Sitor's poems evoke beauty

Sitor's poems evoke beauty

Lie Hua, Contributor, Jakarta

Sitor Situmorang has a lot to offer to Indonesian literature,
particularly in terms of versification. He is most noted for the
lyrical nature of his poems.

Unlike Chairil Anwar, whose poems reflect his burning egotism,
Sitor Situmorang is famous for the euphony of his verses despite,
according to many critics, the existentialist philosophical
content of these poems.

Many of his lines can easily be recalled just because of the
beautiful sound they evoke. Listen to these: "The lake glances in
the morn/A church bell on a hill in Italy" (Song of Italian
Girl) or "Flower on a stone/Burned by loneliness" (Flower), or
still, "A bird picking up the grass/A nest it has no chance to
make" (Silk Night). Sound and meaning reinforce each other in
Sitor's poems.

It is this aspect that has left an indelible impression on
Nirwan Dewanto, who reviewed Sitor's poems from 1948 to 2001 in a
discussion held by Aksara Bookshop on Wednesday, June 5, 2002. He
was the sole speaker and also the moderator.

Nirwan said that for him the most prominent feature of Sitor's
poems was not their philosophical content but their orderliness
of sound and form. Sitor, unlike the Chairil Anwar, the reformer
of Indonesian poetry, prefers to make use of old verse forms like
sonnets and pantun, a four-line stanza.

Sitor, said Nirwan Dewanto, who is an editor with the literary
and cultural journal KALAM, does not use the traditional verse
forms because he is against modernism. Rather, his use of these
traditional verse forms is a means to filter the hullabaloo of
modern experiences.

Nirwan was right when he said that Sitor's poems described
forms or shapes: nature, city, architecture, women, inanimate
objects. However, what he conveys in his poems is not the realism
of these objects but the impression that they make on him. So,
like a painter, Sitor the poet discards details to save his
subjective view. We may therefore be charmed by the beauty of a
panorama in his poems but then we can always find a philosophy of
sorts in these poems. Sitor, according to Nirwan, often achieves
this by using abstract nouns. Look at these lines: "Loneliness
here becomes a presence" (Place St. Sulpice) or "Eternal boredom
turns to forgetfulness," (La Ronde).

Nirwan also likened Sitor to Baudelaire, a noted French poet,
who made a journey to savor the world as broken and decadent
parts and therefore went in search of decay rather than virtue.
Yet in the eyes of Nirwan, Sitor is still looking for beauty.

Then Nirwan also compared Sitor with Pablo Neruda, the famed
Chilean poet. Neruda, he said, would like to extol the virtues of
his fatherland for all nations to see while Sitor seems to be a
cosmopolite still weighed down by the legacy of his ancestors. In
this context, Sitor perhaps tries to deny his origin by using
traditional verse forms.

Interestingly, in Nirwan's observation, both poets have taken
the leftist path, though for different reasons. Neruda adopted
leftist ways because he was fed up with modernism in poetry.
Sitor, for his part, has taken the such a path because of his
distance with modernism in poetry. He has reconciled himself with
his village, which he has now expanded into a "nation". In this
way, his philosophy of fun has been replaced by an ideology. It
is at this juncture that impressionism has made way for realism.
And, it is easy to guess, as his traditional verse forms have
turned into free verse.

Following his release from jail in the 1970s -- he was
arrested for alleged involvement in the Sept. 30, 1965 coup
attempt that was blamed on leftists -- Sitor became a different
person as a poet. He no longer concerned himself with euphony and
music, the main feature of his poems in his early collections
like Surat Kertas Hijau (Green Paper Letter), Dalam Sajak (Within
Verse) or Wajah Tak Bernama (Nameless Face).

As the title of his first collection of poems published after
his release from prison, Peta Perjalanan (Map of a Journey),
suggests, Sitor is no longer a hunter of fun, rather, he is now a
collector of souvenirs from all corners of the country, and even
the world. Understandably, these poems are no longer concerned
with euphony or music. The content is an attempt to describe the
"I".

Although many of Sitor's poems talk about nature, a more
profound reading of these poems will show that just like the
majority of Indonesian poems, his poems lay emphasis on "I" very
seriously. It is the "I" that sticks to the environment because
of its dominant position. Nirwan added that perhaps the first
Indonesian poem to be purely about inanimate things was Mata
Pisau (Knife Blade) by Sapardi Djoko Damono.

It is interesting to note, Nirwan said, that once we were fed
up with sermons in poems, we would return to Sitor's early poems
as they always offered us music and sound. It is by surrendering
ourselves fully to the music and sound of his poems that we can
have real fun reading these poems. In this way, we remove from
Sitor's poems what is usually considered his "philosophy".

A discussion of Sitor's poems can never be complete because
the more we delve into his lines, the more the sound rings in our
ears and knocks at the door of our conscience. Imagery becomes
more powerful in his poems because of the sound that the lines
evoke. When imagery blends with sound, a poem has come full
circle and becomes complete in itself. It is this feature of
Sitor's poems that Nirwan has rightly observed.