The burden of understanding

a different body by Lean Borlongan, translated by Eric Abalajon (self-published, 2025)

 

If only he could stop
the involuntary movements
of his hands
always shaking
left and right, if only
his tongue and lips were not twisted
if only his head
hadn't filled with fluid
if only he were born full-term
he would not
write poetry
about failed loves.

["The Poet"]

 

By page 30 of this collection, one reads a college application form in which the applicant (the poet) is asked if he has a disability (Yes / No). The applicant puts a check beside No. With that simple lie, the reader can sense a personal world shifting in its course.

Here is a poetry collection that does not announce its difference lightly. It tackles the themes of inclusivity and disability in a manner that suspends and redraws our assumptions about inclusivity and disability. One reads and recognizes the truths behind the lines, the hurt and pain that must have accompanied their writing.

The title of the collection was taken from "Tonight," in which the disabled poet imagined himself in the body of another, "longing / desiring to live / in a different body?" To be different can be a curse, but the poet chose to express his longings and desires to give shape to his singularity.

The whole sequence was capped with "Until Believed," a powerful ending that is as close to a manifesto or poetics as there can ever be about disability. It began with the circumstances and limitations faced by a person with disability "in a society / where a broken body / is nothing special":

To be disabled
is to be mocked
to be shouted at
in the streets
pelted with insults
reprimanded by the guard
refused at restaurants
denied purchase
barred entrance
locked out. 

Each stanza began with the same line: "To be disabled" ("Ang kapansanan"). It was almost like a repeated line in a famous poem, "The guerrilla is like a poet," but here a narrative was being limned, its arc moving from physical limitation to defeat and eventually to resistance. 

As the poet found his voice, he came to terms with his physical self and his literary abilities. The poet as a PWD was also a survivor and resistance fighter.

To be disabled
is to defy limits
and boundaries
to continue fighting
even when the heart and mind
are bruised.

To be disabled
is to dare
to challenge everyone
to question their own beliefs
and to change the order of things.

To be disabled 
is just a part of me.
Not the whole of me. 

And therein lies the poet's mastery of himself. His physical condition does not wholly define him, as he is much more than this. He was not another acronym or a broken body. In this collection, his body may be the site of his poetry, but his poetry shines through to illuminate the fullness of his humanity.

The poet's actual medical records—detailing the results of his medical procedures and diagnoses—were interspersed with the poems in this bilingual edition. These documents authenticate and blur how we receive these lines. The objective value of these unfeeling, scientific documents stands in contrast to the subjective feelings of personal poetry. 

In lines of poetry "lie emotions / that can't be shown openly / ... / lie my passion / my sincerity / my true voice" [from "In Poetry"]. The poet gave voice to none other than himself. 

We were privy to a very personal journey as the poems contextualized an experience that was not only lived but relived.

A tilted, swaying head
is mocked for always being
drunk. I drank and drank –
no matter how bitter
no matter how I sank
I will wake up to my own affliction. 

[from "Drunk"] 

The poet woke up daily to his own affliction. And daily, he came face to face with people's presumptions and assumptions about what he could and could not do. In "People," the poet turned the tables on the able-bodied citizens who had misunderstood him for most of his life.

Though they are unaware 
of their prejudice
I am consciously judging.
These sons of bitches
look like idiots.
I am smarter than them. 

The poet then shifted the "burden of understanding" his condition from himself to the other people, focusing instead on his understanding of their misunderstanding. 

Yet still, I bear
the burden 
of understanding.
They only wish
to get their message across.

The disabled poet's empathy for the non-disabled flipped the perspective. The poet has demonstrated a generosity of another order.

In the body of the poem
the veins don't fidget.
Lips have a voice that is
ready to share secrets
and depth. ...
.......................................
I am conversing
with readers
even only for a moment
with an abled body.

[from "In Poetry II"]

He has put himself in the shoes of others. He has glimpsed his condition from the perspective of others and has decided to express what he found in his poems.

In a different body, an individual has found his profession in poetry. His declaration was unequivocal: here I am in all my profound humanity. This is a book that overcame the odds. Its translator, Eric Abalajon, has made creative decisions that negotiate the idiomatic uses and quirks of the Filipino language. It would require deep sensitivity on the part of the translator to convey Borlongan's poetry. I believe that this is Abalajon's first published book of translation. For both poet and translator, this bilingual edition was a profound meditation on disability and humanity.

