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Number 1 February 2018
HUMANIORA
VOLUME 30
Cyclicity of Second-hand-ness: The Language and Translaon
of Afrizal Malna’s “Toko Bekas Bahasa A dan B”
Zita Reyninta Sari
University of Auckland, New Zealand
Email: zitareynintasari@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
Penned by the Indonesian poet, Afrizal Malna, “Toko Bekas Bahasa A dan B” is a poem with the prominent
theme of second-hand-ness. This paper examines the use of language in Malna’s poem, along with its co-
relation with its English translation by Gracia Asri, using translation theory from Marilyn Gaddis Rose
and Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory on language and speech. Ultimately, this research found the presence
of two cyclical relationships (cyclicities) in the following forms: (1) the cyclicity of language in the form
of the co-dependent relationship between “problem” and “language”, made apparent by the non-normative
translation of the poem, and (2) the cyclicity of language “birth” performed by characters A and B. These
two cyclicities are constantly renewing themselves inside the scope of the poem.
Keywords: Afrizal Malna; cyclicity; Indonesian poetry; language; translation study
INTRODUCTION
In 1955, Maurice Blanchot proposed an argument that
poetry is a kind of eternal renewal of itself. “The poem
is a beginning [and] always speaks anew and is always
starting over,” (Blanchot, 1989: 33). He saw that
poetry speaks for itself, starts itself, and eventually
completes itself in what sounds like a cyclical process
of rejuvenation. A poet, meanwhile, is merely an agent
involved inside the poetry’s cyclical existence.
This vision of the cycle of starting over
is what the poet Afrizal Malna operates in,
particularly in his poem “Toko Bekas Bahasa A
dan B” (included in his 2013 collection, Museum
Penghancur Dokumen). Malna’s poetic style, which
consists of seemingly disjointed images and ideas
wrapped inside deceivingly simple phrases, has
earned itself a kind of stylistic “movement”, dubbed
“afrizalian”. Malna noted in an interview that this
term was rst coined by Universitas Gadjah Mada’s
professor Faruk HT, and the term was quickly used
to categorize other poetry with similar stylistic
aspects to Malna’s (Aan, 2016). “Afrizalian”
style is known for its seemingly simple writing,
often putting everyday objects, especially those
which in a glance are the most mundane—from
excrement-lled used diapers to leaky buckets to
empty Coca-Cola cans—in the spotlight. Under a
closer inspection, however, these objects actually
speak for their relationships with and between the
body and the self.
Tia Setiadi oered insight on how Malna’s
objects “actively dene human beings” in his poetry.
She pointed out the overt symmetrical relationships
between the objects through their constant association
and disassociation with their meanings (Setiadi, 2010).
Meanwhile, Andy Fuller, Malna’s English translator
and personal friend, underlined Malna’s exploration
of urban surroundings in his poetry, which includes
“[playing] one sentence o against another” and his
“engagement with language games” (Fuller, 2013: 9).
Fuller argued that this is Malna’s way of reecting
his “doubt in [the Indonesian language]” and his
“fragmentary self”. While Setiadi and Fuller set their
doi.org/102216/jh.v29i3.27389 jurnal.ugm.ac.id/jurnal-humaniora
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Humaniora, Vol. 30, Number 1 February 2018
focus on Malna’s use of the objects depicted in his
poetry as a way for the body to communicate itself, I
choose to take an alternative route for this paper. The
objects depicted in “Toko Bekas Bahasa A dan B” are
themselves interesting to discuss, but I will choose to
instead treat Malna’s poetic language as an object of
itself; particularly, as a means to communicate various
cyclicities.
The discussion of language in Malna’s poem
does not merely involve its original Indonesian form,
but also its English translation. The translation of
“Toko Bekas Bahasa A dan B” that I use in this paper
is by the poet Gracia Asri, as was published in an
Indian poetry journal, Kritya (2013). I specically
chose Asri’s translation because of its striking non-
normativity, shown in its spelling, grammar, and
sentence structure. This non-normativity will be
relevant to my critical analysis in this paper.
Since “Toko Bekas Bahasa A dan B” is a
relatively long poem, I will only include the parts
that are relevant:
Toko Bekas Bahasa A dan B
Toko barang bekas A dan B menyimpan banyak
bahasa bekas A dan B. Mimpi bekas, kesedihan
bekas, musim panas bekas, semua agak heran
tentang bahasa A dan B. Sedikit heran perlahan-
lahan, mulai berjalan agak dan bertambah
heran, dan mulai berlari menjadi sangat heran,
seperti ledakan lain dalam sunyi sebelumnya:
kenapa manusia menciptakan bahasa antar
manusia. Setiap hari mereka bicara antar
manusia dengan bahasa berbeda-beda. Apa
saja yang mereka bicarakan antar manusia,
dari apa saja yang mereka kisahkan antara A
dan B. Apa saja yang mereka selesaikan dari
persoalan apa saja A atau B. Apakah persoalan
adalah bahasa mereka, dari apakah bahasa
mereka adalah persoalan. A dan B saling
menatap: adakah manusia yang tidak pernah
menciptakan bahasa? Bisu dari persepsi dan
pisau-pisau pemotong dokumen bekas.
