Poetry&Stuffby
MARNE KILATES
MARNE
S
KRIPTS
from
Antinostalgia & the Tokhang
Rhapsodies
from
Antinostalgia & the Tokhang
Rhapsodies
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
from
Antinostalgia & the Tokhang
Rhapsodies
Poems 2022
Poems 2022
Poems 2022
Poems 2022
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
My Two-Timing Love for Two Languages
(& My Practice of Translation)
ASKED OFTEN about my “process” of translation as a longtime translator mainly of poetry, but later also of prose; and mainly of literary translation but more frequently now of technical translation (I have been requested to translate into English or Filipino senate and congressional bills, resolutions and position papers), I have been quite hesitant to explain even to myself what this “process” is or might be. I thought it was enough that I was in the praxis and was not obliged to talk about the theory.
But I guess one can never really avoid these things—an academic friend reminded me that even the most hesitant, informal, but obligated explanation was a theory in itself—since I have been requested to share my experience in various literary and translation forums. And, in fact, let me recall now a recent engagement: I have been asked to actually teachtranslation to senior high school students as part of their creative writing course at the Philippine High School for the Arts. (The students were actually two in number, one for each semester, as there were dwindling enrollees in creative writing compared to the performing arts, such that after two semesters the attrition had taken its toll with zero enrollees. Since I actually found the one-on-one classes quite exhilarating, and I hope my two students did as well, the eventual absence of students put a stop to my more or less relaxing Monday trips to and afternoons in Makiling.)
Thus I found myself scrambling to read up on what I was just actually doing, to explain myself to me, and to my student. I found some friendly, practical descriptions from fellow poet practitioners—Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Ben Belitt, Nathaniel Tarn, and Alastair Reed, to name a few from old readings—but also the critical theorists like Walter Benjamin, apart the translated poets themselves like Borges when he was meditating on the incarnations and mutations of his poetry in translation.
Recalling my “career” of translation, the first “hint of fate” that I was going into this direction apart from writing my own poetry was that when I submitted my first poems in Tagalog to the GAT (Galian sa Arte at Tula) workshop in early 1988, Rio Alma’s first remark was that they sounded like translations. Of course they were because they were originally written in English (after college I quite seriously took up writing poetry with English as my writing language). I wanted so much to write in Filipino but my “translations” wouldn’t do. To be brief, the twists of fate were that I became the unofficial translator of GAT poets who were published in international anthologies, one who attended the Iowa Writers Workshop, and the GAT poet-singers who went into international concert tours (e.g., Heber Bartolome, Jess Santiago, and later friends like Pendong Aban of Grupong Pendong and the late Susan Fernandez) who needed translations of their songs for their program notes.
The feedback was encouraging when they returned—the translations were well appreciated and they kept being asked who their translator was. So the requests became more frequent and my next and first major translation assignment was to edit and translate, together with Mike L. Bigornia and Alfrredo Navarro Salanga (both late and much lamented and missed) Rio Alma’s first bilingual Selected Poems.And so I went into a parallel “career” of literary translation from Filipino into English while I attended the UP National Writers Workshop in 2004 as a writer in English. The workshop was experimental as it involved only one genre, poetry.
And so goes my little back story of how I came into my “parallel career” of literary translation. Now I came to reflecting on this as I finished helping edit and hopefully enhance an existing translation of Rolando Tinio’s May Katuwiran ang Katuwiran, and as I completed the 40th chapter of 45-chapter novel, Ilaw sa Hilagaby Lazaro Francisco. (Update: I am now on the 43rdchapter.) So what have I learned so far as my work of translation literally ran parallel to my own work of poetry over more than three decades? Quite a few, actually.
For one, languages have different habits, different ways of creating meaning. And this is most pronounced between two languages from much disparate and different language families, such as the Germanic, Anglo-Saxon English, which came to us by way of colonization from the opposite side of the world, and Tagalog (the basis of Filipino, the national language), which is part of the huge Austronesian family whose speakers populate the territory stretching from Madagscar at the coast of Africa to Polynnesia in the Pacific. (Languages of the same family, and much more in the "cousin" or "filial" relationship like Filipino native languages, have all the similarities you can think of, not really much difference/s.)