 

Missives from a vagabond and reply from a ghost

Epistolaryo ng Bagamundo at ang Tugon ng Multo by Mikael de Lara Co (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2026)

 

Reading Epistolaryo ng Bagamundo at ang Tugon ng Multo, the third poetry book of Mikael de Lara Co, was not a straightforward read. I found myself taking long pauses after every poem, trying to catch my breath. Unable to move on to the next poem, I needed to process the words in front of me and latch on to the ideas and feelings they generated. What I thought was a leisurely read took me days as the images lingered in my mind. Something was eating the poet, and his frustrations and pains bleed into the reader's anxiety. It could be a bruising experience. 

An overwhelming guilt haunted the poet. How could he bear witness to a war in Gaza and carry the weight of history unfolding beyond his reach and firsthand experience? We all saw the images and heard about the atrocities in the comfort of our cubicles but how could a Filipino poet engage with them? 

In "Probokasyon sa Probokasyon sa Probokasyon" (Provocation Upon Provocation Upon Provocation), the poet asked, "Kaya mo bang magsulat / ukol sa pagdurusa sa malalayong bayan?" (Can you write / about suffering in far-off places?). His answer to the provocative question was a pedantic pile of the same words, unable to arrive at a justification that would convince even himself. All translations are mine:

Kung gayon: Magsulat ukol sa pagdurusa
sa malalayong bayan. Matapos nito,

itanong sa sarili kung paano mong kinakayang
magsulat ukol sa pagdurusa sa malalayong bayan.

Samakatuwid, isulat ang totoo,
na kayâ ka nagsusulat ukol sa pagdurusa

sa malalayong bayan
ay dahil wala ka pang sapat na tapang

upang harapin ang sarili mong mga multo. 

 

If that's the case: Write about the suffering
in far-off places. After which,

ask yourself how you can bear
writing about suffering in far-off places.

And so: write this truth,
that the reason you're writing about suffering

in far-off places 
was because you were not brave enough

to face your own ghosts. 

The distance separating the poet from faraway wars was geographic. An ongoing historical event was so far beyond his grasp and yet so near in emotional reckoning. Mikael Co's ethical conundrum was how the circumstances of a distant war could become material for a poem by a poet from the other side of the world. 

It could be that the poet was in denial of his own suffering, unable to "face [his] own ghosts." Wars preoccupy him because the capacity for human cruelty is the same elsewhere. 

Walter Benjamin's idea of history as an inevitable chain of terrifying historical events was acknowledged by the poet: "At kailan mo natuklas / na pinagdurugtong tayo // ng sari-sariling digmaan. / At kailan mo natukoy na ang pagdilat // ay pagdurusa." (And when did you discover / that we are connected by // our own homegrown wars. / And when did you realize that to live // is to suffer.)

For poets attuned to human suffering, wars exact a toll on the mind. "Ang Aklatan sa Shuja'iyya" (The Library in Shuja'iyya) was dedicated to the memory of Refaat Alareer (1979–2023), a Gaza-born Palestinian poet:

Paa ng sirang mesa, unan sa ilalim ng butas 
na ulo ng sanggol, mga piraso ng kasaysayan 
mula sa malalayong bayan: Inunang paslangin 
ng Khmer Rouge ang mga nakasalamin. Mayroong 
tula dito. Kung may bahagi ng pusong 
natatapyas sa bawat masaksihang kamatayan, 
ilang airstrike bago ito tuluyang maubos?
May bubughaw pa bang sugat sa kalangitang 
humalili sa pader?
                     Balang araw 
mangangahas muli tayong magpalipad 
ng saranggola.
                     Maaaring 
wala na ako doon. Mayroong tula dito.
 

A leg of a broken table, a pillow under the punctured
head of an infant, fragments of history
from far-off places: The Khmer Rouge liquidated
first the ones wearing eyeglasses. A poem
dwells here. If a section of the heart
is chipped away for every death witnessed,
how many airstrikes before it disappears?
Is there any shade of blue darker than a heaven which
replaced the walls?
                       One day
we will be brave enough to fly
kites.
                       I may
no longer be around then. A poem dwells here. 