Kipas angin bekas dalam toko barang bekas
A dan B, tidak bisa menggerakkan udara
menjadi angin dari pikiran-pikiran. Tidak
berdaya memberikan kesejukan ke dalam
ruang percakapan. Udara bekas, tubuh bekas,
manusia bekas. Membuat bahasa saling
bergesekan antara kata tetapi, maka, mungkin,
dan apabila. Pertemuan makan malam antara
sebab dan akibat. Perpisahan antara ya dan
tidak di sebuah lipatan selimut bekas. Kipas
angin rusak dan kipas angin bekas. Keduanya
tak tahu rusak karena bekas, dari bekas karena
rusak. Atau rusak dan bekas karena gesekan
debu-debu bahasa.
(strophe 1–2)
[…]
The English translation by Gracia Asri is as
follows:
Second hand language store A and B
The second tongues language store A and B
has many second tongue languages of A and
B. Second hand dream, second hand sadness,
second hand summer, everybody is wondering
about language A and B. A little bit curious,
slowly, start to walk and getting more curious,
and starting to run, become really curious,
like another explosion in the silence before:
why human creates language between human.
Everyday they talk between human, from
anything that they told between A and B.
Anything that they nished from any problem
of A or B. Is a problem a language? A and B are
staring at each other: is there any human that
never create language? Mute from perception
and knives to cut second-hand document.
Second-hand fan in the second-hand store A
and B, cannot move the air to be wind from
minds. Powerless to cool the conversation
room. Second hand air, second hand body,
second hand human, make language, friction
between language, between words, but, so,
maybe and if. Dinner between cause and
consequence goodbye between yes and no
in the fold of second-hand blanket. Broken
fan and second-hand fan. Both did not know
broken for used or used for broken or broken
and used because of the friction of language
dust.
(strophe 1–2)
Before beginning the discussion, I would like
to note that the poem is in a prosaic form. It lacks
traditional poetic qualities such as lines and xed
stanzas. Instead, the poem is written in paragraphs
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Zita Reyninta Sari – Cyclicity of Second-hand-ness in Afrizal Malna’s Poem
with highly stylized sentences. For the purposes of this
paper, I therefore choose to refer to the “sentences” in
the poem as “verses” and “paragraphs” as “strophes”.
Whenever I refer to a particular verse, I will put it
as “verse [order of sentences] of strophe [order of
strophe]”. For example, “verse 7 of strophe 1” will
refer to the seventh sentence on the rst paragraph.
Although the poem gives the impression that it
was set in a physical second-hand shop, the rst objects
that are introduced to the reader are abstract concepts,
like “dreams”, “sadness”, and “summer”. It is not
until the last of the rst strophe that the poem starts
to introduce physical objects, like “document” and
“fan”. The way that the poem opens with abstractness
might actually foreshadow the predominant abstract
characteristics of the entire poem.
The poem’s main theme is the adjective “bekas”,
an abstract quality. This quality is attributed to objects
and concepts featured in the entire poem, by default
presenting them as “used”/”second-hand”/”bekas”.
To say that something is “second-hand” is to say that
something used to be something else. Based on this
notion, we can argue that the poem itself is second-
hand, because it used to be something else: a concept
developed in Malna’s mind, perhaps, as an example.
For English readers, the translated poem that you read
can also be seen as a second-hand object, since it used
to be a poem in Indonesian.
English readers might also notice the numerous
discrepancies between the poem’s Indonesian version
and Gracia Asri’s English translation. Asri used non-
normative grammar and even did not translate some
verses originally included in Malna’s version. As I
have pointed out earlier, these incongruities in the
translation will be an essential aspect discussed in
the second section of this paper, in relation to the
poem’s cyclicity.
Based on the cyclical characteristics found
in the theme, language, and the translation of the
poem, the research objectives of this paper can be
categorized as follows:
•
Discover and analyze examples of cyclicities
in relation to second-hand-ness in the poem’s
original version, translated version, and within
the relationship between the two;
• Examine the cyclical economy occurring inside
the poem through the language it uses; and
• Analyze how the cyclicities perform in language
and as language.
