I once accompanied my friend, Chi Le, to one of the many ‘street bookstores’ in Hanoi. And there I was amazed at my first site of books, piled on top of each other beside a busy highway, by the world’s greatest writers: Borges, Sinclair Lewis, Camus, Flaubert, Hemingway, Buck in Tieng Viet, Vietnam’s national language.
Although most Vietnamese college students do not read and write in English, this does not mean, however, that they are deprived of the chance to read these classics of world Literature. In fact, having these books in their language places them at an advantage because the burden brought by mentally translating every word and phrase has already been eliminated allowing them to proceed in doing something of even greater importance, and that is seeing themselves and their experiences in the context of these works.
Most Vietnamese students are knowledgeable about these great authors and their works only that they learned about them in their native language. It is worth noting, nonetheless, that most of these works that are considered canons were originally written in a different language, not in English, as these are mostly English translations.
In the Philippines, things are totally different. Most Filipinos look down on works written in Filipino or any regional language. No one is interested in translating these works to Filipino because reading them in English is more ‘convenient’, some are even skeptical that Filipino has enough stock of words in vocabulary to accurately capture the thoughts in the original work. Some would even declare that English is easier to read and understand than Filipino
But who do we fool? Our students’ English proficiency is on a rapid decline. The ubiquity of BPO companies in the country is giving us a skewed perception of the general condition of the use of English in the country. Granting that we’re able to mimic the American twang or the British nonchalance when speaking, we’re missing the point if majority of the population is living in the darkness of assumed literacy.
And from this something got through me. This blog Salìn, a Filipino word that means ‘translated’ is the product of this desire to make these works more accessible to the reading public. As an initial public offering, I am posting here my translation of an article written by my favorite essayist Umberto Eco. In the mean time, as I am yet to develop fluidity in style and faithfulness to the originals, I shall begin translating shorter articles by Eco from his brief anthology of essays called “How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays” and will eventually try doing more ambitious translation projects.
http://raconteurist.bravejournal.com
From where I am seated I could see the bluish gray mountains of Davao giving way to orange slits that are this day’s first lights of dawn. I’m at the international airport of this southern city waiting for my 6:30 flight to Iloilo City.
I thought that last night was going to be a blast, but it was nothing but a boring one spent watching cable reruns while eating bland food in a seedy motel some three kilometers from SM City. Using a mall to orient one’s self is nothing odd for most Filipinos as almost all major cities boast their own SM mall. And for a city one is not quite familiar with, like Davao City, I am left at the mercy of a department store to find myself in the greater scheme of existence.
I’ll be in my favorite city in the world an hour from now.
There is something explicitly funny, if not implicitly fishy, in the way we Filipinos think.
An ABS-CBN reporter praised people falling in line in front of different COMELEC offices in Manila until the wee hours of the evening catching special registrations scheduled by the Commission without mentioning that these people were there because they procrastinated, ignoring the almost one year given to them to register to vote for May.
http://wagnalang.wordpress.com
Chiz Escudero, one of the front liners in this presidential election is brandishing change and non-traditional politicking, but his ads are flagrantly traditional showing him in the time-tested and trite politician’s handshake with sampaguita garlands on his neck and bodyguards that keep a safe distance between him and the affectation of the public. There was, however, no mention of his platform of government, only a very broad, undefined clamor for change which only he probably knows what type, made even murkier by his lengthy, monotonous, and overly empathic statements. Change what? Lemme ask.
Filipino congressmen, 20 or more of them in the Lower House, are going to Las Vegas to watch Manny Pacquiao’s fight against Miguel Cotto on November 15. This is despite criticisms from some people in their league and the public. Still these 20 or so gutless politicians are pursuing their plans, unmindful of the negative public opinion. After all, this so called ‘public opinion’ has long been dismissed as a vestige of the golden age of Philippine politics, unnecessary and purposeless; this concept has long lost is power to influence the actions of our politicians. And it will not matter now, on November 15, or any time soon.
Moreover, to most Filipino politicians, there’s no better political ad than being seen, even for a split-second, beside Pacquiao after he knocked Cotto unconscious.
ABS-CBN’s Parol (Christmas lantern) ni Bro was just lighted. Now, it must inspire a different kind of hope in somebody who is crestfallen after a tiring day at work, riding a non air-conditioned bus plying EDSA-Kamuning flyover, and to see from a distance this giant hybrid lantern supposedly meant to symbolize the infant Christ. Something which he knows is nothing but another commercial posing.
Noynoy Aquino’s poll ad, which started airing last week, is another talk-of-the-town. For the first time, I saw Noynoy Aquino confident about himself, so sure that he’ll have May 2010. He’s never been like this before. He was an under-accomplished son of two heroes, whose only bill made to a law is changing the status of an obscure street in Tarlac, his home province, to a national highway.