From Cambodia to Gaza, cruelty and hate persisted, and poetry dared to document what was left: broken tables, pillows, eyeglasses. Poetry was recorded on scraps of paper, material fragments of history that nonetheless contained the undying dream to "fly / kites."

The poet immediately refuted this romantic idea of poetry as resistance in the opening of the next poem, "Sin Verguenza," where a feeling of indescribable shame chips away at the poet's conscience.

“Balang araw, matatapos ang digmaan
at mababalikan ko na sa wakas 
ang aking mga tula,” sabi ng graffiti
sa Aleppo, at wala kang magawa
kundi mamutiktik sa hiya
ngayong kakasangkapanin mo na naman
ang pagdurusa ng iba para makasulat
ng sariling tula.

"One day, the war will end
and I can finally return to writing
my poems," said the graffiti
in Aleppo, and you couldn't help
but die in shame
now that you were using again
the suffering of others in order to write
your own poem. 

The poet then prayed a litany to the various gods: the god of worms, of windows, of the throats, of sidewalks, of cable wires, of metaphors.

Diyos ng mga kawad, paano pa bang lilikha
ng kapilya mula sa guho. Diyos
ng talinghaga. Balang araw
matatapos ang digmaan at babalikan
natin ang mga tula ng mga may tapang
ng hiyang tumula sa panahong ganito.

God of cables, how could we create
a chapel from the ruins. God 
of metaphor. One day
the war will end and we will return 
to the poems of those who were shamelessly
brave enough to write a poem in these times.

The invocation was preserved from the poet's first two English poetry books: What Passes for Answers (2013) and Canopy (2017), but here the polished lyricism of the first two books gives way to the rawness and messiness of the Filipino register. What saved the poet from his ethical dilemma was his "self-consciousness" when he couldn't help / but die in shame as he appropriated a suffering poet's graffiti at the outset. And the jumble of gods served to undermine the "poetic" and hinted at a poetry of engagement. "Sabi ng diyos ng mga bintana, / Titigan mo ako, baka sakaling / may makapkap ka pang kapayapaang / nakasilid sa mga hiwa ng mundo. / Walang silbi ang makatang naglilihis / ng paningin." (Said the god of windows, / Look me in the eye, you might / frisk out some peace / hiding in the interstices of the world. / The poet who averts his gaze / is inutile.) 

Stitching the threads of these poems was a select set of recurring images and statements. A few examples were: the knife concealed under the sink, a glass of water by the bedside to drink after the poet's bouts of nightmares, fitting things between two measly palms ("dadalawang palad"), and a body that can no longer bear it (original in italics, "Hindi ko na káya sa katawang ito."). Their recurrence gave the poems a unified effect and seemed to function as a vocabulary of journey and pain shared between the poet and the reader.

Mikael Co used various lineations, indentations, and poetic formats, mixing English and Filipino passages to create hybrid forms of expression, as in "Laging nasa Bingit" (Always on the Brink), a prose poem alternating Filipino and English sentences. This poem contains the line, "Sabi nga: Tungkulin ng makatang di maubusan ng salita." (It is said: The poet's task is to never run out of words.) The line alluded to "The Doomed," a poem appearing in Mikael Co's first two books: "The task of poetry / is to never run out of words."

"Meditasyon sa Parang" (Meditation on Wilderness) began with a compression of Rilke's lines: "Ayon kay Rilke: Nakakikilabot / ang mga anghel, / sapagkat ano nga ba ang kariktan / kundi bukal ng kilabot?" (According to Rilke: Every angel / is terrifying, / because beauty is nothing / but the root of terror?) Stephen Mitchell translates Rilke's passage as "For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror ... / ... / ... Every angel is terrifying." William H. Gass goes for "because [beauty] is nothing but terror's herald; / ... / ... Every Angel is awesome." The Rilke device, as well as the meditation on poetry and its uses, reminded me of Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles’s Sa Wala Ka Maniwala (Trust in Nothing), the final volume in his Sonetoismo septology, which also tackles history and the war in Gaza.