My reading of this poem is mainly based on
Blanchot’s argument of the cyclical characteristics of
poetry that I mentioned in the beginning of this paper,
but with relation to the quality of second-hand-ness.
The analysis also utilizes approaches from applied
linguistics theory, translation theory, and philosophy.
THE CYCLICITY OF TRANSLATION: WHEN
“PROBLEM” MEETS “LANGUAGE”
The interpretation of the term “second-hand” or
“bekas” that is used repeatedly in “Toko Bekas Bahasa
A dan B” is intriguing in both Indonesian and English.
“Toko bekas bahasa” can either refer to “the shop that
sells second-hand language” or “the store that used
to be language.” The second part of the title, “bekas
bahasa A and B”, is also ambiguous. It can either be
read as “A and B’s second-hand language” or “(the
store that) used to be A’s and B’s language”.
Although the Indonesian word “bekas” has
various English translations, including “used”,
“former”, or “hand-me-down”, the word “second-
hand” is the only translation of “bekas” that leads to the
notion of cyclicity. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate®
Dictionary denes the word “cyclicity” (also called
“cyclicality”) as “the quality or state of being cyclic”
(Merriam-Webster’s Online, 2016). In this paper, the
word is used to refer to the cyclical characteristics
found inside the poem and between the poem and its
translation and their connection to the characteristic
of “second-hand-ness.”
Calling a translated text “second-hand” might
seem derogatory at rst. As Mona Baker (1993) stated,
the act of translating is often viewed as a “second-rate
activity”. Consequentially, translated texts can be seen
as a “distorted version” of its original, and sometimes
a translation is seen as producing “second-hand
texts” (Baker, 1993: 233). Baker critically contests
the term “second-hand” for translation because she
sees translation as an alternative means of recording
“genuine communicative events” that is “neither
superior nor inferior” to other kinds of communication
(Baker, 1993: 234).
It is likely that Baker’s argument alluded to
the notion in Ernst-August Gutt’s book, Translation
and Relevance: Cognition and Context (1991), which
suggested that translation is a form of “secondary
communication” that can be placed inside the boundary
of “relevance theory”. Linguist Kevin Smith explained
that relevance theory distinguishes descriptive from
interpretive uses of language. Descriptive use denotes
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Humaniora, Vol. 30, Number 1 February 2018
the act of describing something that accurately
represents reality (Smith, 2002). For example, if
speaker A describes an apple to speaker B, speaker
A will be faithful to the shape, color, and every
characteristic of the apple’s reality. Interpretive use,
meanwhile, tries to be more faithful to the meaning
of the source itself; it interprets, not merely describes
(Smith, 2002). This denition ts with the act of
translating, because according to Smith (2002: 108),
translations “must retain all the communicative
clues of the original. […] Their value lies not in
their intrinsic form, but in their communicative
function. Due to the structural dierences between
languages, it is not possible to reproduce the linguistic
properties of one language in another.” Based on these
characteristics, Smith seemed to agree with Gutt that
translation should be placed under the term “secondary
communication”, because it is an act of processing the
original utterance/text to be faithful to the meaning
of the source as opposed to an exact imitation of the
source in a dierent language.
Keeping Gutt and Smith’s theories in mind,
I choose in this paper to call translation “second-
hand”. To be clear, my choice is not to degrade or
belittle translation, or to put it in a so-called “inferior”
position, as Baker argued against. Instead, I equated
translation with the characteristic of “second-hand”
that is closer to its denition in Indonesian, “bekas”. As
I have stated previously, “bekas” is a direct translation
for “second-hand”, but it can also be translated into
“used” or “former”. Thus, if I call a translated text
“second-hand”, it is because it is “bekas”/”used” to
be in another language; namely, its “rst-hand” form.
As translator Marilyn Gaddis Rose posited, the
process of translating for a translator is as follows:
“[first], we comprehend the source material in
language 1; second, we transfer our comprehension to
language 2; and third, we express our comprehension
in generally comparable target-language material”
(Rose, 1991: 5). The process of comprehension of
the source material can be seen as the “rst-hand”
form, while the transfer of comprehension from
language 1 to language 2 is the process of producing
the comparable target-language material, or in this
case, its “second-hand” form. This idea is reinforced
by Rose’s description of what occurs after transferring
the source material from one language to another:
After forming an expression of the material in
the target language, translators do not report
reliving the experience of transfer when
returning to it after some lapse of time. Once
the transfer is made, the translator is severed
from the original, and the process is irreversible
(Rose 1991: 9).
