poems from abdul latiff / singapore / translated by adibah amin

TENGGARA / APRIL 1968
Dept. of English-Univ of Malaya
Kuala Lumpur/ Malaysia

                                           abdul latiff :
                                            poems from his note book
                                                                             
                                                                Translated by Adibah Amin

POEMS FROM HIS NOTE BOOK

                                                                 waiting

                                                         casuarina tree
                                                         dies awaiting
                                                         north wind
                                                         at river's edge
                                                         north wind
                                                         at day's end

                                                         old crow
                                                         awaiting death
                                                         casuarina tree
                                                         at river's edge
                                                         casuarina tree
                                                         at finger's end


                                                                    mekong river

                                                                                 I
                                                         mekong river
                                                         i choose your name
                                                         for i am desolate
                                                         i shall plunge my breast
                                                         down to your bed
                                                         right leg to the moon
                                                         left leg to the sun
                                                         my heart shall drift
                                                         with your waters
                                                         my name to the sea
                                                         my voice to the mountains.

                                                                                  II

                                                         mekong river
                                                         now tranquil your breath
                                                         how untroubled your gait
                                                         now untroubled your gait
                                                         on your bank
                                                         a mother's voice calls forlorn
                                                         for the voice of a lost son
                                                         when she lovers her face
                                                         against your face
                                                         you can still smile at ease.

                                                                                  III

                                                          mekong river
                                                          end the day-dance your ripples!
                                                          i see down in your bed
                                                          buds bleeding
                                                          pebbles wounded
                                                          tonight
                                                          a storm shall come from the north
                                                          your banks shall break
                                                          your waters shall run red
                                                          and your current shall rage more violent
                                                          than Nigeria.

                             
                                                                    a blue bus

                                                          a blue bus
                                                          without number without driver
                                                          crawls
                                                          amidst vehicles
                                                          blood-smeared.
 
                                                          if it stops
                                                          before me
                                                          i shall buy
                                                          a blue ticket
                                                          without humour without song.

                                                           saudara,
                                                           the time has come
                                                           for me to step forward
                                                           the ticket I bought
                                                           feels hot in my hand.

                                                           the blue bus
                                                           has opened its door
                                                           the time has come
                                                           for me
                                                           to know suffering.


                                                                     old river

                                                           as desolationb stabs the breast
                                                           the old river hobbles on
                                                           from village to village
                                                           whose people have long ago
                                                           cast their faces to the city
                                                           whose butterflies have long ago
                                                           lost their rainbow colours.

                                                           when your bank slide away
                                                           when your villages slide away
                                                           give your tears of desolation
                                                           to the jungle dogs
                                                           who have lost the moon they hunted
                                                           to the messengers birds
                                                           who have lost the continent they loved.  []


ABOUT PAINTER-POET 
ABDUL LATIFF

Abdul Latiff was born in Lenggeng, Negri Sembilna, 26 yeras ago.
He has been painting ever since he left school. He received formal training in art when he spent four years at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts.  His most recent one-man exhibitions were held in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore in 1967 and early 1968. Latiff is an uncom-promising painter. There appear to be in his work hints of a deliberate search to give expression in long forgotten forms of vitality in the Southest Asian environment, an aim which gives his paintings and sketches their unmistakeable air.

It is not generally known that Latiff is also a poet of some distinction. His poems here appeared in the Indonesian journal Horizon edited by Mochtar Lubis, and have won the regard of many Indonesian readers. The limpid style of Latiff's poems carries, at the same time, a starting kind of force suggestive of the quality
of his commitment to his art.       TENGGARA 

[] 

239 THE PHONG[i.e. Do Manh Tuong] Thephong by Thephong, The writer, the work and the life autobiography . Saigon. Dai Nam Van Hien Books . - $850

Google/ Images / Thephong writer /
The Rubbish Tip Outside the City and ...