Perhaps our brave and shameless poet was justified in never running out of words. Who else would memorialize the bloodied temples and wasted lives? In "Tanging Pananalig" (Only Faith), the poet questioned the Great Poet ("Dakilang Makata") for not intervening with His omnipotence: "may kutob akong / hindi rin Siya nagbabasa ng tula." (I suspect / that even He doesn't read poems.) Thus the poet carried his faith in art while resisting in the only way he knew: "ang tangi kong alam na pag-aaklas / ay ang laban sa pananahimik?" (the only form of resistance I know / is the one against silence?). Never running out of words is a resistance against silence. 

If silence reigns in wars in far-off places, destruction prevails without resistance. To remain silent in the face of war is to embrace death, even suicide. But like the insistent words of a poet (in graffiti, in paper scraps), love itself was an ardent form of resistance, as in "Ang mga Mangingibig ng Khan Younis" (The Lovers of Khan Younis):

May pulutong ng kalapating nakikipagkarera 
sa mga bala. Mahihipo ba ang pakpak 
kahit man lamang sa haraya, mahahanap 
ang batobalaning nakabaon sa bituka't 
gumagabay sa kanila tungo sa kung-saang umaga?
Narito pa rin tayo kahit ubos na ang landas palabas 
ng lungsod. May kargang babala ang mga ulap.
Natatakot ako. Kung darating ang apoy, Sinta, 

hawakan mo ako. Paghinangin nawa ng digmaan 
ang ating mga palad. Pagbuhulin sana ng init 
ang ating mga gulugod. At kung balang araw 
mahukay tayo ng mananakop, maisip 
nila nawa: Sa kabila ng lahat, may nagmahalan 
pa rin dito. Hindi nila napigil ang pag-ibig.

A troop of doves races against
the rain of bullets. Can their wings even be touched
by imagination, can the magnetic attraction
buried in their intestines and
guiding them toward what morning be found?
We're still here even if all roads out of the city 
are blocked. The clouds carry a warning.
I'm scared. If fire comes, my Love,

please hold me. Let our palms be soldered by
the war. Let the heat knot together
our vertebrae. And one day
when the conquerors unearth our remains, let
them think: Despite everything, two lovers
remained here. They could not contain their love. 

The poetic sequence ended with gestures of closure. Some traumatic family event or tragedy (a fire?) was confronted, an heirloom or inheritance might be destroyed, but the poet was sure it would all end with him ("nagpasya na ako. / Sa akin magtatapos ito."). He made peace with his birthright. And he had perhaps forgiven the ghost haunting him. Or it had forgiven him.

Like César Vallejo, his death poem was already composed, "Magtitistis Tayo Hanggang sa Pagpanaw" (We Will Labor Until Death Finds Us). And "Paanyaya" (An Invitation), the collection's final poem, was addressed to another poet (the poem has an epigraph from Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha). Here are the final lines:

ang aking paanyaya: Kung maligaw ka
sa munti naming arkipelago, dalawin mo ako.
Pirming walang kandado ang pintuan
ng tahanan ko. Palaging may tao dito.

my invitation: If you happen to find yourself
in our humble archipelago, come visit me.
The doors to my home are
unlocked. And people are always waiting here.

In an ideal world, Mikael Co, an accomplished translator apart from being a brilliant poet, would produce equally forceful translations of these haunting, bruising poems. Meanwhile, those who read them in Filipino will encounter some of the most fragile and raw lines about being a feeling human being despite wars and corruption. And, after drawing sharp breaths and audible sighs, they will also be treated to gestures of kindness and hospitality. This book is like a hard-earned respite. It is one poet trying to connect with another, one human being to another.

The truth content of a sonnet: On Sonetoismo by Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles, 2

This is the second of two-part posts on the last two volumes of Sonetoismo by Filipino poet Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles. My thoughts on the penultimate volume, Dahilan (Reason), can be read here.