The “irreversible process” that Rose refers to
might also speaks to the “second-hand” quality of the
result of the translation, which cannot and will not
be able to transform and return back into its “rst-
hand” form. What it turns into, one might argue, is a
new form of “rst-hand”. Indeed, the text has become
“second-hand” after translation. But from another
perspective, this second-hand text can be an entirely
new “rst-hand” experience, not only for the audience
the translators plan to reach, but also for the translators
themselves. This rejuvenation from second-hand to a
“new” form of rst-hand is how I view the economy
of translation.
My view on rejuvenation in translation reects
philosopher Benjamin McMyler’s view on second-
hand knowledge. McMyler (2011: 74) argues that
“knowledge acquired by testimony is second-hand in
the sense that another person (the speaker) is partially
epistemically responsible for the audience’s belief”
(emphasis mine). Simply put, a piece of information/
knowledge will turn into a second-hand form of its
original after it is passed down from another source.
As a receiver of that knowledge, an individual (“the
audience”) must be “rationally responsive” in response
to the speaker’s trustworthiness; the receiver has to
“ingest” the information rst before “swallowing” it
(McMyler, 2011). This shows that second-hand-ness is
not of inferior quality, because it is a result of a process
of “ingestion”; namely, the intake part of thinking/
rationalizing. Then, if a language use (which includes
translation) is second-hand, as a “testimony” as well
as a result of “interpretation”, the loop of language
is innite. Every language including its use is both
“rst-hand” and “second-hand” inside the cyclical
economy of language “processing”.
Based on this theoretical stance, I conclude that
Mona Baker’s insistence on avoiding the term “second-
hand” for translation is not necessary. Especially in
the context of the poem “Toko Bahasa Bekas A dan
B”, translation being “second-hand” is not something
unacceptable. While the rst-hand experience of a text
might belong to the translator’s act of “processing”—
what Rose previously called “comprehend[ing] the
source material” and “transfer[ring] comprehension to
[the target language]” (1991)—the resulting second-
hand-ness of translation displays two signicant
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Zita Reyninta Sari – Cyclicity of Second-hand-ness in Afrizal Malna’s Poem
aspects that can be viewed in a more positive light
than negative in terms of poetic economy.
The rst signicant aspect as a result of
translation is forward-movement. I have argued that to
possess a second-hand quality means that something is
a production of a cyclical process. In Malna’s poem,
the “agents” involved in the cyclical process are A and
B. A and B’s role in this poem shows the aspect of
forward-movement. When the poem rst introduces
the adjective “second-hand”, the term is immediately
followed by the pairing of A and B. By doing so, the
poem hints at a sense of moving forward at least in the
following way: something “second-hand” used to be
“rst-hand” before it “moves forward” to be second-
hand. This is indirectly stated through the metaphorical
shift from A as the rst letter to B as the second letter.
In the order that is known to every human who has
learned the Latin alphabet, A represents the “rst”
while B represents the “second”. To include A and
then B is to imply that there is a forward-movement
from point “A” to point “B”. With this in mind, it can
be said that the second-hand quality in the context of
the poem does not indicate a setback; rather, it may
speak of progress.
The second aspect is the concept of rebirth.
To illustrate this point, it may be tting to include
this English idiom: “one person’s trash is another
person’s treasure.” The idiom indicates a situation
of repurposing “trash”—which in this context is not
meant to devalue but instead to describe the trash’s
“status” as essentially composed of second-hand
items—into something that other people can use and
benet from. I view this as an example of forward-
movement combined with the concept of rebirth. In
other words, from something that is undesirable to one
party the second-hand item progresses further in the
cycle of rejuvenation to eventually become something
desirable to another party; thus, it is “reborn”. Because
of the forward-movement from A to B—or rst-
hand to second-hand, in this case—the item acquires
regeneration and becomes “new” to their new owners.
Therefore, being second-hand is the objects’ new
“status”. This process of rebirth may also explain the
“irreversible process” that Rose proposes. Because of
that, this argument of the concept of rebirth can also
be used to characterize the transference from language
A to language B in a process of translation.
Although the forward-movement denotes
progress, it does not necessarily signify that language
B is better than language A, or vice versa. Rather, I
view language B as symbolizing a “new” form of
“treasure” out of something that is already “used”. In
other words, if a language has undergone a process
of translation, then it can be said that it has moved
forward to be reborn, and therefore can oer a brand
new and fresh perspective or experience that may not
be visible in the beginning. Hence, translation is not
merely a means of interpretative transfer, but also
serves to create something unprecedented from the
potential of its rst-hand form.
