Then I reminded myself: these new poems were written in Malay, for personal reflection or private circulation, i.e. Plus, the translations are of pretty inconsistent quality-the very first one that appears, "Azam" / "Resolution", makes no grammatical sense! There seems to have been no real attempt to reflect Pak Said's idiomatic English here-though granted, he did seem to have had a thing for unnecessary archaisms, as seen in his English poems "Pusillanimous Lackey" and "Lass in White".įrankly, a lot of the new pieces disappointed me-they felt like cliché truisms, barely worthy of being called poems. Unfortunately, the book feels unnecessarily padded-there's a preface, three forewords, an introduction, and two speeches and a biodata as appendices, containing loads of redundancies and bloviating against the injustice of his detention. This book provides a much-needed archive of all 72 of the poems Pak Said wrote in jail (the extra 55 are in Malay), together with bilingual English/Malay translations by Adriana Nordin Manan with the assistance of Muhammad Haji Salleh, all on facing pages, so semi-bilinguals like me can shuttle easily between versions to grasp both the music and sense of the words. Consider his reflection on the 1969 racial riots, "Hidden Hands", clear-voiced in its politics, clean and sonically resonant in its sorrow, devoid of pomp and obscurantism-far more relatable than the work of the pioneer nation-building poets at the NUS English Department at the time.
I'd read it before and it struck me as surprisingly good. This is an imperfect work, but it's an important one! The author (1928 – 2016) is one of Singapore's most famed political detainees, arrested during Operation Coldstore and held for 17 years from 1963 to 80.īack in '73, a pamphlet of his English-language poems was smuggled out and published under the same title, Poems from Prison. Puisi dari Penjara / Poems from Prison, by Said Zahari
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