Chairil Anwar

Chairil Anwar, the author of most of the poems in this section, lived only twenty-seven years yet is a major force in modern Indonesian poetry. His influence stems from two sources: one, his innovations in language, which stripped traditional 'decorative' and traditionally 'poetic' conventions from the Indonesian language, leaving what he called "the germinal word, the germinal image"; two, his short, perhaps tragic life (born in 1922, he fought as a guerrilla against the Dutch colonial rule and died of typhus, tuberculosis and syphilis in 1949, when he was only 27 years old) that coincides with a period of social and political unrest (the end of Japanese rule and the fight for independence from the Dutch) central to the making of modern Indonesia. These poems are translated by Burton Raffel and published in The Voice of the Night: Complete Poetry and Prose of Chairil Anwar (1993).

I cannot give you much information about the last two poems or their authors. The works are reprinted in The Poetry of the World, ed. Jeffrey Paine (New York: Harper Collins, 2000) but without any background or publication information. "Siapapak enghau" is by a contemporary Indonesian writer who appears to be influenced by Chairil Anwar; "My Message" is also a recent work, and apparently the author, a Malaysian poet with English connections [see his name] wrote it originally in English.