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So translating between languages of such disparate families as English and Filipino, is really no easy task unless you love both languages. It is a task like transplanting meaning between two soils of different islands separated by oceans. It is an acrobatic act of close reading, deep understanding, and necessitating much manipulation and maneuver to render, especially literary works, in the literal, idiomatic, figurative, symbolic, emblematic, and metaphorical modes of the target language. Indeed, it is an act of love for both languages because the translator must intimately know either and both the source and the target language.
There is something perfidious about it; the act of translation is both artful and manipulative, but at the same time authentic and other-seeking. As the Italian adage so ambivalently states, “Traduttore, tradittore”(translator, traitor), translation betrays the meaning of the source language only to reveal it and generate understading and ultimately, appreciation. That is why there is really no accurate or perfect translation because there are many new ways of transplanting meaning as there are translators, from different places and lexicons, from different times (the Bible is translated continually, there are newer and newer translation editions of theIliad and the Odyssey,there are a variety of ways of rendering idiomatic phrases in a different language and culture that constructs idioms differently, and there are numerous and endless amusing examples of untranslatable words).
Translation is the imperfect art, says Umberto Eco, but it is also the independent afterlifeof a work of language, according to Walter Benjamin. In the relatively new field of Translation Studies, one of its advocates, our one-time conference speaker Lawrence Venutti, describes translation as both a process of "domestication" and "foreignization." The translating or target language “domesticates” the source language by minimizing its strangeness through a transparent and fluent style; it “naturalizes” the source language and the process is sense-for-sense, free, and consists of dynamic equivalents (Venutti). “Foreignization” seeks to preserve the original cultural context in terms of setting, names, and values literal, faithful, and formal equivalents and is often alienating (Outi Paloposki).
In my own estimation, the foregoing styles or methods of translation overlap and combine in practice depending not on the translator’s preferences but on the necessities and ultimate literary goals and context. In my own case as a practicing translator, this becomes a “two-timing” love for my two writing languages, English and Filipino as I intimately know them. Rendering them intelligible to each other (or to their speakers and readers) is the only motivation for me to translate what I consider to be the best literary works, the supreme exemplars in the use of both languages or either language.
In another context, I am a victim as much of the English hegemony and American colonization when I love Robert Frost or T.S. Eliot or W.H. Auden or Seamus Heaney or W.B. Yeats. Just as I am impelled by my own Filipino-ness when I insist on the importance of a national language and express that love by translating into English—the language that has become my writing and creative language—the exemplars of our language, from Francisco Balagtas and Emilio Jacinto to Ildefonso Santos, A.G. Abadilla and Lazaro Francisco, and Rio Alma, Rogelio Mangahas, Lamberto Antonio, Ruth Elynia Mabanglo and numerous others of my contemporaries writing in the national language.
It is the same reason I admire our "regional" (for want of a better term) writers who persist in writing in their own language and in building their own bodies of literature (or works in the other areas or larang of knowledge), while acknowledging the need for Filipino because there is a Filipino nation being built out there. Many of these older and younger writers are bilingual and trilingual right at the start of their writing vocations, and have no complaints nor compunctions about it. They are simply Filipino writers practicing out of a multicultural and multilingual nation. That is what we are, where we are now, more or less, as far as I am concerned in the development of the national language and in our engagements with our second “official,” and borrowed, language.
And that is why, in the end, as I seek to explain myself to myself in my literary work, I find that I translate because I desire to partake in this engagement of languages, in the act of transplanting, cultivating, and resurrecting meaning in and among the archipelagos of culture, as it were, and across the gulf of relative ignorance and non-understanding.
Marne Kilates
12 July 2019
Makati South Hills
Parañaque