Materials, for Preposterity

By design and by default, enclosed concrete spaces heavily secured in built structures exclude. Insiders isolate themselves from the wild natural world outside. They validate each other’s truths and cement their beliefs, so they only receive dubious outsiders, who undergo security checks, satisfy decorum requirements and speak the language. Voices harmonize and synchronize to the point of unison, as if hearing a fellow insider’s voice is no different from hearing one’s own, conjuring delusions of grandeur and visions of the future under the industry they thought they have built with their own hands. Their noble vocation, essential. Their technological knowledge, absolute. Their corporate confidence, intact. Thus, they tremble and panic when proven wrong.

Translations indeed extend original texts, as if giving them afterlives that seem familiar. But upon further scrutiny, imprecisions and deviations surface, concealing profound perceptions, or at times, revealing messages that the…

Before Buwan ng Wika ends, I published through my social media account “tokhang ang daigdig,” a poem rendered from Alejandro Abadilla’s “ako ang daigdig.” In every illuminating moment of replacing each of Abadilla’s ako with tokhang, the new work gradually forms and reveals itself as something relevant in these dark times, yet conscious of the limits of its being. I leave further reading and thinking up to those who want to dissect the derivative work, which, hopefully, has its own merits. So I can devote enough space to translation. Along the way, what Hans J. Vermeer calls skopos (aim) and/or commission (definition) shifted accordingly, that ended with the translatum (target text), “tokhang the universe.”