This paper provides a reading of the translation of a single text in Rotinese ritual language. I have chosen this text for a variety of reasons, but, in particular, because it offers a glimpse of the world created through the cultural imagination of the Rotinese. The underlying assumptions, conventional expressions, and complex philosophy of life that give coherence to this poetic world cannot all be explicated in this paper. My intention is simply to examine the text selectively at various levels from its metaphysical allegory to the minutiae of the formulae embodied in it. As such, this reading may provide something of an introduction to the possibilities of this form of poetry.

Introduction to the historical text

In 1911 the renowned Dutch linguist, J.C.G. Jonker, published the text of a long Rotinese ritual chant. He added this single chant to his collection of Rotinese texts as an ‘example of poetic style’ which he recognised was characterised by ‘sustained parallelism’. But instead of translating the chant, which he implied was ‘obscure’, he merely provided a series of notes to it with a translation of the ordinary language paraphrase that accompanied the text (Jonker 1911:97–102, 130–135). In 1913 Jonker published another collection of texts in a variety of Rotinese dialects and, in 1915, his massive Rotinese grammar, but he never again gave further consideration to the chant, and so it has remained the only untranslated portion of his vast corpus of Rotinese material.