COMMODITY FETISHISM AND ART

Commodity Fetishism and the Crisis of Contemporary Art E. San Juan, Jr. University of Connecticut Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility...either cultivated or brought into being...The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present. — KARL MARX The smell of impending death rose from these avantgardes. The future was no longer theirs, though nobody knew whose it was. — ERIC HOBSBAWM It is no longer news anymore, at this late date, to declare that art, in our marketized planet, is deemed a precious commodity. Considered as property, artworks are bought and sold, circulated, forged, stolen, recovered, auctioned everyday. Profits are made for artists, merchants, smugglers, consumers, and anyone involved in trading/ merchandising. It’s banal or trivial to observe this fact. So intense was this commercialization from the mid-1950’s that Ian Burn complained how it spelled “corruption and the prostitution of the artist” (1999, 397). A few recent examples can be cited as prolegomena to our discourse. In Sotheby’s contemporary art auction in November 2013, avant-garde art confirmed its absorption by the market with the $104.5 million sale of Andy Warhol’s 1963 “Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster).” In 2007, his “Green Car Crash” sold for $1.7 million, a proof that the aura of the name dictates market value, with the subject or content of the artwork adding enough differentia specifica to mark its historical period or milieu. In the past, Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucien Freud” was sold for $142.4 million while Gerhard Richter’s abstract, MABINI REVIEW | VOL. XI (2022): pages 1-20 © 2022 San Juan, E. Jr. | ISSN 2012-2144 [I] “A.B. Courbet” was sold for $26.4 million and Cy Twombly’s “Poems to the Sea” (1959 drawings) was sold for $21.6 million (New York Times 2013). Recently, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 painting, Warrior,” a work which is said to symbolize the struggles of Black men in a white- dominated world, was sold in a Christie auction for $41.9 million, which does not rival a Basquiat painting sold for $110.5 million in 2017. The earlier commodification of cubist art (Picasso, in particular) has been diagnosed by John Berger (1965; see also Raphael 1980). Together with Warhol and Picasso, Basquiat continues to be a key player in the blue- chip art market even in this crisis of globalized neoliberalism. Commodification seems to have climaxed in a species of trading rituals involving postmodern art, including both “conceptual” and “post-conceptual” species. Exchange-value (embodied in money as cause) has displaced use-value (now conceived as effect). At the outset, the term “conceptual” art offers a conundrum since it is not clear what concept is referred to, or whether the term designates the artist’s intention not necessarily fulfilled or carried out (Smith 1974; Godfrey, 1998). Indeed, Sol LeWitt states that “the artwork may never leave the artist’s mind” (1999,107), though how we can verify or ascertain this remains a mystery. In any case, a metalepsis seems to have occurred. Art generates the concept (telos; universal significance) instead of the concept (vision or intuition) engendering the performative, linguistic/ discursive, visual practices that followed expressionism and cubism: constructivism, abstract expressionism, kinetic art, fluxion happenings, pop art, minimalist art, op art, conceptual art, etc. A historic, epoch-making event occurred at the threshold of postmodernity. In 1973, the “dematerialization of the art object” from 1966-1972, was documented by the critic, Lucy Lippard. It was inaugurated by Marcel Duchamp’s “readymades.” With this gesture, Peter Osborne asserts, “art changed its focus from the form of language to what was being said,” changing the nature of art by focusing not on morphology, structure, or medium, but on function—from “appearance’ to conception. Osborne further notes that “all art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually” (2002, 13). The idea/intention/concept preempts its hypothetical realization and its physical embodiment or actualization. [2] MABINI REVIEW | Volume XI (2022) The epochal transformation initiated by Duchamp abolished the categorical distinction between creative artifice and found objects/ incidents in nature and everyday life. Minimalism further destroyed traditional barriers and conventions. Performance art reconceptualized the art-object as an act or event constituted through and disappearing into time, sustaining itself at the level of its motivating agenda. No longer can art be confined to its visual or spatial experience and pleasure attached to the medium or vehicle. Following the break-up of formalist modernism, minimalism followed after with Sol Lewitt’s 1967 manifesto, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.” Osborne summarizes the lineages of negation characterizing conceptual art and its aftermath: 1. The negation of material objectivity as the site of the identity of the artwork by the temporality of ‘intermedia’ acts and events. 