Unable to prove himself, he unsuccessfully attempted to embrace the shadows that are bigger than he is. Caught by circumstance, he reluctantly accepted the challenge to lead a wounded country, thinking that having heroes for both parents is enough to bring change. In the desperation of the Filipino people for change, they are willing to literally try anyone, even an untried son of heroes.
And being one of them, this blogger, a Filipino himself, writes these queer thoughts about topics whose subjects are these odd island people.
The moon outside is simply stunning. I hope everyone is seeing it from my window.
I’ve never seen Luna as big, as beautiful, as bright as I am seeing it now. Good night everyone.
“There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.”
-George Carlin
To listen to love songs during late night programming when all cheesy and gut wrenching songs with romantic melodies and lyrics are playing is the worst advice one can give to somebody recovering from a recent breakup.
But tonight, just before all the FM radio stations in General Santos City sign off, I am doing something I would proscribe anyone from doing, with or without of late parting with his/her lover. But I cannot help it, I am doing my sister’s Math project, which she requested me to do last week. I procrastinated until this afternoon when she demanded me to do it with added stipulation that I have to be done with it tonight or she’ll have nothing to submit later this morning to her teacher, and that it will cost her her grades for this grading period. Being a brother ridden with biting guilt that I have not helped my sister with any of her assignments since she started schooling, I humbly acquiesce.
Example is this one below:
8. Of the apples inside the barrel that will be sent to Tampakan for Christmas, 1/13 are green, 2/4 are red Fuji variety, and 7/65 are sour yellow, the remaining apples are native ones grown in Kalsangi (a local farm in Polomolok, South Cotabato famous for its golf course and fine weather). What part of the apples in the barrel are native variety from Kalsangi?
Let me know if you know the answer.
I have no choice but to hear the songs coming from an old stereo to my left, since silence is a harsher company.
So here I am being drowned by Barry Manilow’s bromidic sermons about love, gasping in Air Supply’s heinous high notes, and helplessly manslaughtered by Engelbert Humperdinck 70s classic, while wracking my head to provide answers to the fraction word problems I wrote myself.
In general, love songs are meant to be confusing. The poetry, or prose, that makes up the so called lyrics is nothing but a gibberish that is arranged in such a way that it sounds intelligible to somebody whose judgment is clouded by a recent heartache or a newly found love. Every line is sprinkled with randomly chosen meaningless abstraction such as the word love (the most overused), memories, the only one, alone, you, heart, waiting, remember, now and then, tomorrow, sun, song I sing, all my life, day without you, and other ludicrous ideas that exist anywhere but in reality.
They all have silly notions that forever can be through, there can be bluer than blue, about a moonriver (a foolish idea) wider than a mile that can be crossed in style someday, somebody whose only want is to grow old with somebody, leaving on a jetplane to someday come back with her wedding ring, or saying ‘I’m yours’ while spending precious time doing an entirely dopey thing of checking one’s tongue in the mirror.
And it would be too much if I still have to comment on the melody. They all sound the same, with some little variations here and there, and whose only purpose is to make anyone of their unsuspecting victims to be out of touch with what’s real.
See, I almost forgot about my sister’s assignment. I have to continue writing now, while ‘Unchained Melody’ envelops my room with an eerie feeling of dread.
Today is the 1st of November, All Saints’ Day.
People in the Philippines remember their dead relatives on this day instead of the more appropriate day, tomorrow, the 2nd of November, All Souls’ Day. But no one is dictating people from this island what’s proper or not. They’ll do what please them and follow the traditions they’ve acquired from their parents, and hope to pass this on to their children.
My parents left our house early this morning to go to the cemetery where my uncle, grandfather, and great grandmother were buried. According to my mother, they cleaned the area and paid somebody to repaint their gravestones. A fact she said in a rather ironic tone to emphasize the money they could have saved had I waken up earlier and gone with them to the cemetery. I pretended not to care, and mentioned sarcastically the importance of having at least eight hours of sleep each day.
Good thing they transferred the bodies to this private cemetery several years ago from the municipal graveyard. If not, then aside from cleaning the grave, they would also have to find the grave and sort them from other identical graves, or worse would have to make do with somebody else’s grave to light candles for as most graves disappear for no reason.
This afternoon, my father asked me to grate coconuts he would use for the different delicacies made from sticky rice for the evening. This is the first time I spent November 1st with my family after six years. The different practices they were doing strike me as something curious; this after a long time of just doing them without asking why I was doing them.
Earlier this evening, my mother started putting small portions of the delicacies my father cooked into small plates, then took her seldom-used glasses and poured beer, Coke, and water inside. My youngest sister plucked four branches of red santan from my mother’s ornamental flower garden, and together with the food, placed them on top of the old sewing machine. I was even more shocked when my father left few cigarette sticks beside the plates of ‘food for the dead’, as he referred them. He added that the souls of our dead relatives will visit us this evening to partake the food we offered them. I could not believe my father unknowingly conspired with my mother. But he seemed not to care that I reacted quite vehemently.