   

                                                           THEPHONG (i.e Do manh Tuong, 1932)
                                                                                                       ( drawing by PHAN DIEN0

                                                                                                                                                         TRAN KIÊT NÔ

                                                                       The Phong  [i.e Do manh Tuong, 1932 -      ]


                                                              
                             Catologue 146. Rare & Fine Books.  Including Recent Acquisition.

239. THE PHONG [i.e. Do Manh Tuong]  The Rubbish Tip Outside the City
 & other stories. Translated by Dam Xuan Can.  Dai Nam Van Hien Books  [1973]          
                                                                                                             $650

Second Edition in English, 4to, pp.69, [4] mimeographed very in good in
 original printed wrappers.  Errata sheet laid in. 


-----------------------------------              
           THE PHONG                                   

    THE RUBBISH TIP
    OUTSIDE THE CITY
      & other stories                                                                                                                                                   


          dnvh press
------------------------------------

This copy with a presentation from the author dated April 1973.

Short stories by The Phong,  the Vietnamese poet and novelist, born 1932, who started writing in Hanoi 1952 " in the first days of the Vietminh."  In 1953 he embarked on a career of journalism.  He moved to Saigon before the Dien Bien Phu in 1954 where he wrote film reviews and other materials on a contractual basis.  He is the author of three novels (2 written in Hanoi , and anothe in Saigon) and in September of 1964 [1954] he became press officer of the Minister of Information whIch brought him in contact with many important people in both the literary as the political scene.  From March 1965 to the end of 1966 he was a lecturer in politiccs in the Vung Tau Training Center.  He remains a creative forces in Vietnam this day and is, at that time of this cataloguing in a dispute with Jees Bezos and Amazon over copyright infringement.

                                                                  Three copies of this edition is OCLC.
                                                                                                            See also item 167 


240  THE PHONG  [i.e. Do Manh Tuong] Thephong by Thephong, The writer, the work and the life autobiography.  Saigon.  Dai Nam Van Hien Books .
1972                                                                                                                       $850 

Third Edition in English, 4to. 3p.l., [1] mimeographed book near fine in original pictorial wrappers.

This copy with a presentation from the author, inscribed dated April 1973.  The book was first published in 1966 and there was a revised edition printed in 1968.

Autobiography by The Phong , the Vietnamese  poet and novelist who having come to Saigon, his native in Hanoi, befriended the American forces even though he was very opposed to the war.  Among his other works:  The Summing up of Ten yeras of Writing ( Reminiscence & Reflections).  Translated  from the Vietnamese  by X.H. [Dam Xuan Can] , Saigon 1968, I am an American  Militiaman  [another title: The Ordeal of the American Militiaman (second edition.)  Translated by X.H.[ Dam Xuan Can]  and South Vietnam the Baby in the arms of the American nurse . Translated by Dam Xuan Can (poetry,  Saigon 1969)  among others.

This edition not in OCLC       See also  item 167.

----------------------------------

Item 171

The writer The Phong's copy (see items 239 and 240) , signed and dated by him in 1952 on the title page and also p. [45] p. 57.  Originally published in The Bulletin de la Société des Etudes indochinoises , nouvelle série, tome 12,NO. 3-4 in 1932.

The Phong ( b. 1932   --  see items below started writing on Hanoi in 1952 " in the first days of the Vietminh".  In 1952  he embarked on a career of journalism.  He moved to Saigon before the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1954.  Where he wrote film reviews and other materials on a contractual basis.  He is the author of over 40 books, among them three novels ( 2 written in Hanoi, and another in Saigon) , and in September 1964 [1954] he became a press office of the Minister of Information which brought  hom in contact with many important people in both  the literary as the political scene.

Not found in OCLC 

-----------------------------------

APPPENDIX 

Ngày 17 tháng 7 năm 2014 Thephong by Thephong, The writer, the work and the life autobiography par THEPHONG [i.e, DO ... 


