“Love needs no explanation, of course. There's nothing to explain. About love or longing. The thoughts that accompany our feelings. It's been there for a long time. Ever since it first came to say hello and then declared itself.

It's not something strange, not easily understood. It's like the togetherness we share today. Sit and chat with friends. Enjoying time and joking. Playing old songs, from The Beatles, Frank Sinatra, Matt Monro and Elvis Presley.

We're not too old to go back to those days. Revisiting the stories of the past. Talking about paintings from Sudjojono or Affandi to Dede Eri Supria and Lucia Hartini. Arguing who is greater; Chairil, Sapardi or Sutardji?

We put aside the issues of political depravity and the news of leadership succession that is not what the public expects. Let time resolve everything. Better to talk about climate change, which is sometimes cloudy and sometimes sunny. Or the heat that does not hesitate to burn your head until it reaches 37° while in other places heavy rains cause floods everywhere. We will never know, until the wind takes us back from the past.”

O Do Not Love Too Long http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1549/
In The Seven Woods (1904)
Context: Sweetheart, do not love too long:
I loved long and long,
And grew to be out of fashion
Like an old song.
All through the years of our youth
Neither could have known
Their own thought from the other's
We were so much at one.
But O, in a minute she changed--
O do not love too long,
Or you will grow out of fashion
Like an old song.

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (2000)

Source: Incredibly Alice

Translations, From the German

Source: The Meaning Of Life, II

The Sound of Settling
Transatlanticism (2003)

Glimpses of Bengal http://www.spiritualbee.com/tagore-book-of-letters/ (1921)

Source: Goodbye, Columbus (1959), Chapter 2
Context: We came back to the chairs now and then and sang hesitant, clever, nervous, gentle dithyrambs about how we were beginning to feel towards one another. Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them-at least I didn't; to phrase them was to invent them and own them. We whipped our strangeness and newness into a froth that resembled love, and we dared not play too long with it, talk too much of it, or it would flatten and fizzle away. So we moved back and forth from chairs to water, from talk to silence, and considering my unshakable edginess with Brenda, and the high walls of ego that rose, buttresses and all, between her and her knowledge of herself, we managed pretty well.

"Metaphors of a Magnifico"
Harmonium (1923)