Malna himself, however, seems to be rather
unsure about the notion of translation and the chance
of renewal it oers. Many of Malna’s poems have
been translated into English, a language that he admits
he neither speaks nor understands (Malna, 2013). For
Malna, seeing his works translated into languages that
are foreign to him is like seeing his plants move into
an alien place. Malna’s view on translation denotes a
sense of detachment and a feeling of estrangement, as
if his works are “replanted” in a “foreign soil”, which
is to say, a foreign language. After seeing Fuller’s
translation of his works, Malna expresses his concern:
My poems have migrated into another
language—one I don’t understand. They
are in a dierent city and dierent language
medium. Maybe they also have a dierent
breath. I imagine them like a plant that I have
planted and that is now growing in another
person’s garden. […] A migration, a language
mutation that I can’t imagine (Malna, 2013b:
99, translated by Fuller).
Malna seems worried that his poetry becomes
re-located or even dis-located because of translation.
Perhaps, Malna would see Gracia Asri’s translation,
with its deviation from the source material, as a perfect
example of the “language mutation” he was concerned
about.
Contrary to Malna’s view of translation being
a kind of foreign relocation, philosopher Walter
Benjamin noted that the process of translation may
actually provide an opportunity for “the eternal life and
the perpetual renewal of [the] language” (Benjamin,
1968: 74). While his statement corresponds with that
of Malna, that translation is a “removal from one
language into another”, Benjamin also emphasized that
this removal is not without advantages, because “[t]
ranslation passes through continua of transformation,
not abstract areas of identity and similarity” (Benjamin,
1978: 325). His statement might be another way of
saying that in order to maintain the continuous cycle
of renewal, “absorptions” and “sacrices” cannot
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Humaniora, Vol. 30, Number 1 February 2018
be avoided, since they are part of the “continua of
transformation” necessary for the work to acquire
rebirth.
On one hand, a translation is obviously never
without its aws. Philologist Alton J. Becker (2000:
19) wrote: “Translation has not been a neutral,
painless act. It has been necessarily full of politics and
semi-intended errors of exuberance and deciency”.
Translation is never done to achieve a full delity to
the source language, and thus the so-called “language
mutation” that Malna worries about might always be
present.
On the other hand, the cycle of translation,
with its inescapable elements, might actually make
translation the symbolic embodiment of a “perfect”
economy. Rasula and McCaery (2001: 248) summed
it up nicely by saying that “[t]here is never something
‘lost’ in translation without something else being
found.” This is concurrent with my earlier argument
that translation can give birth to “treasure” out of
something that has been “used” through a cycle of
moving-forward and rebirth.
The cycle of moving-forward and rebirth,
or the perpetual renewal of translation, will always
be maintained through the relationship between the
source language and the target language. As Becker
(2000: 18) asserted, “Translation is not the end point
… Rather, it is a starting point, the beginning of
moving back, looking back, towards the source […].”
Such cyclicity that Becker describes, as well
as the discussion about the cyclical characteristics of
translation’s “second-hand-ness”, can be seen in verse
4–7 of strophe 1 in the poem “Toko Bekas Bahasa
A and B”, which reads: “Setiap hari mereka bicara
antar manusia dengan bahasa berbeda-beda. Apa
saja yang mereka bicarakan antar manusia, dari apa
saja yang mereka kisahkan antara A dan B. Apa saja
yang mereka selesaikan dari persoalan apa saja A
atau B. Apakah persoalan adalah bahasa mereka, dari
apakah bahasa mereka adalah persoalan.”
Asri’s English translation of these verses
did not correspond with the original. She omitted
several words in her translation and shortened the
poem’s original structure. If Malna’s verses were to
be translated to include every word, faithful to the
original contents that followed the rules of normative
grammar, the verses would read: “Every day they talk
among humans in dierent languages. Anything that
they talk about among humans, from anything that
they tell between A and B. Anything that they nish
from any problems A or B. Is problem their language,
or their language is a problem” (my translation).
Meanwhile, Asri’s translation reads: “Everyday they
talk between human, from anything that they told
between A and B. Anything that they nished from
any problem of A or B. Is a problem a language?” As a
result of the missing parts, Malna’s verse 7 of strophe
1 becomes Asri’s verse 6.
As the translator of the poem, Asri must have
faced diculty transferring Malna’s characteristic
“afrizalian” style into English. This might be the
reason why she chose not to translate verse 7 of
strophe 1 word-by-word. At a glance, her English
translation for some of the verses seems to be slightly
more “normative” than the way Malna originally
arranged it. Still, Asri included numerous deviations
from the original, as seen from verse 6 above. Other
examples can be seen in verse 3 of strophe 1, where
she used a compound sentence that did not conform
to the normative parallel grammatical pattern (“start
to walk and getting more curious, and starting to run,
become really curious”), and did not use a plural form
in the question/answer (“why human creates language
between human”). Nevertheless, it can be argued that
Asri’s non-normative translation is another way to
reiterate Malna’s non-normative “afrizalian” style,
albeit done through translation as opposed to poetry
writing. More importantly, Asri’s deviation from the
poem’s source language provides an example of the
“language problem” that the poetic persona in Malna’s
poem raises in verse 6. Previously, I pointed out that
in translation, as in other acts of language, language
dierences cannot be transferred equally. Thus
appears a question: does language oer a solution to
human communication, or is it the cause of problems
in communication? These are the subjects the poem
sets forth to consider. Malna’s poem performs those
subjects in itself through its complexities and the
depiction of second-hand-ness as a form of cyclicity.
