Shortly before his death in December 1873, the renowned Javanese court poet R. Ng. Ronggawarsita composed a short work of social criticism and Islamic ethics that is among the most celebrated of Javanese literary texts. Serat Kalatidha (The Time of Darkness) reflects upon the avenues that remain open to the ethical subject in what Ronggawarsita calls the “time of madness,” the time of darkness and error that marked his dismal present in high colonial Java. Most celebrated as a prophecy, the poem is, in part, a critical reworking of an early nineteenth‐century prophetic reflection on the Javanese past. My article explores the troubled context in which the author wrote this twelve‐stanza (108‐line) poem and how its text forms both a critical commentary on the state of the poet's current‐day society and a pensive reflection on the ethical imperatives of Islam. In the course of this exploration, I reveal how Ronggawarsita's poem forms a prophecy, not as a foretelling of an already determined future, but rather as a work that moves along prophetic time to provoke in his readers a productive intimacy with both pasts and futures.

中文翻译：

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生活在一个痛苦的时代：JAVA最后的预言诗人的最后几天

在1873年12月去世前不久，著名的爪哇宫廷诗人R. Ng。Ronggawarsita撰写了一篇简短的社会评论和伊斯兰伦理著作，这是爪哇人最著名的文学著作之一。塞拉特·卡拉蒂达（Serat Kalatidha）《黑暗时代》反映了荣加拉西塔所说的“疯狂时期”中仍对伦理学主题开放的途径，这是黑暗时期和错误时期，标志着他在高殖民地爪哇的惨淡表现。这首诗最著名的是预言，部分是对十九世纪初期对爪哇人过去的预言反思的批判性重制。我的文章探讨了作者撰写这首十二节（108行）诗的困境，其文本如何形成对诗人当今社会状况的批判性评论以及对伊斯兰教义要求的沉思反思。在探索的过程中，我揭示了荣加拉西塔（Ronggawarsita）的诗歌是如何形成预言的，而不是预示着已经确定的未来，