Toto Sudarto Bachtiar (12 October 1929, Cirebon – 9 October 2007, Bandung)[1] was an Indonesian-language poet and translator active from the 1950s to the 1970s. He published two volumes of poetry,
His better-known poems include Pahlawan Tak Dikenal (Unknown Heroes), Gadis Peminta-minta (The Begging Girl), Ibukota Senja (Twilight Capital), Kemerdekaan (Independence), Ode I, Ode II, and Tentang Kemerdekaan (About Independence).
In addition to writing poetry, Bachtiar translated Jean-Paul Sartre, Anton Chekhov, Ernest Hemingway and Rabindranath Tagore, among others.
Bachtiar's poetry has been described as having "a haunting lyric grace",[2] but it is notoriously difficult to understand. His verses do not correspond to syntactic units, he hardly uses any punctuation, and words often do not have a literal meaning. As A. Teeuw described it,