But most of all, the subjects are especially outlined
and propagated in Asri’s translations.
The issue of “language versus problem” is
apparent in Malna’s verse 7. The verse is delivered as a
statement: “Apakah persoalan adalah bahasa mereka,
dari apakah bahasa mereka adalah persoalan”. The
Indonesian word “apakah” translates to “is/does/
what” as an interrogative word. This translation is in
the normative form and is the most commonly used.
If the translation of verse 7 used this normative rule,
it would read: “Is problem their language, from what
is their language a problem[?]” (my translation). On
the other hand, the word “apakah” may also have a
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Zita Reyninta Sari – Cyclicity of Second-hand-ness in Afrizal Malna’s Poem
meaning closer to the word “whether”, an indirect
enquiry connoting uncertainty. If “whether” were used
as the translation, the verse would read: “Whether
problem is their language, from what is their language
[a] problem.” Considering the fact that Malna’s poetic
persona does not use a question mark in this particular
verse, verse 7 seems to be more of a statement than
a question. With this in mind, the most suitable
translation for this verse would be the latter, using
“whether”.
Asri’s English version, meanwhile, oers
its own particularities. Asri excluded the mention
of “dierent languages between humans”. Instead,
she specied that the “anything” spoken “between
humans” is told between A and B. Most apparent
of all, Asri’s shortened verse 6 of “is a problem a
language?” features a question mark after the verse.
In doing so, she established the verse as a question,
not a statement.
The discrepancies between the Indonesian
and English versions are another suitable example
of Rasula and McCaery’s argument about the
economy of losing-and-gaining in translation. In the
case of Malna’s poem, the Indonesian version loses
the phrase “dierent languages” in verse 7, and gains
the embodiment of “talking in a dierent language”.
That embodiment is the poem’s English translation.
Thus, due to this “embodiment”, the cyclical
economy of verse 7 transcends its text and moves
into the intertextual plane. The cyclicity no longer
occurs merely among the words within the poem; it
now occurs between the poem’s Indonesian version
and its English translation. I have argued previously
that Malna’s original poem is an indirect creator of
its English translation. The English version obviously
would not exist without the Indonesian. In turn,
the English version “enriches” the interpretation
of the Indonesian one, especially with Asri’s word
choices and non-normativity. Eventually, both texts
complement the particularities of each other.
This complementarity can be best perceived
by juxtaposing Malna’s original verse 7 and Asri’s
verse 6. In Indonesian, verse 7 reads as a statement:
“Apakah persoalan adalah bahasa mereka, dari
apakah bahasa mereka adalah persoalan”, while its
English counterpart, which is placed in verse 6, reads
as a question: “is a problem a language?” Evidently,
the English version lacks the symmetrical quality that
the Indonesian version displays through the back-and-
forth relationship between the words “problem” and
“language”. Even so, Asri’s English version is able
to paraphrase the statement, adding a more succinct
interpretation but with the same meaning conveyed:
is language the problem, or is problem a language
itself? These intertextual questions may even reect
the statement/question in verse 6/7 and the point that
it addresses. Do the dierences between English
and Indonesian evoke the so-called “problem” in
understanding each other, or in other words, the
“discrepancies” at the heart of multilingualism? Or,
more importantly, do the “problems” in communication
make it necessary to invent language, or is it because
of “language” that such problems in communication
arose in the rst place?
Although those questions are clearly breaching
a much broader subject and will be impossible to be
covered in this paper alone, I propose that “yes” can
be the answer, at the very least in the context of the
poem discussed here. As long as there are dierent
languages, problems in communication will continue
to be created, and as long as there are problems in
communication, there will be language. Similarly,
as long as a language can be translated into another
language, gaps of meaning as well as enrichment will
always likely be present.
The argument about the mutual existence of
“problem” and “language” actually touches the next
discussion, particularly in how the two aspects form
a cyclical relationship depicted in another part of the
poem.
