The Australian poet and translator Jennifer MacKenzie has held a lifelong fascination for Indonesia, having spent long periods in the country while working on her first volume of poems, Borobudur—an engagement with the histories and cultures of Java that was well received there when it was republished as Borobudur and Other Poems. Her new collection, Navigable Ink, continues with many of the same themes—the immanence of the artist in the material world, the centrality of nature, the intricate mechanisms of the passage of time. A poem from it, ‘Ganesha Lost to View’, engages with the work of the great Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer, whose novel Arus Balik MacKenzie is currently in the process of translating into English.
I spoke with MacKenzie about her engagement with Indonesian literature and art, and about what poems set amid the deep past of Java might have to say to the contemporary world.
You’ve described yourself in the past as ‘strangely at home, in a poetic sense, in Central Java’. How did that entanglement begin, and when did you realise it would become your life’s work?

• Tags: Indonesia, Issue 20, Jennifer MacKenzie, Rupert Arrowsmith