 

Sa Wala Ka Maniwala by Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles (De La Salle University Publishing House, 2026)

 

Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles is one of the writers I've discussed most in this blog. I'm looking back at my jottings on his works. They can't quite make a sonnet yet. Or perhaps they can. Once again, in the spirit of the poet's inventive flair, I present this hypertext/hyperlinked sonnet comprising the titles of posts I've made so far on the poet's writings, including the fresh line from yesterday's post:

May Be a Review of Text-Image: Sonnet Lacking a Quatrain

You can do anything in poetry: On Sonetoismo by Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles, 1
May be a review of text-image
Fourteen poetry impressions: On Sonetoismo, volumes 3 to 5
In verbo tuo
Antares
Pesoa
Echolocation
The spirit of déjà vu
Forever in transit
Interview of A. (Author) by R. (Reader)

Not sure if that bibliographic sonnet makes utter sense. In any case, I was wondering how Arguelles would wrap up his poetic cycle Sonetoismo. Given all that came before, I'm pretty sure the concluding sequence will contain some sort of artistic statement. 

The title of the concluding sequence announces a surprising departure from the expressionistic function of poetry. Sa Wala Ka Maniwala can mean Have Faith in Nothing. The translation of the title loses the Filipino wordplay in "wala" (nothing, or something absent) being wholly inside or part of the word "maniwala" (believe, or have faith). It's almost like an agnostic or atheistic manifesto on the utility (or uselessness) of art in the age of Gaza and Kyiv.

The first and last volumes—Arguelles pointed out in his lecture during the July launch of the last two books—provide the narrative anchor of the cycle's trajectory. After all is said and done, belief in nothing represents the paradoxical fulcrum of Sonetoismo's innovative yet pragmatic take on the function of modernist poetry to defy power structures—all structures, in fact.

* * * 

The first volume, Laging Patúngo (Forever in Transit, or Always En Route), announces the various subjects a sonnet in this cycle can address. The pieces are as yet ungrouped but one already sees the creative framing and stuff (or not-the-stuff) behind this first salvo in the cycle. The sonnets in Laging Patúngo are all "proper" sonnets in the sense that they consist of 14 innocent lines.

In the next volume, Monstruo, we see the monster waking up from the slumber of tradition by shattering the encrusted form of its 14-line template. This volume literally erases certain lines from the sonnet and introduces a new rule: a sonnet can wear whatever form it wants to take. A sonnet is self-determined by poets and readers alike. And so we encounter pieces like "Dalawang Linyang Soneto" (Two-Line Sonnet, or Sonnet as Couplet, or Couplet as Sonnet), "Kalahating Soneto" (Half-Sonnet, or Seven-Line Sonnet), and other monstrosities of form. This travesty earns its place by being consistently a malformed monster, an "ugly" amalgam of low and high modernism. Its topics remain as diverse as the number of protein sequences in the universe.

The third and fourth volumes—Tatlong Libong Araw (Three Thousand Days) and Anyo ng Kalatagan (The Lay of the Land)—continue transforming minutiae into sonnet-artifacts and treasures, adhering to the cycle's self-determining and self-questioning approach to conceptual writing. The universe of written, typefaced text expands to take on the online hypertext and found materials (e.g., Facebook Memories, art exhibition notices, song playlist). 

Sa Halip na mga Bulaklak (Instead of Flowers), the fifth book, deepens the cycle's Oulipian influence by working within and breaking down the constraints or shackles of the sonnet form. It freely appropriates other forms and media of artistic expression (painting, film, chess game) through the three sequences within this volume. 

The cycle, which was conceived as a tribute to the date paintings of On Kawara, now becomes more expansive as it becomes more self-reflexive. It now mimics other art forms, supplying parenthetical critique or commentaries on three creative impulses: Agnes Martin's grid paintings, Abbas Kiarostami's shot frames in his last film, and Mikhail Tal's tablero (chessboard). Here is the first board in the third sequence, on the Soviet chess grandmaster Mikhail Tal.

[Tablero 1]

Misha, sa iyo ang ahedres 
ay isang sining kaya naman 
nakamamalikmata ang iyong 
pambihirang mga pakana; 
kay lawak ng 64 na parisukat 
sa iyong isipang nagsasapin-
sapin ang salimuot ng sulong 
kada sulong, at mga sakripisyo, 
hanggang hindi na masundan 
ang kahihinatnan o minsan 
pagkakamali ang hangganan 
pero hindi ka nangangamba 
sa mga posibilidad, sa halip 
nananahan sa mga maaari.

