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.