Sergius Seeks Bacchus

BY Norman Erikson Pasaribu / TRanslated from indonesian BY Tiffany Tsao

Shortlisted, NSW Premier’s Translation Prize 2021

Winner, English PEN Translates Award

Sergius Seeks Bacchus is a heartbreaking and humorous rumination on what it means to be in the minority in terms of sexuality, ethnicity, and religion. Drawing on the poet’s life as an openly gay writer of Bataknese descent and Christian background, the collection furnishes readers with an alternative gospel, a book of bittersweet and tragicomic good news pieced together from encounters with ridicule, persecution, loneliness, and also happiness.

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.

Contributors’ details

Norman Erikson Pasaribu is a Toba Batak poet and writer. Their first poetry collection, Sergius Mencari Bacchus, won the first prize in the 2015 Jakarta Arts Council Poetry Manuscript Competition, and led them to win the 2017 Sastrawan Muda from the Southeast Asia Literary Council (Mastera). Their book of fiction, Happy Stories, Mostly (tr. Tiffany Tsao), gained international critical acclaim. It won the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses, and was listed for the 2022 International Booker Prize, the 2023 National Book Critics Circle's Barrios Book in Translation, the 2023 National Translation Award for Prose and the 2023 Cercador Prize for Literature in Translation. Norman was the inaugural recipient of the Patricia Kailis International Writing Fellowship, and was a Harvard University Asia Center's artist in residence for 2023–2024. They are a sixteenth-generation descendant of Siraja Bondar of the indigenous Toba Batak, North Sumatra.

Tiffany Tsao is a translator and novelist. Her translations of Indonesian literary work have been awarded the PEN Translation Prize and NSW Premier's Translation Prize. Her novel The Majesties was longlisted for the Ned Kelly Award. She has a Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley.

PRAISE

‘Timeless and yet utterly of the moment, spiritual but always grounded in reality, deeply sensual, but always aware of the transiency of connection.’ — Andrew McMillan

‘A wittily crafted, inquisitive and generous dreamscape. Here is a space where we are safe and invited to wonder, to thread together musings on the divine, our selves, our families and friends, to contemplate great sorrow and small joys, to see light and darkness and not be afraid to venture into either.’ — Nina Li Coomes

‘Sergius Seeks Bacchus provides a unique queer perspective on love, loneliness, persecution, society, and religion. In increasingly conservative Indonesia, Norman’s work is a significant contribution to wider public debates around culture, nationhood, and identity. It is a must read for international readers, especially those who are committed to promoting non-Western perspectives in queer literature.’ — Intan Paramaditha, LitHub

‘Though he writes in Indonesian, Pasaribu’s poetry collection Sergius Seeks Bacchus (translated by Tiffany Tsao) carries the inflections, songs, and stories of diaspora. His works offer the joys and isolations of queer life in a conservative landscape, a minority existence (less visible in the Javanese-dominated mainstream), and the influences of Christianity.’ — J.R. Ramakrishnan, Electric Literature

MORE INFORMATION

• Publication date: 21 March 2019

• Format: Demy paperback (216mm × 138mm)

• Extent: 96pp

• ISBNs: 9781911284239 (print) / 9781911284215 (ebook)

• Rights held: Commonwealth excluding ANZ