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----------------          Thephong by Thephong, The writer, the                                         work and the life autobiography
                               THE PHONG [i.e. DO MANH TUONG]
    Image                                                Edité par Dai Nam Van Hien, Saigon 1972

                                                                                                                                           Prix EURO  615, 61
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poems from a painter :abdul latiff . singapore / TENGGARA 5

TENGGARA 5 - Dep.of English.
Univ, of Malaya-  Malaysia


                    Abdul Latiff

                    POEMS FROM A PAINTER *

                                                           Translated  by the author

---
*  A selection of sketches and others poems  by Abdul Latiff appeared in TENGGARA 2
    ( Old No.  Vol.2. No.1, April 1968.


                                           a curved line

                                 a curved line
                                 scratches the curious sky
                                 i shall be loose a dragon
                                 to resign there

                                 let the moon sleep
                                 let the sun drop
                                 never lose heart , saudara

                                 scratch your name
                                 on the curved line
                                 bare youre breast
                                 on the eminous sky


                                           you will never understand

                                 you will never understand
                                 dawn rising
                                 between legs of buffaloes
                                 cold and stunted
                                 dark water of ricefields
                                 reflected in my ancestors' eyes
                                 for centuries

                                 you will never understand
                                 the shadow of a dream
                                 leaning against the steps of a hut
                                 the hope lost
                                 on the lips of the sky

                                 you will never understand
                                 the sweet and the mud
                                 that wet the sickles
                                 and spades
                                 among the long bitter lalang

                                   
                                          my blood

                                 at night
                                 fear-ridden :

                                 my boold climbs
                                 step by step
                                 screaming, forcing its lumps through
                                 the rose thorns
                                 the owl, spitting out
                                 and falls

                                 my blood dreams of a time
                                 a time without danger and flight
                                 my blood yearns for a world
                                 a world without mist and fences


                                           Crete

                                your white houses
                                your black eyes
                                drought screams
                                burning
                                land of crete

                                donkeys crawl wearily
                                olives hang withered

                                your face
                                is still furrowed
                                by screams of centuries
                                your houses are still hot
                                from split blood

                                 arise !
                                 the waters of iraklion are salt
                                 your black eyes
                                 are still weighing hope


                                            beneath the ink

                                 i received
                                 a letter
                                 without address
                                 i received
                                 a letter
                                 without words
                                 from its breast
                                 sprang
                                 a wolf
                                 belly ripped
                                 eyes blinded
                                 blood flowing
                                 from its leg
                                 so long
                                 tortured
                                 beneath words
                                 beneath ink


                                            i paint the moon

                                   night has yielded
                                   i paint the moon
                                   from a frop of wax
                                   hick and cold
                                   and red

                                   i know
                                   the jungle bounds will be mute
                                   the sea winds will stiffen

                                   i know
                                   the jungle bounds will be mute
                                   the sea winds will stiffen

                                   but here
                                   a lover demands witness
                                   and day always begins


                                            sail away

                                   this heart keeps on singing
                                   these eyes keep on observing
                                   this blood keep on flowing
                                   sail away
                                        my heart
                                             my eyes
                                                 my blood
                                                     far away  ... far away
                                   and send word
                                   when you land


                                          fly off

                                   i receive news
                                   without  words
                                   i receive flowers
                                   without colours
                                   i receive her
                                   without love

                                   fly off
                                   fly back into the air
                                   and turn to ashes


                                         abdul latiff

                        (TENGGARA  5 -   p. 55- 59)

The CIA's Favorite Novel - Christian Caryl / The National Interest

THE NATIONAL INTEREST
JUNE 25, 2014


                                     the CIA's favorite novel 
                                                 by Christian Caryl

                                                            Boris Pasternak

Why the CIA helped sneak Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago into the Soviet Union -- and how the censor ultimately won.

CHRISTIAN CARYL
June 25, 2014

Peter Finn and Petro Couvée, The Zhivago Affair, The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbiden Book ( New York: Pantheon Books, 2014, 369 pp., 826. 95

WE LIKE to think ourselves as creatures of causality.  We cling to the belief that our choices will have predictable effects on the course of our lives.  But that's somewhat that illusory.  And the illusion is even more pronounced in dictatorship, where the powers that be have then own views about the vagaries of individual fate.

