisch man in marking out such a culture in the Indies when living there, then sustaining it back in Holland, is important in the work of writers like Nieuwenhuys and Vincent Matthieu (Tjalie Robinson). (Beekman, 1996, 511-561). But for those who remained in Indonesia for an extended period after 1949 and who became Indonesian citizens, such as Resink, there has been too little research undertaken to assess the impact of these choices on their poetry and world view. Only Hartoko seems to have fully appreciated the importance of this. (Hartoko, 1985, 326).

 

In Resink’s case, I believe that his poetry did expand in terms of his creativity, especially in the direction of increasingly using Kejawen cultural themes. Other poets writing in Dutch, thematically, did not develop new approaches, but focussed more on the collection and reflection phase of their creative careers, which displacement to Holland ‘forced upon’ them. Additionally, they were ‘denied’ new sources of material for poems, no longer living in the country of their birth or the ‘country that they loved’.

 

Of course, in any analysis of colonial literature, there is always the troublesome aspect of definition of what constitutes the boundaries of that literature, in this case poetry? Is it solely the poetry, in Dutch, written by members of the colonial elite? How do we regard, for a previous century, the work of Kartini in regards to letter-writing, and in the context of the Van den Berg, the work of Noto Soeroto and R.O. Hanka. The common sense approach, is I feel, best. Thus the very fact of using the Dutch language is the unifying thread. It becomes less relevant whether the author is indigenous Indonesian, Dutch-born or of mixed descent. What is important is the language they use, even if, for example, the revolutionary uses the language of the oppressor, to commence the struggle, and the political outcome is the replacement of the colonial language in the new state.

 

The second anthology Wind Ademt in zijn Eentje, reflects a useful Dutch language alternative successor myth to the more traditional tempoe doeloe recreation of the past. Here the scope of the Indies concept has been broadened to include the literature of the succession movements in Indonesia, as well as the poetry written in Dutch by political exiles or the descendants of the Moluccans who went to Holland after 1949.

 

As Beekman suggests, the Dutch naturalistic poetic tradition did find a place in the 20^th century in the Indies, rather than in Holland proper. (Beekman, 1996, 7). So much of the poetry of the Van den Berg collection seems to fall easily into this category. If there can be said to be any tradition of Dutch colonial poetry in the 20^th century it would certainly fit best under this heading – where the accent is on closely descriptive poetry, and where nature is given prominence of place. Sometimes, of course, the descriptions of nature especially flowers are used to symbolize, allude to, or embellish references to women, whether they be Javanese dancers or the mother-figure. Once again, such references reinforce the Indonesisch décor of the poetry itself.

 

Some other points strike one about Dutch poetry from the Indies as exemplified in the anthology. I have already commented on the apparent lack of a satirical element to the poetry. What also strikes one is the absence of reference to particular persons in the poems. There are plenty of references to typologies eg Minangkabousche vrouw, Javaansche danseres, Indische oudjes and so on, but few personal names, apart from a poem of Resink’s regarding the graves of two Dutch children who died in a malaria epidemic. Only with the translated poem of Bandar Harahap, Sarinah en ik, do we get a feeling of the personal, although even here ‘Sarinah’ may solely be a collective reference to Indonesian women. Could it also be indicative of the social distance between Indies poet and the society being described. Or is it simply that Du Perron, of course, had no way of knowing the name of the watchman on duty in Garut or Brandt the name of the Javanese dancer!

 

Now this is not necessarily unusual in that poetry, unlike the novel genre, by definition, is a medium which generalises, which seeks the universal, but it is somewhat unusual that few of the poems from the colonial period mention personal names. There are also few poems of homage, for example, to particular individuals, apart from Nog ëënmaal, written for Rob Nieuwenhuys by Tjalie Robinson. But nothing similar to the poem in the Australian colonial context about New Guinea called New Guinea – in memory of Archbishop Alain de Boismenu M.S.C. which Australian poet, James McCauley, wrote dedicated to the Archbishop:

 

                        Only by this can life become authentic,

Configured, henceforth, in eternal mode;

Splendour, simplicity, joy - such as were seen

In one who now rests by his mountain road. (in Krauth, 1982, 195-6)

 

Time did not permit a close analysis of the poems where the poet is writing about women. That said, those poems in the anthology dealing with ‘women’ as a theme tend to contain descriptions of Indonesian women, as general tributes, rather than focus on feelings of reciprocity or mutual attraction at a personal level.