[Tablero 1]

Misha, for you chess 
is a form of art that is why 
it is a treat to witness 
your brilliant stratagems; 
the expanse of 64 squares is a vast 
tangle inside your mind unfold-
ing layers of complexity in move 
after move, and the sacrifices, 
until the outcome can no longer 
be predicted or the times 
when the wrong move determines 
the endgame but you never shy away 
from possibilities, instead 
you thrive on them. 

If one is to choose a translation project from the cycle, the translator can do worse than begin with Sa Halip na mga Bulaklak, which, at this point, constitutes the most formally inventive and "translatable" book in the series. [By translatability, one needs to revisit Walter Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator" or Arguelles's short essay "Hinggil sa Pagsasalin" (On Translation), from Pilas ng Papel (2014).]

* * * 

It is fitting then to discover that the concluding sequence of Sonetoismo takes as the main frame of its canvas some 45 paintings of angels by Paul Klee (1879–1940), the Swiss-born German expressionist painter who produced numerous paintings of winged creatures embodied in a style that is at once minimalist, opaque, and abstract.

This decidedly ekphrastic turn of the sonnet sequence says a lot about the clear ambition of Sonetoismo. To excavate ideas and feelings from the sketches of a high modernist painter. To sift through the sure and silly strokes in the drawings and correlate them with his own lived experiences. To filter and refract from within Klee's depiction of angels his own idiosyncratic view of history and the role of art to critique its trajectory. 

"Every angel is terrifying," wrote Rainer Maria Rilke in the first Duino elegy. Arguelles inverted this sense in the final couplet of his "Anghel na Di-Tapos, 1939" (Unfinished Angel, 1939): Nanghihilakbot / lahat ng anghel (Every angel / is terrified). The preceding lines of the sonnet speak of the angel looking upward as if praying for all suffering to end or dreaming of a piece of heaven for children even if it knows that nothing, except bombs, will fall from heaven.

Where there's Klee, there's Walter Benjamin, another guiding spirit of this final volume. Their intersection is the signature painting at the center of Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History." Arguelles's sonnet about this painting is a synthesis of the volume's central concern about art's inevitable failure to tame history.

Angelus Novus, 1920

Ayon sa nasulat, nang makita 
ng mga bata ang anghel, anila, 
"yan ay batang namatay." Para 
kay Benjamin, ito ang anghel 
ng kasaysayan. Aniya, ibig nitong 
manatili upang muling buhayin 
ang mga patay (lalo na marahil 
ang mga bata) at ang mga guho 
ay muling itayo. Ngunit batid 
na walang makapaghihimalang 
anghel na nasabit ang mga pakpak 
sa daluyong sa langit na lubhang 
marahas kaya hindi na muling 
maisasara upang maipangyakap.

Angelus Novus, 1920

It was written that when the children 
saw the angel, they said, 
"that was a child who died." For 
Benjamin, it was the angel 
of history. For him, it wanted to 
stay put so it could bring to life 
the dead (the children, 
most of all) and so that the ruins 
could be built again. But it was known 
that no angel was miraculous 
whose wings got caught in a 
storm of heaven so terrifying that
it could no longer close its wings to 
draw the children into its embrace. 

Several sonnets directly reference the suffering of children in Gaza. As mentioned in "Arkanghel, 1938": At sa bawat panahon, / patuloy ang pagdurusa (And in every era, suffering abides.) 

Klee's angels and proto-angels are a perfect foil to the final volume's paradoxical dictum for humanity and its artists and workers to stay put (like the angel of history), to persist no matter what, and to put one's faith in nothing, to hold on to nothing like your life depended on it. In "Nililikhang Anghel, 1934" (Angel in the Making, 1934), the poet directly paints this paradox of creation. The angel in the making is already there, hiding in plain sight, in the constituent elements of the canvas: sa mga narito nang linya, / kulay, hugis—bilog, krus, / tatsulok—at sa kung-ano (in the lines already here, / in the colors, shapes—circle, cross, / triangle—and whatever.)