She then complained why I did not want to join her for the prayer, and related with nostalgia how I used to accompany her during prayers for the dead when I was younger. I said ‘no’ and continued writing.
After her prayers, she returned to the living room and continued watching TV. “Ma, can I eat those (pointing to the food on top of the sewing machine) after midnight?”
“No,” she gravely replied.
I was a witness to my parent’s power to mobilize resources at quickest possible time, with efficiency that could even rival that of the Armed Forces of the Philippines.
We were in the middle of a very late breakfast when my parents proved to me again something that I am all too aware even before – my parent’s almost magical, if not occult-like, power to cause spontaneous generation of anything.
Our family has no concept of brunch; we breakfast at around 10 am during Saturdays and Sundays and move our lunch time to 2:30 in the afternoon. On our table are the usual poor man’s breakfast – fried fish, laswa (an Ilonggo dish made from a smorgasbord of vegetable from our backyard garden), and steaming rice. This is something I have been complaining about ever since I arrived home three weeks ago.
We heard a vehicle pulling over in front of our gate. A group of women got off a small pick up truck led by the youngest sister of my mother who is active in a Protestant religious group called Kingdom that is based in Davao City. There were 13 of them. She asked if they could have their lunch in our house. My mother being the ever hospitable did not hesitate to say yes.
I asked her how come. One moment were having a very simple breakfast of fish and sticky vegetable soup on Tupperware dishes, and in a matter of 15 minutes, she uncovered her expensive-looking china which I am sure she got at a bargain. She then asked my father to cook six chupas of rice, which translates to roughly 2 ½ kilos, and lo and behold, he’s using a really big pot that looks like the ones used by witches, which I do not know we have, until he started cooking rice.
My mother then removed a slab of frozen pork from the freezer and started thawing it in running water. After a minute, she changed her mind and took a 500-peso bill from her purse, gave it to my father and instructed him to buy roasted chickens in the plaza corner. It was too fast, and before I could comprehend what was occurring before me, my aunt and her team started devouring what we served them.
From this I learned important lessons about resource mobilization:
1. In a tightly knit society where people living next door know what you will have for dinner, it is a rule of thumb to live modestly and if possible blend in to keep them from concocting ugly stories whose subject is your steamy private life set in a French-like atmosphere of a film noir. People in rural areas are very post-modern without them being aware of it.
2. Expensive-looking china are not for every-day use. You’ll never know when a horde of religious women, who gets easily impressed by them, comes visiting your place.
3. Big pots are of extreme importance, and like the expensive-looking china, should be kept hidden as to avoid triggering your extremely nosy neighbors from inventing stories that can start modern-day witch hunt.
4. Set breakfast time, especially during weekends, at a normally accepted time; between seven to nine o’clock in the morning is the safest. This is to avoid being caught unaware by eventualities such as unexpected guests who always make it a point to schedule their visits at awkward moments and you’re in your ugliest housedress, giving you no time to mobilize needed resources.
5. In case you decide that you do not to bother yourself with these mundane tasks on a weekend, lock you gate and pretend you’re away enjoying your two days on a deserted island alone. This time, you can take advantage of your neighbors who will make stories, colorful ones, without you having to hint anything. From an escapade with an imaginary paramour, a dead body you want to dispose of in a coral atoll, to as grand as you contemplating to purchase an entire island.
At first I thought it was just a coincidence that every time I write entries for this blog, usually between 10 in the evening to midnight, I would catch my youngest sister comfortably propping herself in front of the television watching Pinoy Big Brother, an ABS-CBN franchise of a Dutch original program concept of placing good-looking people inside a house where every sneeze and scratch they do is captured by cameras positioned in every nook and cranny. Until it occurred to me that this scene would be a regular fixture of our evenings—me writing while my sister makes witty commentaries about the senseless program she obviously enjoys.
Programs such as PBB and other ‘reality’ shows and talent searches, when they were initially introduced in Philippine TV, provided a kind of novelty that Filipinos snapped without question. When media executives found out that singing competitions that showcase not just the singing talent of contestants but also their private and intimate lives raise ratings to astronomical level, they started flooding all afternoon slot before primetime with singing contests of this format. When it proved easier and more financially rewarding to search for new stars through a reality show than the usual process that a hopeful has to go through if only to have his share of the limelight through painful trial-and-error, both ABS-CBN and GMA each allotted an hour of its primetime for Star Circle Quest and Starstruck, respectively.
And just recently, in their aim to make programs even more ‘democratized’ as far as the people seen in these shows are concerned, both stations lowered the bar even further to accommodate the not-so-good-looking and not-so-talented members of the hoi polloi and the used-to-be invisible proletariat all in the name of fun and all derivative definition of the word ‘entertainment’.
