On Translating Abner Dormiendo

“In Antipolo, you can find a museum” is a poem about desire that also points to the estranging effect and transfigurative power of art. The speaker faces “a painting [they] can’t comprehend,” one that frustrates them but also brings forth memories of a forgotten lover. The enigmatic painting both alienates the speaker and transforms their capacity for recall.

I think of translation in a similar way—as an act of estranging magic. The presence of an engkanto in Dormiendo’s poem suggests a kind of magical quality, since “engkanto” is a catch-all term for the many non-human entities in Indigenous Filipino cosmologies. A cognate of the Spanish word encanto introduced into the vernacular through colonial rule, engkanto also gestures toward the violent slippages of power and meaning that underpin the practice of translation. I struggled to find an English word that could capture both the word’s meaning and its troubling and troubled history. Enchant, charm, magic, glamor—each conveys something of the fantastical but also elides the colonial etymology of the original. In the end, I chose to include the word in the original Filipino, both as a signifier of an experience beyond literal comprehension and as a way to hold space, in the poem, for the aftereffects of violence.

“In Antipolo, you can find no statistics on suicide” provided a similar challenge. The poem opens with a pun that turns on the word laslas, an onomatopoeic verb meaning “to slash,” which, read backwards, is slang for masturbation. Again, I opted to keep the Filipino original, and appended “cut” and “touch” in the clause following as a near-palindromic slant rhyme (“cut” backwards is “touch,” almost). The reversing logic of the pun is key to how the rest of the poem unfolds, as the speaker turns “everything in Antipolo inside out,” until time and causality are themselves troubled.

In choosing to retain these words in the original Filipino, I hope to show how poems can move us even when their meaning isn’t transparent. In fact, the choice to employ language that resists comprehension, here via the interruption of English by another tongue, can itself be evocative. Dormiendo’s speaker, after all, finds themselves moved by a work of art whose meaning escapes them. Translation might put us face-to-face with works we can’t comprehend, but since when is full understanding necessary for something to change us?