Babel
Sight sets the heights.
Towering past clouds what is pursued by the eye
Remains ungraspable within the eye's reach.
At the edge of the gathering, ruin.
Where to find fullness?
Before everything, the bustling clamor.
(speech)
A sudden, momentary pause.
(a drop of hush)
As the saying goes, an angel in transit.
(a knot in the tongue's logic)
Afterwards, a horde of angels.
Afterwards, the sense
that something will take place.
(a portent)
Approaching a summit.
The instant before once again
God's hand plummets.
Again, what was stalled at the tip of Adam's tongue
in straining for the fruit.
(a savored refusal)
The one word.
Here.
This remaining nameless.
Morpo
From the leftmost, towards finitude's margins,
is silence expelled.
A heavy door ushering in
utterance.
Movement is sure-footed in the narrowness of what's allowed.
Towards the chasm's edge, in the pause
before facing the vanishing point.
Although reappearing.
Until the door of what's possible
is sealed completely.
There is a mystery to this line.
There is a hand that intervenes between having been
and being.
Nothing ever returns.
As through a hinge, around which the opening revolves.
Weighted shackles to the heavy footfall.
(remember, nothing ever returns)
The immaculate page stops the mouth.
There are lips imprinting the emptiness.
Straining towards form.
Wanting speech?
From the leftmost. Reappearing.
Weighted footfalls. Remember.
Towards finitude's margins.
While outside, a world
of noise bleeds through.
And beyond the world, stillness.
Also known as edgeless space.
On this line the world whirls.
Imago
The insects know.
Theirs the numberless proof.
Therefore true.
They who cloak the noon
Of explanation.
Numberless wing-shadow.
What ripeness is.
In air, inhering.
A-hum.
Scatter a fistful.
Stare at small hands
In gloom.
(lacking)
Dissolving before touching earth.
(gravity's roost)
A kind of hunger.
From arid ground, bodies
Mounting each other.
Scales peeling off tight coils.
Afterwards, a breeding swarm.
(droning)
Pregnant wave parched from cresting.
(brief lives, murmuring)
Amounting-to, mounting, surmounting.
No surface scarring over.
No remains remaining.
Tongues of Angels
They unfold their wings.
The shadows they create
Fail to darken the earth.
They watch.
Without once batting an eye.
Without once turning their backs.
Without once shielding
Their faces with hands
They cannot lift from their trumpets.
Sometimes they are visited by the memory
Of voice. They long to open their mouths.
But cannot speak.
What is a tongue if not a piece
Of flesh that can never be swallowed.
Crossing
The nuns on the shore gazing into the river.
There's unease in their eyes.
It's the hour the water begins to swell.
One wades into the water to feel how cold.
The others follow her to cross.
They enter the water, one shadowy wave.
Almost as if their legs measure
How bit by bit the river deepens.
Each foot gropes for the next step that will hold.
Until their garments soak up water.
They pause and look about.
They see each other's faces.
Slowly, they lift their garments.
Their eyes close as the hems pass their knees.
The river flows with its noises.
The cold crawls up their bodies.
They feel their garments gather weight
And adhere to their hidden curves.
In the middle of the river,
They hear the distant vesper bells toll.
Shivering, they sing their hymns.
Eve
In the dark of a cave, fear
Visits her. She who remembers
How to be woken out of the sleeping
Body of another.
She will pluck out from herself the loss
As the exact punishment for her sin.
Wrapped in the hide of animals,
Her eldest, borrowing its heat.
The edges of her mind scratch with the most terrible
Futures her child could suffer.
This is how love was first felt.
Six Poems
Allan Popa
translated from the Filipino by Jose Perez Beduya, Jose Edmundo Ocampo Reyes, and Marc Gaba
'Babel,' 'Morpo' and 'Imago' (from Morpo, 2001) were translated by Jose Perez Beduya in collaboration with the author. 'Tongues of Angels' (from Kami sa Lahat ng Masama, 2003) was translated by Jose Edmundo Ocampo Reyes. 'Crossing' and 'Eve' (also from Kami sa Lahat ng Masama, 2003) were translated by Marc Gaba.
In working with Allan Popa on translations from his second book, Morpo (which signals both "shape" or "form" as well as the linguistic "morpheme"), I came to realize that translation is a transcoding of not merely meanings but more importantly processes—a pantographic performance of the author's manipulation of words as concrete materials, with an awareness of the properties of the original language.
Filipino, unlike English, generates meanings through echoing: In most cases, changes in verb tenses, degree of qualification, and word forms are effected through reduplication, where part or all of the root word is repeated. Popa foregrounds this peculiarity in lines such as this, from "Imago":
Ang dami, dumadami, ang dami-dami.
Here the root word dami, which means "number" or "the many", becomes the present tense verb "multiplies" through the addition of the bound morpheme "um" and then transforms into the "too many" or the "overmuch" through the doubling of the root word. Needless to say, preserving the morphemic/phonemic repetition—a crucial element—was a challenging negotiation, with all alternatives freighted with losses. In the end, to create an analogue for the original, we settled for:
Amounting-to, mounting, surmounting.
This sequence encapsulates the book's intertwined animating drives: the desire to mean and the desire to be—the yearned-for unity of logos and ontos, Word and Flesh, in a world of emergings, crestings, and dissolvings. Popa enacts these twin movements through repetition and permutation, the innate mechanisms of Filipino and the very engines of desire.
