Toto Sudarto Bachtiar


Toto Sudarto Bachtiar
was an Indonesian-language poet and translator active from the 1950s to the 1970s. He published two volumes of poetry,
His better-known poems include Pahlawan Tak Dikenal, Gadis Peminta-minta, Ibukota Senja, Kemerdekaan, Ode I, Ode II, and Tentang Kemerdekaan.
In addition to writing poetry, Bachtiar translated Jean Paul Sartre, Anton Chekhov, Ernest Hemingway and Rabindranath Tagore, among others.
Bachtiar's poetry has been described as having "a haunting lyric grace", but it is notoriously difficult to understand. His verses do not correspond to syntactic units, he hardly uses any punctuation, and words often do not have a literal meaning. As A. Teeuw described it,