When Boris Pasternak handed the manuscript of his novel Doctor Zhivago to the representatives of an Italian publisher in the spring of 1956, he almost certainly didn't envision the chain of events that this simple act would set in motion.  He wasn't planning on the book becoming a global literary sensation.  He probably didn't suspect that he would prompt an elaborate covert action ny the Central Intelligence Agency, whose opeartions saw his novel as the perfect opportunity for a cultural drone strike, exposing for all the world to see the Soviet Communist Party's  prodigious contempt for genuine creativity.

There was, however, one thing that Pasternak foresaw quite accurately the storm that was about to break.  His decision to have the book published overseas, by passing the party's entrenched mechanisms of artistic control, was bound to trigger a vicious reaction from the Soviet leardship.  He had seen enough to know.  Born in 1890, he had weathered revolution, civil war and Stalin's terrors relatively unscatted  --  but in this respect he was an extraordinary exception.  Already established in the 1920's as one of the great Russian poets of his generation he had watched as his most illustrious contemporaries were goaded into suicide ( Vladimir Maiakovsky and Marina Tsvetaeva),  sent to die in the gulag ( Osip Mandelstam), or forced to endure public humiliation and the killing or improsonment of their lived ones.  ( Anna Akhamatova.)

Peter Finn and Petra Couvée, the authors of this remarkable biography of Pasternak's  novel and the global scandal it spwaned, deftly illuminate this background.  As they explain, Pasternak's former next  --  door neighboor, the novelist Boris Pilynak, " was executed with a single bullet to the back of the head in April 1938, " Isaak Babel, the great chronicler of Jewish life in the Black Sea city of Odessa ( from which both of Pasternak's parents hailed), met the same end two years later. Finn and Couvée put the number of Soviet writers who were either executed or died in labor camp for various alleged infractions after 1917 at nearly 1, 500.

 I'm not sure when this precise figure comes from, but surely it's on the low side, considering the vast reach of the scythe that out down marry of the leading intellectuals among the USSR's various ehnich groups in the 1980's and 1940's  ( Much depends, I guess, on how the Soviet regime defined the word" writers.") So Pasternak can hardly be acuused of hysteris when he predicted the worst.  On that Sunday morning in May, as Pasternak took his leave from Sergis D'Angelo the visiting Italian Communist whom he had just entrusted with the manuscript, he said, " You are hereby invited to my execution."

It didn't quite come to that --  partly because the immense publicity stirred up by the affair around the book made it virtually impossible for the Politburo to have Pasternak packed off to the uranium mines.  In that respect, for all of her self-professed ignorance of political intrigue, Dr Zhivago's author showed a shrewd sense of timing.  The URSS in the spring of 1956 was still a Communist dictatorship, but it was'nt the same as it had been, say, in 1949, when Stalin's henchman Andrei Zhdanov launched a vicious public campaign against Akhamatova ( famously dubbed
 " half whore, half nun" by Zhdanov) and the satirist Michail Zoschenko, Akhamatova's son Lev Gumilar, whose father had been shot by the Bolcheviks for allegedly counterrevolutionary activities, was dispatched to the camps  --  for the second time. 

Stalin died in 1953.  His successors embarked on a cautious political opening that came to be known, somewhat optimistically, as the " thaw." Millions of prisonners returned home from the camps.  And in February 1956, just a few months before D'Angelo's visit,  Nikita Krushchev had taken matters one dramatic step further by dennouncing Stalin's " cult of personality" to a closed audience of top ranking Communist Party officials.  The party faithfull were stunned by Krushchev's tales of his predecessor's viviousness and caprices : served members of the audience had heart attacks.  For many Soviet citizens, of course, this " news" about Stalin wasn't news at all .  For them, this tentative excorcism of the dictator's ghost prompted a collective sigh of relief. []

    CHRISTINE KARYL

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poems by edwin thumboo + robert yeo cheng chuan ( singapore ) - TENGGARA 5

TENGGARA 5 - Dept. of English -
 Univ. of Malaya/ Kuala Lumpur-
 Malaysia 


                                                  Edwin Thumboo

                                                       Edwin Thumboo


                                                 NEW POEMS


              Colour

These days are taut with colour,  disbelief
Uncertain of its sun, the air
Blooms in misshapen brown.
My trees turn green without relief:
Soft and black, your hair
Is now the colour of the town.

