Afrizal Malna - Document Shredding Museum
Afrizal Malna
Document Shredding Museum
Translated from Indonesian by
Daniel Owen
$20.00
Bilingual Edition
208 pages
May 14, 2024
ISBN 978-1-954218-19-2
Distributed by Asterism (US) and Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
BIOS
AFRIZAL MALNA (b.1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia) is a poet, artist, and writer of short stories, novels, literary essays, and playscripts. His work has won a number of national and international literary honors, including the SEA Write Award and the Khatulistiwa Literary Award. His most recent books are the essay collection Performance Art dan Medan Pasca-Seni (Performance Art and the Post-Art Field) and the poetry collection Tiket Masuk Bioskop Autobiografi (Autobiography Cinema Ticket). He was a 2015 DAAD Artist-in-Residence (Berlin) and has performed at poetry festivals in Bali, Bremen, Maastricht, Hamburg, Kerala, and Yokohama. His work has been translated into Dutch, English, German, Japanese, and Portuguese. His books available in English translation are Document Shredding Museum, Morning Slanting to the Right, and Anxiety Myths.
DANIEL OWEN is a poet, translator, and editor. His translations from the Indonesian of Afrizal Malna’s Document Shredding Museum were chosen as the winner of Asymptote Journal's 2019 Close Approximations contest. He is the author of the poetry books Toot Sweet (United Artists), Restaurant Samsara (Furniture Press), and Celingak-Celinguk (Tan Kinira). Recent writing and translations have appeared in Tripwire, Two Lines, Circumference Magazine, and Harp & Altar. He edits and designs books and participates in many processes of the Ugly Duckling Presse editorial collective.
Afrizal Malna
Document Shredding Museum
Translated from Indonesian by
DANIEL OWEN
Indonesian poet Afrizal Malna’s Document Shredding Museum moves from intimate encounters between lovers and friends to mass environmental and semantic destruction, engaging with Javanese literary tradition and the archives of colonial and postcolonial violence.
Drawing on a wide array of modes and moods, and colored always by Malna’s characteristic complex of dark humor, curiosity, and insight into the iniquitous social conditions of the global present, Document Shredding Museum proposes a poetics of uncertainty and wonder as it aims to make porous the ossified social imagination encoded in dominant regimes of language usage. Since the mid-1980s Malna has been respected as an innovator in the Indonesian literary tradition, and his extensive work in performance and visual art has deeply informed his poetics. First published in 2013, these poems explore Indonesian and global histories by reflecting on the mythic in the everyday and the everyday in the mythic. Document Shredding Museum is the first of Malna’s books to be published in the United States.
“Voices echo and shred in intermittent inventions, the torn presences of the pressure of realities, implosive, exuberant, blank. Afrizal Malna and his translator Daniel Owen offer verbal charms and social shards, bringing Indonesian into a transforming dialog with the anti-conventional poetries of North America.” —Charles Bernstein
“Afrizal Malna—one of Indonesia's best contemporary poets—challenges the subtle potential for authoritarianism that haunts all language acts. Daniel Owen's excellent translation maintains the poetic sensitivity of the original.” —Sylvia Tiwon
'“Afrizal Malna’s refined, mature, and elusive lyric accumulates sentences rife with strange recursions and logical and metaphorical paradoxes. It sequences ‘poetic’—because spare—objects in order to at least try coming to terms with Indonesian history, both colonial and postcolonial: with the violence and the haze of it. … This intellectual poetry of the highest caliber … will certainly appeal to American readers of Michael Palmer, Michael Davidson, and Susan Howe. Daniel Owen, writing in an elegant, reserved English, has offered us a beautiful thing of clear obscurity, and that is already a great achievement.” —Eugene Ostashevsky
“Finally Indonesian poetry translated into English by a real poet. Daniel Owen pays as much attention to the poetry of Afrizal as he does to his translation, reimagining and bridging the tingles in the spine of the originals into his own version of Afrizalian anxieties and madness.” —Mikael Johani
Bilingual Edition
208 pages
May 14, 2024
ISBN 978-1-954218-19-2
Distributed by Small Press Distribution (US) and Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
