Sergius Seeks Bacchus
By Norman Pasaribu and Tiffany Tsao
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About this ebook
The thirty-three poems in Norman Pasaribu's prize-winning debut display a thrilling diversity of style, length, and tone, and telescope out from individual experience to that of fellow members of the queer community, finding inspiration equally in the work of great Indonesian poets and the international literary canon, from Dante to Herta Müller.
Norman Pasaribu
Norman Erikson Pasaribu is a Toba Batak poet and translator. Their first poetry collection Sergius Mencari Bacchus won the first prize on the 2015 Jakarta Arts Council Poetry Manuscript Competition. Its English translation by Tiffany Tsao won a PEN Translates award and was published in the UK with Tilted Axis Press. Their collection of short stories Happy Stories, Mostly (tr. Tiffany Tsao) won the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses and was listed for the 2022 International Booker Prize, the 2023 National Translation Award for Prose, the 2023 Cercador Prize for Literature in Translation. Among their accolades are the inaugural Patricia Kailis International Writing Fellowship and Southeast Asia Literary Council’s Sastrawan Muda. They are Harvard University Asia Center’s 2023-2024 Artist in Residence.
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Sergius Seeks Bacchus - Norman Pasaribu
Sergius Seeks Bacchus
Title Page: Sergius Seeks Bacchus, by Norman Erikson Pasaribu. Translated by Tiffany Tsao. Published by Tilted Axis Press.Word definition: Langit-langit. In Indonesian, you repeat a word to pluralise it. But in colloquial speech, repetition can also be used to minimise a term, turning it into a toy or imitation: ‘kuda’ is a horse, ‘kuda-kudaan’ is a toy wooden horse. ‘Langit’ is the sky, the sight of a borderless world, heaven. ‘Langit-langit’ is the ceiling, the wall above, the fake sky. In this book, ‘Langit’ is the name of a future child of a male couple, the hint of liberation, the start of a new era. But it has to start from a leak in the ceiling, a car in an underground car park, a suffocating interiority, before taking a leap of faith to depart for the outside, to bask in the light of day.‘You are home now, outsider, for what that’s worth.’
Gregory Pardlo, Digest
‘Meanwhile, we lose our sense of wonder. The world is no longer mysterious.’
Jack Cohen, Major Philosophers of Jewish Prayer in the Twentieth Century
FOR LEO,
who too fell in love with footnote to howl
Erratum
What was he thinking here, picking this body
and this family, where being match-made
with your mother’s niece was possible,
where first-born sons always meant everything,
and here, falling in love with the boy
who sat beside him at school,
when all that lingered of first love was that first kiss
they shared when cutting PE,
and here, not long after his first book came out,
as his family sat cross-legged together and ate,
he told them it wouldn’t end with any girl,
much less the Toba or Karo kind,
and here as he stood by the side of the road
that night, all alone, cars passing him,
his father’s words hounding him,
Don’t ever come back, Banci,
and he wept under a streetlight, frightened
at the first drops of rain misting his hair,
and here when he realised something odd about the
text that was his life and hoped sometime soon
the Publisher would print an erratum
to restore the lost lines, wherein
he’d know he was everything and also nothing
was wrong with him, and he’d know
what lingered of first love
was that very first kiss, bestowed
back when his family sat cross-legged together
and ate, grateful because he had picked
this body and this family?
Love
When the rain pays a visit
and he’s sitting at home,
he climbs up the stairs and into this room
to make sure there are no leaks
between the ceiling and the sky.
He and the Tree
At high noon he sought forgiveness from the solitary tree
at the edge of the company parking lot, where it sheltered his car
from the sun. He sought forgiveness for his granddad, the palm oil
company’s founder, for the whole clan, really, who’d spent
generations taking a carpenter for god’s own son. The tree sobbed,
recalling suddenly his childhood friend who had been ripped
from the earth for being ‘too close to the foundation’.
From afar they used to exchange mischievous glances and winks
and daydream about growing up, when birds and butterflies would alight
on their branches and leaf buds to help them pass notes back and forth.
The tree regretted not telling his friend that he loved him.
If he were here, he would take him to a church. At the altar
they would be joined together before god, who had three branches
—like a tree—and their children would fill the lot, every
single square inch, so that someday everyone who passed
would think a forest had sprung up in the city’s heart.
The man hugged the tree and the tree hugged the man.
Sergius Seeks Bacchus
Snake-like, you shed your short-lived skin
and commence/continue your quest. Now the light from on high
passes through you. You’re luminous. Meanwhile, out west
in decrepit Rome sits Galerius, oblivious his end is nigh.
You seek your beloved—he appeared to you in your cell,
his body glowing silver as he