For in the town they talk of sin,
Cry deep into the night,
Twist the legend, twist your arm,
Your hair, the colour of my skin,
Prejudice lies tight
Beneath the surface of a modern calm.

The evening rides upon a pin
Of light, congeals disastrously,
Will twisting symbols so awry
Know simple feelings deep within
Or learn that language painfully
Engendered in the lover's eye ?

                   
           An Ordinary Man

Mr. Quick would have lived almost happily
Had not the powers that be
Disturbed the peace
Disturbed his orchid nursery,
The arrangements of his life,
Even his researches into Buddhist history.

He kept regular house,
Tolerated nothing disorderly,
His children, he noted with proper pride
Had his habits, his regularity,
His fastifious determination,
But quite by chance had developed their mother's patience
They benefited from his attention, were brought up by hand.
Naturally the children respected his hand in all matters.

Out of the blue Malayan sky,
Out of that blessed place,
Out of some obscure administrative slip
He was transfered to the Federal Capital
The Head Office was bad,
Its work uncertain, routine irregular,
The contact with inconstant men most painful,
Bahasa Kebangsaan proved only too real,
The peons no longer offered to draft his letters
(or run his errands)
And the instruction on 'Malay Without Tears'  
In thirty easy lessons, was in Malay
Confirming his worst fear
One bad to sink or swim, he thought, then
Sank into the language and fell silent.

To top it all his wife
Undid her patient suffering,
Learnt mahjong, permed her hair,
Painted her nails, put on airs
After her face was lifted, brows plucked,
Her double chin tucked in, and  she'd
Taught her hip the secrets of the cheongsam.
But Mr Quick at his age,
Laid low in spirit and body,
Anxiously the energetic avoiding
Could not benefit from her change .

He quickly thought of something else that gave security,
His children, the joy of his heart and hand
But the children too were strange
His sons kept their hair,
And the girls bought wigs,

And so Mr. Quick  sank, gradually
Without fuss, without funeral
Finding his own aesthetic,
Dreaming of sky-scrapers, monsters
Snarling in the traffic, across the fly-over
Near the Mosque, the Railway Station,
The new model women in his house,
Hairy children
Mr. Quick sighed enlessly for his orchids
And the orderly house.

Mr. Quick is an ordinary man,
Slightly bald but not threatened by virility
Or glandular disturbances.
Perhaps Mr. Quick has arrived among us.

    EDWIN THUMBOO



                            Robert Yeo Cheng Chuan


                      In a Temple

To entertain  profanity
Apart, in a pipalled sanctuary,
Headbowld, feetbare, the incense strong
The sing-song chants that seem so long,
See suddenly the Lord Buddha
Smoke chandu on a saffron sofa,
In the mind's law, the heart's regret
We cannot cage within a net
Divinity, though saints may weave
The water must slide through, as Eve
From Adam did, when Satan teased.
The impure streams of Eden hissed.

Please enter on bare feet  -- but the mind
Is not a temple brow can bind
Or cell enclose.  We may keep free
From mud or sand, that eyes may see
The carpet neat, limbs feel bow smooth
The floor, and regulate the truth
To suit all faculties of flesh.
We may but we can't the mind enmesh
We can resolve to sit no more
Or see no more, if we know where
We shall nest go.  We simply close our eyes,
But the mind  -- we cannot close his eyes.

     ROBERT YEO CHENG CHUAN

                                                                       ( TENGGARA  5 -   p. . 34- 37 )