 

It is appears, as far as I can ascertain, there were no poems in the Van den Berg anthology written by women. This is quite intriguing considering the disproportionate number of women novelists with a background of having spent a portion of their life in the Indies, eg. Maria Dermout, Helle Haasse, to name but two. Perhaps the letter-writing genre was more favoured by women.

 

I now return to the points I made about a new approach to the poetry of the Dutch East Indies earlier in the introduction to the paper. The first point to make is that purely descriptive poetry can have its own value, quite apart from any search for ‘deeper meaning’. One of the values of poetry is that the creation of an image, through words, can be an end in itself. Much of the anthology, as I have mentioned, contains such purely descriptive poetry, and I for one, enjoy reading through the word-images they create, both in the original Dutch and then in the English translation. Many of the images they create are not time-dependent. The tropical sun still rises even if revolutions come and go. Apart from the growth in pollution and urban population numbers, the images of the Bandung valley against the mountains, the changing colours through the day, as in Nes Tergast’s poem De Nacht bracht… are pleasing to imagine. Now, it is probably true that Indonesian poets, especially those emerging out of the revolutionary period, did not see the need to comment in poetic form, on what is always there. But fashions come and go and Indonesian poets themselves may move more in this direction in the years to come.

 

Hence the outsider - as many of the colonial poets were in relation to local Indonesian/indigenous society – can often observe and see things that pass unnoticed by the ‘locals’. The phenomenon of poetry about dance performance is also an area where I consider the insider/outsider dichotomies of value in assessing poetic possibilities.  What the (colonial) outsider perceives in a Javanese dance performance may be vastly different from what the performer intends or even the meaning of the dance for the performer, or in the meaning that the local population ascribes to the performance. True, there is a concurrence in that all of these parties believe that the performance has value. They may agree that the performance is aesthetically beautiful. But that may be where it ends. An Indonesian poet, in the immediate post-revolutionary period, may not have considered the worth of describing dance performance. Hence, I suggest that some of the poems in the anthology describing dance performance are of a fine quality, even if there is nothing approaching the genius of Rilke’s poetry in German about dance – the Spansche Tanzerin written in 1907/08 – or Lorca’s poetry in Spanish about flamenco in the 1920s.

 

            A further area where the poet as outsider may provide insights relates to the phenomenon that finds its way into poetry is in relation to descriptions of the archeological remains of kingdoms, such as exist on Java. It is here that the villager living close by the ruins and the (colonial) Dutch poet are on similar ground as neither could claim to understand fully the significance of what past civilizations have erected, even if both acknowledge the inherent importance of the remains. Here the value of a poem, such as Resink’s Vrouwen figuur op een Tjandi can be seen. Or indeed, the poems by Albert Besnard about Boroboedoer, or the poem Balische Brahmanentempel by Resink.  

 

Where perhaps Dutch colonial poetry rises out of the ‘provincial’ into the mainstream of world poetic traditions is where it deals with the universalities of suffering and death. As mentioned previously, there is the fine poetry of Brandt and Resink about their experiences in Japanese prison camps in the Indies in the 1940s. But apart from the poetry of prophecy from Hanka, there is virtually no poetry originally written in Dutch in the anthology dealing with the suffering of the Indonesian population as a whole, either at that time or during the period of Dutch colonial rule itself.

 

A more contentious proposition, perhaps, is my view that some of the poetry dealing with the flight from the old colonies and the experience of being ‘refugees from the land of their birth’ can also be seen outside the straight-jacket of being confined narrowly within the tempoe doeloe  traditions of modern Dutch literature. It can be more firmly placed alongside other world literature dealing with ‘loss’. The poem Verloren by Resink captures some of the ambiguity of the process, of adjusting to ‘loss’, that which is verloren.

 

So too does his poem Het Bezeten Huis, even though not appearing so at first glance. In the  poem Resink takes up Du Perron’s idea of the ‘the colonial house’ as a metaphor for the poet’s spirit or the mind. Recreation of the past – de oud Indisch huis  - and the focus on the past, can, of course, be seen as part of the reaction to ‘loss’.

 

Tempoe Doeloe appears at first glance to be simply an over-sentimental portrait of the easy life in the tropics and regret for its loss. But even the poet cannot resist using language almost as if it has ‘magical’ properties in bringing back the past. The words, ‘in het tidverdrijf van etentjes en dansie- dansie stieft met Griekse zuilen,’ have a ring of over-exaggeration, at least for me, and provide some evidence that Resink is not solely trying to recreate an atmosphere of ‘mindless partying in the midst of a sea of suffering of the colonised poor.’  The reactions of the other poets, whose work is included, to ‘loss’ can also be seen in this light.

