WHEN I heard about Datuk Rahman Shaari being given the National Laureate of Malaysia award, I rummaged through my memory and remembered that I first met him in June 1996 in Moscow.
It was during the international seminar on "Nation-building and the Literary/Cultural Process in Southeast Asia", organised by the Nusantara Society of the Lomonosov Moscow State University.
The seminar was attended by representatives from many countries in Southeast Asia, including a large delegation from the Federation of National Writers' Association (Gapena) headed by its first chairman, Tan Sri Ismail Hussein.
Others were poets Muhammad Haji Salleh, Siti Hawa Haji Salleh, Taufiq Ismail and Fadli Zon, critics Noriah Taslim, Rahmah Haji Bujang and Hamzah Hamdani and scholar Asmah Ahmad.
Others included critic Wiratmo Soekito and scholar Suryadi from Indonesia, poet Suratman Markasan from Singapore and linguist E. Constantino from the Philippines.
Rahman, then a lecturer at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, presented a paper on "The Form and Social Content of Contemporary Malay Poetry" that generated great interest.
The paper examined the features of modern Malay poetry (starting from the 1950s), mainly from the point of view of the correlation between forms and social content — in particular, the works of Datuk Dr Usman Awang, Datuk Baha Zain, Dr Muhammad Haji Salleh, Masuri, Kassim Ahmad, Dharmawijaya, A. Wahab Ali and Latiff Mohidin.
The next time I heard about Rahman was in 1999 when the world celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. Malaysia participated in the celebrations too.
I was not in Malaysia then, but my colleague Dr Eugeniya Kukushkina, who was teaching Russian at Universiti Malaya, informed me that deputy vice-chancellor Datuk Dr Hashim Yaacob had written a short play about Pushkin and that Rahman had played the part of the Russian poet with brilliance!
Having arrived in Kuala Lumpur in 2001 as a lecturer at Universiti Malaya, I had the opportunity to get to know Rahman better. It turned out that he is not only a wonderful literary critic but also a talented poet and reciter.
He generously shared his knowledge and skills with students.
One day, I went to a concert in Perdanasiswa and was amazed at how beautifully one of the students recited Sutung Umar R.S.'s poem, "Scatter the Flowers".
After the concert, I went up to the student and expressed my admiration.
The student modestly remarked that the credit belonged to his teacher, Rahman, who taught him to recite the poem in a particular way.
Rahman's poetry contains reflections on life, the fate of the people and their culture. The author expresses his point of view, and the reader can accept, agree or reject it.
Rahman was highly acclaimed for his work in 2007 when he received the Southeast Asian Writers Award (SEA Write Award).
Rahman is not alien to poetry lovers in Russia.
His poetry is mentioned in the Great Russian Encyclopedia (2004) and the recently published Lexicon of Malaysian Literature (2022).
His collections of poetry are kept at the Center for Oriental Literature in the Russian State Library, where everybody can read them.
He is concerned about the fate of Malay, the language of his poems.
At a symposium on the Malay language in May this year, he was honoured to recite his poem on the national language in the presence of the prime minister.
I would like to congratulate Rahman, who deserves to be the 15th National Laureate of Malaysia, and express confidence that he will continue to delight admirers with new, no less wonderful, poetry.
The writer, writing from Russia, is a former lecturer of Universiti Malaya