THE “BIRTH” AND REBIRTH OF LANGUAGE:
A PERPETUAL CYCLE
The cycle of language’s birth to which this section’s
subtitle refers specically concerns the aspect of
language’s cyclical “creation” within the poem’s
universe. This cyclicity is delivered through the
mutual action of A and B, and mirrors the previously
discussed back-and-forth relationship of problem and
language.
A and B are introduced early on in the poem
and featured prominently throughout it. Despite this,
the nature of “A” and “B” is never specied. From the
way the poem depicts them, A and B can be interpreted
as characters, names, languages, names of stores, or
any possible relevant thing. A question about A and
B is even proposed by the poetic persona themself
in verse 2 of strophe 1: “everybody is wondering
about language A and B.” Nevertheless, with this
statement, the poetic persona elucidates that A and
B have some kind of relation to language, either to
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Humaniora, Vol. 30, Number 1 February 2018
whom the language belongs, or as the name/label of
the language. It is also possible that A and B are both
of those things simultaneously, or even neither. To
decipher this, we need to rst analyze the rst verse
of the poem.
Verse 1 of strophe 1 suggests that “the second-
hand language of A and B” is synonymous with “A
and B’s second-hand language.” Verse 1 thus can
be interpreted as a statement that the second-hand
language used to belong to A and B. In this case, A
and B are seen as the owners of the language, at least
in a metaphorical sense.
Ideas about the ownership of language have
been raised by many applied linguistics researchers.
These researchers mostly agree that in the eld of
TESOL, the “ownership” of English lies in the hands
of the speakers, both native and non-native. For
instance, Lionel Wee (2000) argues that to be able to
speak a language is equal to acquiring ownership of
the language, because the speaker gains a “legitimate
control” over the language once s/he has fully
learned to speak it. This could explain why speaking
a language uently is sometimes called mastering a
language. It is as if the language is a property that
can be “mastered” once a speaker “conquers” it with
their tongue.
On a similar note as the notion that “the speaker
equals the master”, philosopher George Steiner
proposes that language does not and cannot belong
to an “outsider”. Steiner (2010: 185) writes that “[a]
n outsider can master a language as a rider masters
his mount; [but] rarely becomes as one with its
undened, subterranean motion”. As such, a language
is too complex to be owned by a non-native speaker,
because language encapsulates shared experience,
underlying feelings, memories, and reexes; it is as
deeply ingrained as nature. Although it diers from
Wee’s argument, Steiner’s statement still implies that
a speaker can own a language, as long as it is their
native language.
Contrary to Steiner and Wee, philosopher
Jacques Derrida (2000) boldly stated in an interview
with Evelyne Grossman that language is not owned
and can never owned. Derrida explains that language
does not let itself be appropriated or be possessed.
Because of this unattached characteristic, language
is highly desired, as many have attempted to enforce
ownership and appropriation of it. This leads to
Derrida’s argument that “even when one has only
a single mother tongue, when one is rooted in the
place of one’s birth and in one’s language, even
then language is not owned” because “[l]language
… does not let itself be possessed” (2000: 101). For
Derrida, no one will be able to “mount” that “beast”,
in Steiner’s sense, regardless of whether or not they
are an outsider. Language is what is the most proper,
and not anyone’s property.
With Derrida’s argument in mind, the language
depicted in Malna’s poem may not belong to A and B
after all. Rather, it can be argued that the ownership of
language attributed to them (as is implied by the use
of the preposition “of” in the “second-hand language
of A and B”) actually refers to A and B’s action of
creating language through a cyclical process, as I will
explain shortly.
This particular creation of the “language of A
and B” begins in verse 3 of strophe 1. This verse
indicates that the existence of language, at least
according to the poem’s poetic persona, starts with
curiosity in relation to the (still unmentioned) nature
of A and B: “A little bit curious, slowly, start to walk
and getting more curious, and starting to run, become
really curious, like another explosion in the silence
before: why human creates language between human”
(Asri’s translation).
The depiction of language in verse 3 is
paralleled by Derrida’s argument, in which he stated
that language is “desired” and would continue to be
desired. In the poem’s case, said desire takes the form
of the need to satisfy a “curiosity”. This is the desire
that sparks a cycle of actions that follows, which
gradually becomes more animated: “[…] slowly, start
to walk and getting more curious, and starting to run,
become really curious […]”. Additionally, the poem’s
verse is lacking in agency. There is no clear mention of
any particular character(s) who perform(s) the actions.
This lack of agency indicates that the ones who are
curious might be A and B themselves, considering the
preceding verse ends with their mention. Because of
this, A and B will be treated as pivotal elements in
this cyclical action.
