The tremors of genre in G.J. Resink’s poetry

Abstract

Born in Java, the Dutch Indonesian writer Gertrudes Johannes (Han) Resink published his first volume of poetry Op de breuklijn (On the Fault Line) in 1952. In this collection, which consists mainly of sonnets and Persian quatrains, Resink presents himself as an interstitial writer, occupying a precarious position between the Indonesian culture of his native country on the one hand, and the Dutch literary tradition he chose to embrace on the other. His subsequent volumes display a similar in-betweenness, simultaneously looking east and west. Whereas contemporary critics, in deference to the prescriptive rules of the western canon, took issue with his seemingly cavalier attitude towards generic conventions, the article demonstrates how Resink’s experiments are intimately linked to his anxieties as a postcolonial writer. The journey from sonnet, to eastern quatrain, to the so-called quintain of his final years, is interpreted as part of his lifelong search to define and articulate his own place in the periphery, from both a Dutch and an Indonesian point of view.

Keywords:

• Indonesia
• Dutch poetry
• sonnet
• Persian quatrain
• quintain
• formal experiments

Notes

1. All English translations from Dutch are my own.

2. In an interview, Resink commented on the complexities of the peripheral existence he led. It was peripheral from a Dutch point of view because he worked and lived 14,000 kilometres away, and peripheral from an Indonesian perspective because he wrote his poems in Dutch and not Indonesian (Resink 1987, 18).

3. Nieuwenhuys’s literary history first appeared in Dutch in 1972 under the title Oost-Indische Spiegel (East Indian Mirror). A partial English translation by Frans van Rosevelt, Mirror of the Indies, was published ten years later (Nieuwenhuys 1982). The English edition does not contain the paragraphs devoted to Resink’s work.

4. The Dutch word “halfheid” in the original means “indecisiveness” but the sonnet’s title also triggers the literal reading of “halfness’, in which case the word has the qualities of a neologism.

5. This discussion is based on Steyaert (2003).

6. Since Snoek does not list the sonnets in his article, it is impossible to know which three poems are responsible for the new tally.

7. The percentages are based on an analysis of the following works: the sonnets in Resink’s Cancer and Capricorn (1963), the first 72 sonnets in Perk’s Poems ([1882] 1999) and the first 50 sonnets in Kloos’s Poems (1894).

8. Resink’s constant punning in his quatrains may seem out of place in a genre associated with melancholic thoughts about the transience of life. In fact, it stays very close to the spirit of the original genre, which also relies heavily on homonymic wordplay. Because of its untranslatability, the wordplay in Khayyám’s Persian was sacrificed in FitzGerald’s English Rubáiyát. Naturally, it is also absent in the works of the western writers it inspired, resulting in an ahistorical dissociation between the Persian quatrain and linguistic playfulness (Warners 1947, 111).

9. A slightly expanded version of the obituary was incorporated as an epilogue in Peripheral and Ephemeral (Resink 2001, 227–234).

10. “Achterhoeker” means an inhabitant of the Achterhoek, a region in the eastern province of Guelders (Gelderland) in the Netherlands where Resink’s ancestors on his father’s side were born (Calis 1991, 722).

11. Resink uses the homonym “drift” in a similar way in the sonnet “Sunda Trench” (Resink 2001, 24), the name of the subduction zone with a length of over 3000 kilometres situated nearby the Malay Archipelago.

12. In his sonnet “June Tempest, Mataram, 2602”, Resink includes in his description of a tropical lightning storm references to a bandjir (l. 3), earthquakes (l. 14) and the volcano Merapi (l. 8) (Resink 2001, 37). The Japanese year 2602 in the title corresponds to 1942 CE.