Hendri Yulius Wijaya’s poem “Trauma 4DX,” translated from Bahasa Indonesian by Edward Gunawan, viscerally brings together personal trauma with the dizzying pervasion of global capital in the form of the entertainment industry.

The use in the translation of italics for English loan words in the Bahasa Indonesian version—catch phrases, entertainment jargon, words for food and building spaces—points to the intrusion of globalized culture beyond the space of the silver screen, like the intrusive effects of trauma on the bodymind. The poem’s speaker is subjected to a full surround-sound experience. Gunawan skillfully, too, recreates an onomatopoeia in the poem that relates the scene to the experience of queerness.

Overall, the poem turns the lights up too bright, the sound up too high, leaving the speaker and reader in a scene as “scintillat[ing]” as it is sickening.

— Corine Tachtiris, Gabo Prize Special Judge (translator of Frieda Ekotto’s Don’t Whisper Too Much & Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella, and vice president of the American Literary Translators Association)