A and B’s movement becomes more “animated”
as their curiosity rises. They start from a stationary
position, then they start to “slowly walk”, and then
they “run”. The apex of this development, both in
curiosity and motion, is the “explosion in the silence
before”. The explosion is followed by a colon (“:”),
which implies that the explosion produces or leaves
the following question/statement of why humans
create language in the rst place.
From there, it can be argued that verse 3 of
strophe 1, the verse that questions the creation of
25
Zita Reyninta Sari – Cyclicity of Second-hand-ness in Afrizal Malna’s Poem
language, actually describes the creation of language
itself. It is especially apparent in the mention of “like
another explosion in the silence before”. This is where
the cyclicity comes into play. The word “before”
signies that there was another explosion happening
prior to the cycle that is currently occurring. This
preceding “explosion” may actually be part of a
never-ending creation loop: what comes after creates
what came before it. This is a great example of the
never-ending cycle of language creation, in which the
created becomes the creator. Putting it in the form of
a diagram, the cyclical process in verse 3 strophe of
1 can be depicted as in Figure 1.
Figure 1.
The cyclical process of language A and B creation in
verse 3 of strophe 1 in the poem “Toko Bekas Bahasa
A dan B”
As the poem suggests and as the diagram
shows, A and B are the creators of language A and B. If
A and B are also the names of the languages depicted
in the poem, then it means that they are the second-
hand form of the “curiosity” that creates themselves.
When they express their curiosity about the creation
of language, they inevitably return to the rst circle in
which their curiosity incites the creation of language
in the rst place. Therefore verse 3 is another example
of a “whole” cycle, where the starting point loops back
to itself. A language produced by A and B returns to its
creators to be reborn into another form of language.
The kind of cyclical process of language
depicted in Figure 1 might be seen as a clear example
of Lacan’s argument. From a psychoanalytic point of
view, Lacan argues about the function of language
and speech. For Lacan (2006), the act of producing
language/speech always loops back to itself.
Specically, for him, “true speech already contains its
own response” (Lacan, 2006: 310). He points out that
the cyclical phenomenon of speech occurs beyond the
general schematization of communication theories,
i.e. “sender, receiver, and something that takes place in
between”, if the one who speaks to communicate hears
the sound of their own words. Thus, the sender will
always also be the receiver, looping back to themself;
while the response loops back to the speech (Lacan
1993). For Lacan, speech is a “gift” that “implies
a whole cycle of exchange” (Lacan, 1994; Moore,
2011).
Lacan’s argument interprets the exchange value
of the cyclicity of speech in terms of the transfer from
“rst-hand” (speech) to “second-hand” (the response
originated from the speech). In other words, the
response of the speech is the second-hand form of
the speech itself. This cycle is what occurs to A and
B’s question about language creation: the response
is wrapped inside the question. It is the economy of
creation where one cannot exist without the other.
CONCLUSION
The poem “Toko Bekas Bahasa A dan B” and its non-
normative English translation suggest that the quality
second-hand-ness evokes a cyclical economy where
what is second-hand naturally used to be rst-hand and
will eventually return to being second-hand as long
as the cycle of the item’s transference persists. Based
on this notion, I arrive at the conclusion that such a
perpetual cycle is recurring both in the poem’s use of
language and in its relationship with its translation.
In analyzing the co-relation between the
original poem and its translation, both in content
and in delivery, I nd two striking cyclicities: one,
cyclicity of “language and problem”; and two,
cyclicity of “language creation”. Translation will
inevitably incur a never-ending cycle of renewal that
loops back to itself. This is due to how every time a
work is translated into another language, there might
be elements that are lost, and in turn other elements
that are gained. This will be an enrichment of the
original work, ensuring its longevity. However, with
this perpetual rejuvenation comes the eternal dilemma
of “the chicken and egg” in the topic of “language”
and “problem”. This dilemma is especially apparent
from the dissimilarities between the Indonesian
version and its English translation.
Meanwhile, the content of the poem itself
oers its rendition of the birth of language in a
cyclical form. This cycle is catalyzed by the actions
of A and B, which for the purposes of this paper are
considered characters as well as the names of the
26
Humaniora, Vol. 30, Number 1 February 2018
language discussed in the poem. I propose that the
language of A and B in Malna’s poem incites its
own birth, thus exhibiting an example of a cycle of
never-ending creation. This leads to a conclusion that
the cyclicity of language birth depicted in Malna’s
poem is a “perfect” cycle akin to Lacan’s speech
theory that a “perfect” speech already contains its
own response. In other words, its ending is wrapped
up in its beginning—which, as Blanchot might say,
thoroughly speaks of poetry itself.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I would like to thank my academic supervisor,
Professor Lisa Samuels of the University of Auckland,
for her helpful commentaries about poetic cyclicities.
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