Once, something will fall by accident
into a well long devoid of water. Like a coin
it will clink when it hits the deepest point, echoing
at the hollow suddenly surrounded by children: think of
how to haul up what was not supposed to fall
If you look out, what will look back at you is one pensive
gaze. You will let go one wish, which will appear as if
it were forever falling in the split second before reaching
the very bottom that has long ago dried up. It will ripple
and you will feel the lingering thirst seemingly quenched
Why say that a word is profound. The well will be
surrounded by children. Why say that a well is deep
if the word can bring up the word. In the mouths
of children, dangling in their tongues are wishes
Why keep holding on to a promise. Once more
you wish for a poem. One poem from the word to fall
again. Again, the darkness quickly consumes the word
falling from your mouth, there is no hoping for
whether it reaches the deepest point. The mouth stays
on top of the world there’s no shutting the void
You cannot climb out of a well in the image of a well
The word you are about to put into words persistent
in getting through to you. What you raise cannot be raised
not forever. Once the children have gone home
you quietly approach what they have surrounded, closely
making out what they have spent one day figuring out how
to haul up—they even let fall what was not meant to fall
You slowly lower the bucket tied to a rope, slide
across your palms the threadbare strand of time
while the mouth of the well seems to swallow your tongue
Left out by time nothing is left behind but this—
an open mouth waiting for the trickling outcome
that has no apparent cause. One day the sun will come out
and find what it has long been searching for: the shadow that once
went down not getting up for a long time
You cannot drain the image of a well: one hundred wells
Consider that there are one hundred wells in the direction of the spring
that needs to be drained from the surface of the earth before reaching
the deepest point: one hundred wells. Anything can be brought up
anything can be dropped. You cannot keep under wraps
what stays open for every tomorrow that is not part
of every opening of the world until tomorrow becomes the end. You
see yourself when you peer into the well you are sleeping
open-mouthed dreaming of what cannot be raised talking
in your sleep out of reach of the word that is falling
Deep Well
Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles
translated from the Filipino by Kristine Ong Muslim
Listen to the poem read in the original Filipino by the poet:
In translating “Deep Well,” as well as the rest of the book from which this poem was taken, I tried not to go overboard with translating creatively, except where preserving musicality obviously superseded the need to convey the closest possible intended meaning. I felt that the source text Guwang (High Chair Books, 2013)—a fanatical yet clinical exploration of the silences that fester along the periphery of traumas and of the non-myth that loosely links obsessive psychosis with artistic genius—deserved an equally fanatical yet clinical translation that aimed for an almost word-for-word/silence-for-silence equivalence.
There is no easy way to convey in English the myriad interpretations of the Filipino version of “Deep Well.” This line, for example—nakaguwang na bungangang naghihintay ng mahuhulog na bunga—which I decided to translate as “an open mouth waiting for the trickling outcome,” hints at either an open mouth waiting for an actual fruit to drop or a vocal petitioner teetering while waiting for the outcome of a cause-effect scenario. I combined the two disparate, simultaneously occurring situations. I used the word “trickling” to denote fluidity, which is in line with the spirit of the poem. Even when suspended in the act of waiting for something to happen (or for something to drop), there is unrest. There is always change and movement, both temporally and spatially.
In order to illuminate, Arguelles’s “Balong Malalim” deliberately obfuscates. And it does so masterfully through syntactic wringing: . . . Hindi mo matatakpan // ang mananatiling bukas sa bawat bukas na wala / sa bawat bukas ng daigdig hanggang sa bukas na wakas. The calculated repetition of the polyseme bukas, which means, among other things, “tomorrow,” “open,” and “receptive,” is a challenge to translate. This repetition of “bukas” has been leveraged to demonstrate a lone root morpheme’s remarkable flexibility, set in a lyrical construct, straddling temporal and spatial cues. Although Arguelles’s lines offer multiple possibilities for interpretation, my translation fixes the meaning of bukas at every iteration: “. . . You cannot keep under wraps // what stays open for every tomorrow that is not part / of every opening of the world until tomorrow becomes the end.”
All in all, in translating Arguelles’ poetry, I’ve worked to strike a balance between the need for a meaning-for-meaning translation and the preservation of form.
There is no easy way to convey in English the myriad interpretations of the Filipino version of “Deep Well.” This line, for example—nakaguwang na bungangang naghihintay ng mahuhulog na bunga—which I decided to translate as “an open mouth waiting for the trickling outcome,” hints at either an open mouth waiting for an actual fruit to drop or a vocal petitioner teetering while waiting for the outcome of a cause-effect scenario. I combined the two disparate, simultaneously occurring situations. I used the word “trickling” to denote fluidity, which is in line with the spirit of the poem. Even when suspended in the act of waiting for something to happen (or for something to drop), there is unrest. There is always change and movement, both temporally and spatially.
In order to illuminate, Arguelles’s “Balong Malalim” deliberately obfuscates. And it does so masterfully through syntactic wringing: . . . Hindi mo matatakpan // ang mananatiling bukas sa bawat bukas na wala / sa bawat bukas ng daigdig hanggang sa bukas na wakas. The calculated repetition of the polyseme bukas, which means, among other things, “tomorrow,” “open,” and “receptive,” is a challenge to translate. This repetition of “bukas” has been leveraged to demonstrate a lone root morpheme’s remarkable flexibility, set in a lyrical construct, straddling temporal and spatial cues. Although Arguelles’s lines offer multiple possibilities for interpretation, my translation fixes the meaning of bukas at every iteration: “. . . You cannot keep under wraps // what stays open for every tomorrow that is not part / of every opening of the world until tomorrow becomes the end.”
All in all, in translating Arguelles’ poetry, I’ve worked to strike a balance between the need for a meaning-for-meaning translation and the preservation of form.
Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles is the author of twenty books of and about poetry, most recently Atra: Mga Tula 1999-2019 (Balangay Books, 2020) and the Poetry Book Society-recommended Three Books (Broken Sleep Books UK, 2020), with translations by Kristine Ong Muslim and illustrations by Erika M. Carreon. His works and interests encompass books, conceptual writing, translation, film, video, installation, found objects, and text-based experimentation. His erasure projects continue to explore and expand on the concepts of, among others, time and memory, language and loss, identity and anonymity, and sex and intimacy. Arguelles is a three-time finalist for the National Book Award, and the recipient of multiple national awards—including a Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature and the Maningning Miclat Poetry Award—and fellowships from the University of the Philippines National Writers’ Workshop and the Bienvenido N. Santos Creative Writing Center National Workshop on Art and Cultural Criticism. He works as a book editor and translator, and teaches literature and creative writing at De La Salle University in Manila. His forthcoming books are Hollow (Fernwood Press) and Twelve Clay Birds: Selected Poems (University of the Philippines Press).
Kristine Ong Muslim is the author of nine books of fiction and poetry, including The Drone Outside (Eibonvale Press, 2017), Black Arcadia (University of the Philippines Press, 2017), Meditations of a Beast (Cornerstone Press, 2016), Butterfly Dream (Snuggly Books, 2016), Age of Blight (Unnamed Press, 2016), and Lifeboat (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2015). She coedited the British Fantasy Award-winning anthology People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! (Lightspeed Magazine, 2016) and Ulirát: Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines (Gaudy Boy, 2021). She is also the translator of many bilingual editions, including Marlon Hacla’s Melismas (Oomph Press, 2020) and Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles’s Twelve Clay Birds: Selected Poems (University of the Philippines Press, 2021) and Three Books (Broken Sleep Books, 2020). She grew up and continues to live in a rural town in the southern Philippines.
