THE aged, brown pages make up three volumes. Each is around a dozen pages, with a cover labeled Chairil Anwar. Some pages in these three thin booklets, now kept in the H.B. Jassin Literature Documentation Center (PDS), contain poems, or sketches of poems and what reads as aphorisms.

They are but a small fraction of the valuable manuscripts that Chairil left with Jassin. Hasan Aspahani, a poet who later researched Chairil Anwar, says the compositio