In Morpo, Popa brings the stutter inside words into relation with the voluminous silence of finitude. It is a book most of all about poetic making and unmaking, at language's atomic level. The reduplications inherent in the original language register as echoes bouncing off of limits, which are both outside and inside itself. For example, in "Alingaw" (not included in this selection), Popa elides the last syllable of the irreducible word alingawngaw, meaning "echo," to make audible through negation the echoes that travel backwards from silence to speech, from fragment to whole.
Through the use of homonyms, Popa also calls attention to the chasms between and underneath words, signaling the separation of meaning and being. Consider this brief yet aporetic ultimate line from "Imago":
Walang labing nilalabi.
Walang translates simply to the negative adjective "no," but the last two words carry different meanings. The root word labi here could mean "mouth" or "lips" as well "remains," while nilalabi could mean either "to mouth" or "to leave remains of." These variants and the chiasmic sonics of the original present us with at least four translation alternatives: "No mouth to speak from," "no speech remaining," "no remains to speak," or "no remains remaining." Any choice among these possibilities is inadequate.
Ultimately, in translating Popa's poems and working in the space between languages, I am made aware of the act of choosing as an acknowledgement and a refusal of the finitude that Morpo traces and erases.
-- Jose Perez Beduya
Filipino, unlike English, generates meanings through echoing: In most cases, changes in verb tenses, degree of qualification, and word forms are effected through reduplication, where part or all of the root word is repeated. Popa foregrounds this peculiarity in lines such as this, from "Imago":
Ang dami, dumadami, ang dami-dami.
Here the root word dami, which means "number" or "the many", becomes the present tense verb "multiplies" through the addition of the bound morpheme "um" and then transforms into the "too many" or the "overmuch" through the doubling of the root word. Needless to say, preserving the morphemic/phonemic repetition—a crucial element—was a challenging negotiation, with all alternatives freighted with losses. In the end, to create an analogue for the original, we settled for:
Amounting-to, mounting, surmounting.
This sequence encapsulates the book's intertwined animating drives: the desire to mean and the desire to be—the yearned-for unity of logos and ontos, Word and Flesh, in a world of emergings, crestings, and dissolvings. Popa enacts these twin movements through repetition and permutation, the innate mechanisms of Filipino and the very engines of desire.
In Morpo, Popa brings the stutter inside words into relation with the voluminous silence of finitude. It is a book most of all about poetic making and unmaking, at language's atomic level. The reduplications inherent in the original language register as echoes bouncing off of limits, which are both outside and inside itself. For example, in "Alingaw" (not included in this selection), Popa elides the last syllable of the irreducible word alingawngaw, meaning "echo," to make audible through negation the echoes that travel backwards from silence to speech, from fragment to whole.
Through the use of homonyms, Popa also calls attention to the chasms between and underneath words, signaling the separation of meaning and being. Consider this brief yet aporetic ultimate line from "Imago":
Walang labing nilalabi.
Walang translates simply to the negative adjective "no," but the last two words carry different meanings. The root word labi here could mean "mouth" or "lips" as well "remains," while nilalabi could mean either "to mouth" or "to leave remains of." These variants and the chiasmic sonics of the original present us with at least four translation alternatives: "No mouth to speak from," "no speech remaining," "no remains to speak," or "no remains remaining." Any choice among these possibilities is inadequate.
Ultimately, in translating Popa's poems and working in the space between languages, I am made aware of the act of choosing as an acknowledgement and a refusal of the finitude that Morpo traces and erases.
-- Jose Perez Beduya
Allan Popa is the author of ten collections of poetry, including Drone (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2013) and Laan (De La Salle University Publishing House, 2013). He has received the Philippines Free Press Literary Award and the Manila Critics Circle National Book Award. He teaches at the Filipino Department of Ateneo de Manila University and is currently the director of Ateneo Institute of Literary Arts and Practices (AILAP).
Jose Perez Beduya earned his BFA in Painting from the University of the Philippines and his MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University. His work has appeared in High Chair, Beloit Poetry Journal, Colorado Review, Ploughshares, Fence, Toad Suck Review, Lana Turner, and Boston Review. He has received the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer's Residency Prize, a Lannan Foundation Scholarship at the Santa Fe Art Institute, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. His first book Throng will be published by Lake Forest College Press/&NOW Books in 2012.
Jose Edmundo Ocampo Reyes was born and raised in the Philippines, and holds degrees from Ateneo de Manila University and Columbia University. His poems and translations have appeared in Circumference, The Hudson Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Natural Bridge, Philippine Studies, Ploughshares, and Rattle; have been anthologized in The Powow River Anthology (Ocean Publishing, 2006) and Contemporary Voices from the East (W. W. Norton, 2007); and have been featured on Poetry Daily. He is the recipient of the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Award and the Der-Hovanessian Translation Prize.
Marc Gaba is the author of the poetry collection Have (Tupelo Press); the chapbooks How Sound Becomes a Name and Nouveau Bored; and Atomic Neutral, a single-edition volume of poetry encased in a sculpture as an integral part of the exhibit Birdsounds. He won a Palanca Award for poetry in 1998 and the Boston Review Poetry Contest in 2006. He was a Dorset Prize and Faber-Castell Art Award finalist in 2008, and was nominated for an Ernst & Young exhibit and the Sovereign Asian Art Prize in 2010. He has taught creative writing and art appreciation at De La Salle University and the University of the Philippines.
