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. [Mikael de Lara Co's "Meditasyon sa Parang," from Epistolaryo ng Bagamundo at ang Tugon ng Multo (2026), also begins with a reference to 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 herald of terror?)]
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 three sonnets: one on Benjamin's belongings left in a hotel and two more ekphrastic sonnets, on Allan Balisi's series of paintings about clocks and time and Bea Camacho's artwork Absence. 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 vice versa, has solidified in my mind after attempting to translate—without the benefit of looking at the subject photographs—Erwin C. Lareza's Sonambulista, a work based on a series of 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 (painting 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.
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