The complexity of the world is mirrored in Klee's angels which the poet here carefully reconsiders and structures in sonnet form, with profound care and curatorial intelligence, to craft a suffering world, a world in despair. And yet there are always moments of heart and optimism, moments of beauty and happiness peeking behind the canvas. After considering "Pares ng Anghel, 1931" (Angel Pair, 1931) as seemingly a pair of angels bound together to suffer eternally like Paolo and Francesca in Dante's second circle of hell, the poet would flip this idea and take an alternative view: Masdan, mukha silang masaya / sa kabila ng dustang daigdig. (Look closer, they appear happy / in spite of the forsaken world.)

The coda of Sa Wala Ka Maniwala consists of seven sonnets: one on Benjamin's belongings left in a hotel; five ekphrastic sonnets on Allan Balisi's series of paintings about clocks and time; and an extra-long, 14-page sonnet on Bea Camacho's artwork Absence, with each sonnet line occupying one page. The first of these pieces is a simple list evoking the palpability of an absence.

Mga Naiwan ni Benjamin 
sa Hotel de Francia, 
Setyembre 25, 1940

Isang maletang katad
Isang bulawang relo
Isang pares ng salamin
Mga dokumento
70 dolyar
500 francs
Isang pipa
Isang pasaporte
Larawang pampasaporte
Larawang pampasaporte
Larawang pampasaporte
Larawang pampasaporte
Larawang pampasaporte
 Larawang pampasaporte 


Belongings Left by Benjamin 
in Hotel de Francia, 
September 25, 1940

One leather briefcase
One gold watch
Eyeglasses
Documents
70 dollars
500 francs
A pipe
One passport
A passport-sized photograph
A passport-sized photograph
A passport-sized photograph
A passport-sized photograph
A passport-sized photograph
A passport-sized photograph 

The central alignment of the lines, as well as the discrete number of the belongings, authenticates the tangibility of the stuff left behind. Instead of saying six photographs, the repetition gives life to an existence forever missed.

* * * 

"It is the misfortune (but also perhaps the voluptuous pleasure) of language not to be able to authenticate itself," says Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida (tr. Richard Howard). Without the paintings before us, we can only imagine the turns of pencil and paint in every turn of phrase, the suppositions and assumptions in the canvas. 

Ekphrastic poetry, in this sense, comes closest to the definition of translation. [This idea of ekphrasis as translation, and translation as ekphrasis, has solidified in my mind after translating—without the benefit of looking at the subject photographs—Erwin C. Lareza's Sonambulista (2025), a collection of 29 poems based on 29 photographs.] A translation is forever bounded by the material source in front of the translator. Ekphrastic writers (and translators) are slaves to the material art in front of them (cf. George Szirtes, who says in a recent Asymptote interview that a translator is a servant of the master). 

But a true ekphrastic writer (and translator) has infinite degrees of freedom to reconcile their experience of the world (and language) with the work (image or text) at hand. With a combination of fidelity, deviation, variation, and gut feel, the previously untranslated (or ekphrastically undescribed) has now been created and given a life of its own. The translation and the ekphrasis are now the new living, breathing drafts that constitute the afterlife of the original and breathe on their own.

It is perhaps instructive to go back to Benjamin's distinction between critique and commentary from his essay on Elective Affinities, quoted by Hannah Arendt in her introduction to Illuminations (Mariner Books, 2019). This is Benjamin's idea of the relationship between the "truth content" of artworks and their subject matter.

Critique is concerned with the truth content of a work of art, the commentary with its subject matter. The relationship between the two is determined by that basic law of literature according to which the work’s truth content is the more relevant the more inconspicuously and intimately it is bound up with its subject matter. If therefore precisely those works turn out to endure whose truth is most deeply embedded in their subject matter, the beholder who contemplates them long after their own time finds the realia all the more striking in the work as they have faded away in the world. This means that subject matter and truth content, united in the work’s early period, come apart during its afterlife; the subject matter becomes more striking while the truth content retains its original concealment. 

Critique, hence, is the task of ekphrasis and translation. This concluding volume fulfills the promise outlined in the rest of Sonetoismo. The sonnets are more than commentaries on life and art. They are a critique of the living substance that animates mortal life and timeless art, transforming source materials into new forms, with new intentions and afterlives.