Poetry
Pujangga Tidak Bernama
Not translated into English
Zurinah Hassan · 1994
Synopsis
Fifty-six poems in which the poet lets her emotions speak and addresses the difficulties and questions of her time. Several bear the name of a place in Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Pulau Pangkor or Taiping; others take up figures from legend, Hang Tuah or Mahsuri, and one takes the form of a letter from Tun Teja to Hang Tuah, in which a woman of legend speaks again. The city, domestic life and the identity of the country recur from poem to poem.
Context
The collection appeared in 1994 from the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, the national institute of language and literature, which reprinted it in 2016 in seventy-eight pages and presents it as a selection of her best poems. Twenty years earlier, its author had published a first collection, Sesayup Jalan, from the press of the university where she was studying. A university study reads in her poems on Tun Teja and the other heroines a feminist rereading of Malay history; the publisher notes the choice of words and a tone it calls poetic and harmonious.
Who it is for
A short collection in Malay, which exists neither in French nor in English; the poems can be read separately.
Prizes and reception
Reissued in 2016 in a new printing, shortly after the highest literary distinction awarded to its author.
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