Shaer Burong Punggok: a Malay romance
H. Overbeck published his romanized transcription of the Shaer Burong Punggok in 1914, presenting a Malay metrical romance that offers an alternative narrative to the well-known folk etymology of the proverb “seperti punggok merindu-kan bulan.” Drawing on a damaged Jawi-script booklet printed in Padang in 1884 and a later Singapore edition of 1910, Overbeck argues that this particular shaer transcends the typically artificial quality of the genre and preserves a genuine love-tragedy rooted in rural Malay experience.
Summary
Overbeck’s article is primarily a philological presentation: he transcribes in full a Malay shaer (long metrical romance in quatrain form) that he acquired by chance at a book auction in Batavia. The Padang edition, printed in Jawi script on 26 Rabi-ul-awal 1301 (c. 1884), is badly produced and partially illegible; Overbeck supplements it where necessary from a Singapore edition published on Arab Street in 1910, which he judges to be a memory-based recension of the same text. He also notes that a handful of quatrains from the same romance were circulating in Singapore as early as 1905–1906 under the label “pantun unggas,” suggesting the poem had a longer oral or semi-literate life before either printed edition.
The narrative itself tells of the punggok, a small night-owl, who falls desperately in love with the Moon. After a prolonged period of longing—during which various birds and celestial bodies offer counsel and warning—the punggok is granted an audience with the Moon in a magical garden of extraordinary beauty. The two consummate their union, and the Moon bestows upon the punggok a luminous garment of cloud and rainbow. However, the punggok is subsequently attacked and killed by a geroda (eagle) and a rajawali (falcon). In death, his body transforms into a chendawan, a wailing bird that continues to sing mournfully for the Moon to this day—thus providing the romance’s own etiology for the proverb. Overbeck contrasts this narrative with the version recorded by Skeat in Malay Magic, in which the Moon’s daughter tricks the owl into searching for a dropped betel quid; the two accounts share only the basic premise of unrequited or frustrated love between owl and moon.
Overbeck frames his intervention within a debate about the literary value of shaers. Quoting Wilkinson’s dismissive characterization of the genre as “a very artificial product” that “rarely arouses much enthusiasm amongst the masses,” he then invokes de Hollander’s more generous assessment to claim the Shaer Burong Punggok as an exception—a work of “childlike naivete” and “natural expression of feelings” that may preserve the memory of a real love-tragedy from the older, more isolated Malay world that Clifford and Swettenham had observed.
Key Findings
- The Padang edition was printed in Jawi script on 26 Rabi-ul-awal 1301 AH (c. 1884 CE); the colophon at the end of the text specifies “Purnama rabi-ul-awal per-tengah bulan, dua-puluh ampat hari-nya bulan, pukul delapan petang senayan” (p. 218).
- A second edition was published in Singapore on Arab Street in 1910; Overbeck judges it to be a memory-based recension that reorders and varies the quatrains of the Padang text (p. 194).
- Fragments of the romance were already circulating in Singapore as “pantun unggas” by 1905–1906, indicating a pre-print textual tradition (p. 194).
- The punggok is identified taxonomically as Glaucidium brodii (a small night-owl) following Wilkinson’s Abridged Malay-English Dictionary (p. 193).
- The romance is not listed in any standard reference work on Malay literature that Overbeck could find, unless de Hollander’s “Hikayat Burong Pinggit” (p. 156) refers to the same work under a different name (p. 194).
- The narrative structure follows a courtship–union–death–transformation arc, with the punggok’s post-mortem transformation into a chendawan providing the etiological explanation for the bird’s perpetual nocturnal lament (pp. 217–218).
Conclusion
Overbeck’s definitive takeaway is that the Shaer Burong Punggok represents a rare instance in which the shaer genre achieves genuine poetic force, and that its plot—unlike the rationalized folk-tale version recorded by Skeat—preserves the emotional logic of a simple love-tragedy that once occurred in the remote kampongs of the Malay world. The romance, he implies, is a fossil of an older literary and emotional culture now largely inaccessible except in the most isolated regions of the Peninsula, Sumatra, or outlying islands.
Context
- Overbeck was a European resident in the Dutch East Indies (the Padang copy was acquired at a Batavia auction); his work is that of a colonial-era philologist documenting vernacular Malay literature for a metropolitan scholarly audience.
- The primary sources are two printed Jawi-script editions (Padang c. 1884; Singapore 1910) and a small corpus of orally transmitted quatrains collected in Singapore circa 1905–1906. The article’s historiographical contribution lies in establishing the textual relationship between these witnesses and in arguing for the literary merit of a genre previously dismissed by European scholars.