So now we see common people swallowing glowing and smoldering embers, a man walking on a thin wire while carrying a water buffalo on his head, or a woman dancing to a Lady Gaga tune while evading speeding arrows from her husband’s bow, all these done in front of judges who are shocked dead, or are simply feigning this natural human response of being shocked to heighten more the already glaring out-of-this-world nature of these stunts.
We also see an entire barrio doing some stupid, but definitely funny, things on themselves to impress judges who are more interested in saying nasty things or declaring words of praise for talent when it is absent.
And so the common man contents himself with watching these programs, unable to complain against the shit he is seeing on TV. Without much choice, he continues viewing these programs, unaware that his subconscious has already been enveloped by the stink of the shit he sees on a daily basis. Until one day, he found himself dreaming of one day also leaving his dent, or if he is a little bit ambitions, conquering even for a day the spotlight in this very ephemeral industry we call show business.
After they are finished with their work constructing a house in the nearby village, they would ask the young boy named Joshua, aged 9, to go to the sari-sari store three blocks away to buy two lapad (a thin bottle) of Tanduay. During pay days, however, Joshua has to ask help from a playmate to carry two long-necked bottles of the same brand of rum, an additional lapad in case the two big bottles proved insufficient, and several transparent bags of ice.
During the 90s, before these alcoholic drinks from Manila inundated provincial sari-sari stores in Mindanao, local men would buy wholesale by the gallons coconut wine called tuba, more popularly called in Cebuano-speaking town as bahalina. This kind of wine has a lower alcohol content compared to commercial alcoholic drinks such as brandy or rum. This means that a group of six to eight men needs a dozen of gallons to achieve the desired degree of drunkenness enough to make them forget, even for a night, all their problems concerning their work, family, and some unanswered questions about the skewed sense of justice of the universe.
With or without money, they all spend their late afternoons drinking, drowning the bitterness of life in the equally bitter, cheap rum.
This drinking response was repeatedly used by Russian writers such as Chekov, Dostoyevsky, and Gorky, in their portrayal of hopelessness and resignation felt by working men who felt victimized by their fate and by the prevailing social precondition of their time. But it is worth emphasizing that these novels by great Russian authors were inspired by the events during the turn of the 20th century, more than a hundred years ago. In the Philippines, however, little has changed in the lives of the working class men. Most, after a tiring hard labor, are still chained in the routine of early evening alcohol bout because it is the easiest and most potent in causing temporary amnesia, even for several hours, from the drudgery of the ordinary and the banal.
In most of the time, when the spirit of alcohol has already taken over their usually timid selves, they run amok, start a fist fight, and then sleep soaked in their viscous puke or stinking urine. The following day, they awake and go back to their work as if nothing happened.
This after-work ritual is the only time that these men are able to recover their lost control, their freedom from their constricting work. When they’re drunk, they have a valid excuse to be themselves, to be more truthful to their nature which they would not otherwise be able to do when they are in constant fear of being laid off from their below minimum-wage work. It is only during this time when they are under the control of alcohol do they feel their power over their lives and their selves. Poverty, inequality, and unfair labor practices have long left them powerless.
In most western countries, drunkenness is a sign of a deep seated psychological problem, but in poor countries, such as the Philippines, inebriety is more of a result of glaring social disparities. It is the poor man’s response to the inability of the society to let him become himself.
Changing course
(Orhan Pamuk, The Implied Author, Other Colors Essays and a Story, Vintage. New York: 2007)
Classes have just started and, except for my class in Introduction to Journalism with so few students enrolled I could hear myself breathing while I am giving lectures, I can almost feel I’m indeed back to a setting where I think I am at my best—the academe.
I’ve been away from the university for a year and a half, and it’s not easy to come back when a lot of things have changed, gone, and been replaced. Now I know how students who after a decade of hiatus come back to continue their studies feel, only that in my case I am teaching. But the underlying realities, and difficulties, about dealing with change remain static. For somebody whose life is in a constant flux, confronting change is nothing new to me. I write because my tolerance for boredom is nearly nil. I realized that saying this places me in a very embarrassing position that forces me to admit that I am bored, forever under the spell of unbearable ennui. That’s why I cannot give up writing.
And although life in the academe is not as exciting, as defined in the more bacchanalian sense, compared to life outside, the realities we create inside its intellectual atmosphere is still as real as all other realities we can think of. These realities are as worthy of being documented.
But if before, during my insouciant existence in Manila, I could just write about anything my mind cared to write and post them in this blog site, disregarding any rule of decency and propriety, this time I decide to change the course a bit not only in the manner the posts are written but also the subjects of my short essays, commentaries, and opinions. This is not because of the want to come out wearing the same color of feathers as my colleagues. Only the desire to share my thoughts, this time more distilled; and it is hoped, more mature.
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