 

            In so far as the form and structure of poetry from the Dutch colonial period, poets such as Prins favoured the four-lined rhymed stanza when he was writing at the beginning of the century. But it was the sonnet form, such as used by Resink, and the free verse poetry, where Brandt revels in its use of that form to describe the Javanese dancer, where the finest poetry is revealed. The sonnet had adherents throughout the entire period of the 20^th century amongst the Dutch colonial poets, which is quite different from those writing in Indonesian who tended almost universally to favour free verse form, with the freedoms that structure permits. No one could imagine, for example, much of Chairil Anwar’s poetry fitting in to more formal verse structure, nor that of Rendra writing later.

 

Conclusion

 

This brief critique of the Dutch language poetry of the Dutch East Indies and Indonesian poetry in translation in the 20^th century should be seen as only the first stage of a broader attempt to   give greater coverage to that poetry outside the confines of  a Dutch-speaking readership. Through adopting the approach suggested in the paper it is possible to undertake a re-evaluation of the relevance and literary merit of Dutch language poetry written in or about the Dutch East Indies. The author also considers that such poetry should be seen alongside the traditions of modern Indonesian poetry, as another ‘window’ into the literary exploration of the natural and social life of the archipelago.

 

Acknowledgements

 

As indicated previously, the author gratefully acknowledges the comments and suggestions of Drs Rudy and Sophie de Iongh regarding his draft translations of the poems in the Van den Berg anthology into English.  The translations into Dutch of the Indonesian language poems included in Indië-Indonesië in honderd gedichten were by Linda Voute (Dataran Tinggi by Sitor Situmorang; Adalah bel kecil di jendela by Taufiq Ismail) and Margaretha Ferguson (Sarinah en Ik by Bandar Harahap). The translation into Indonesian of the poem Vrouwenfiguur op een tjandi by G. J. Resink appears in Dick Hartoko’s Bianglala Sastra –Bunga rampai sastra Belanda tentang kehidupan Indonesia. The translation into English of the short poem Adalah bel kecil di jendala is derived from a consideration of both the translation into English from the original Indonesian by Harry Aveling, as well as the Dutch translation by Linda Voute. Whereas in the original Aveling translation, the bell rings out in both June and then July, in the Linda Voute translation into Dutch of the same poem, the bell rings only in June! Finally, the author of this paper prepared for the ASAA2000 conference sincerely thanks Dr Aveling for comments and suggestions on the draft itself, as well as regarding areas for further examination.

 

References

 

Van den Berg, Joop (ed.). 1984. Indië-Indonesië in honderd gedichten. ‘s-Gravenhage: Nijgh en Van Ditmar.

 

VADO- projekt HSJJW (ed.). 1987. Wind ademt in zijn eentje – Poëzie uit Indonesië, Oost Timor en Nederland. Breda: Uitgeverij de Geus.

 

Hartoko, Dick (ed.). 1985. Bianglala Sastra – Bunga rampai sastra tentang kehidupan di Indonesia (Berdasarkan: Oost Indische Spiegel, Karya: Rob Nieuwenhuys). Jakarta: Penerbit Djambatan.

 

Du Perron, E.(ed.). 1948. De Muze van Jan Companjie – Overzichtelijke verzameling van Nederlands-Ooostindiense belletrie uit de companjiestijd (1600-1780). Bandoeng: A.C.Nix en Co.

 

Du Perron, E. 1997. Het Land van Herkomst. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij G.A. van Oorschot.

 

Nieuwenhuys, Rob. 1982. Mirror of the Indies – A History of Dutch Colonial Literature. Translated by Frans van Rosevelt. Edited by E.M. Beekman. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press.

 

Nieuwenhuys, Rob.(ed.). 1979. Memory and Agony – Dutch stories from Indonesia. Translated by Adrienne Dixon. Boston: Twayne Publishers.

 

Beekman, E.M. 1996. Troubled Pleasures – Dutch Colonial Literature from the East Indies 1600-1950. Oxford: Clarendon Press

 

Krauth, Nigel. (ed.). 1982. New Guinea Images in Australian Literature. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press

 

Gomes, Paula. 1996. Ik kom en ik ga. Den Haag: van Stockum  

 

Aveling, Harry. (ed. and trans.). 1975. Contemporary Indonesian Poetry. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press   

 

Multatuli, 1983 edition. Max Havelaar. Amsterdam: Em. Querido’s Uitgevery B.V.