Arasahas by Jaya Jacobo, translated from the Filipino by Christian Jil Benitez, PAWA Press in association with Paloma Press, 2024

My initial encounter with Jaya Jacobo’s Arasahas (Savage Mind Books, 2023) was primal. The title, a Bikolano word deliberately left unchanged by Christian Jil Benitez in his debut translation with PAWA Press, depicts a sensory experience; roughly translated from one of nearly two hundred languages in the Philippines, arasahas describes the warm, humid weather central to life in the tropics. My skin tingles when I read the word, and I recall the inescapable, invisible stickiness that life in the Philippines is steeped in. To the English reader, the word arasahas hisses, sizzles—even without its meaning, its sound, by virtue of the repeating a and s, coils and lingers in the ear. It clings.

A sharp poetic decision by both author and translator, the title invites the reader back into their body, and it is from the body that we approach the text. This is vital, because Arasahas is a collection that dances around what is almost, if not absolutely, unnamable but deeply palpable. It is a book of vivid, concrete images—a perfume bottle breaking, a bird’s nest delicacy, the tugging of “something within”—to allude not just to the abstract, but also the spiritual. In these acts of gesturing is the sense that there is something more, be it the supernatural or divine, that seeps into and transforms the everyday. I am reminded of how humidity, the invisible but ever-present water in the air, is fundamental to the proliferation of life. Similarly, Jacobo’s allusions and references perforate the text, and within these chasms are the hints at meaning that Arasahas alchemizes. Boundaries are challenged; left porous. In Arasahas, this simultaneity of meaning is not mere technique, but a sensibility formed by the lived experience of the poet. READ MORE…