2. The negation of medium by a generic conception of ‘objecthood,’ made up of ideal systems of relations. 3. The negation of the intrinsic significance of visual form by a semiotic, or more narrowly, linguistically based onceptual content. 4. The negation of established modes of autonomy of the artwork by various forms of cultural activism and social critique (2002, 18). It is the last negation that generates art-oriented activities intervening into everyday life in order to transform sociopolitical structures. In this process, alternative or subaltern ideological positions are explored, analyzing, and defining the relations of power at play in all cultural institutions, in particular the appropriative mechanisms of the museum and the market. Social and political critique ensues from the practice of diverse forms of conceptualist experiments, procedures, and historically defined forms. Consequences of Dematerialization As early as 1970, Mel Bochner, one of the practitioners of “conceptual art,” questioned the epithet’s ambiguity and lack of precision. In any case, the rubric “conceptual art” has been used to cover the works created by artists such as Sol LeWitt, Robert Smithson, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, Bruce Naumann and others during its MABINI REVIEW | Volume XI (2022) [3] apogee and crisis in the years 1966-72 (Godfrey 1998). While Kosuth proposed that conceptual art defines itself by questioning the nature of art, Lewitt posited its essence to be found in “the idea or concept” which becomes “a machine that makes the art” (1967), the concept itself subsuming the planning and decisions that enable the execution of the art-work. LeWitt’s pronouncements have become so scriptural that a popular Dictionary of Theories ascribes conceptual art as a “cerebral approach” championed by Lewitt in 1967 as a reaction against post-war formalistic art. Since the concept or idea becomes paramount in the artistic process, “the planning and concept are decided beforehand, but the end result is intuitive and without recognizable purpose” (Bothamley 1993, 108-09). Why and how do we explain this shift of aesthetic concern from the material embodiment of art-ideas to the ideas/notions themselves? One answer is provided by Marx’s theory of commodity-fetishism and its further elaboration in Marxist-Leninist thought (for expositions of the Marxist approach, see Arvon 1973; Laing 1978; Johnson 1984). Reification and Alienation In the initial chapters of Capital Volume 1, Marx delineated the two aspects of that mysterious entity, the commodity. Its use-value refers to the utility of the product, its realization in the act of consumption. Its twin aspect, the exchange-value, is only manifest in the process of exchange in the market where the deposited quantity of labor-time expended in producing the product—the form of value—is recognized. Its “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” inheres in the fact that “the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour” so that the social relations among producers appear then as relations among the products/commodities. In short, “definite social relations between men...assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things” (Marx 1978, 320-321). That insight serves as the matrix of social alienation in a profit-centered political economy (for further elaboration, see Meszaros 1970; Ollman 1971). What lesson is conveyed by Marx’s insight? In producing any useful thing that is exchanged, the objective value of that thing is ideal, [4] MABINI REVIEW | Volume XI (2022) a suprasensible notion translated into price, whereby private labor appears as part of social total-labor. However, the commodity’s abstract ideal property (exchange value) appears as if it were an objective, socio-natural property of the object itself, embedded in the product. Thus, social relations between people assume a phantasmagorical form of relations between things, “social hieroglyphs” (Osborne 2005, 15). Something purely social, exchange value, conceals itself in the product, generating social illusions found in religion, ideologies, and various mystifying practices: the rationale of the hegemonic neoliberal order now in crisis but still devastating the world today. How do we escape from this fetishized world based on historically varied exploitation of labor-power? Marx responds: “The religious reflections of the actual world can vanish only when the practical relations of everyday life between people, and between humanity and nature, present themselves in a transparent and rational form. The social life-process, which is based on the material process of production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it becomes production by freely associated men and women, and stands under their conscious and planned control” (Marx 1976, 173). Art as a form of religious thinking draws its power from the exchange-value it commands, as illustrated earlier. In order to suppress this potential, conceptualists strive to eliminate the concrete embodiment (various media or performance) of the artists’ intention, including the situations or places where they customarily occur (museums, galleries, etc.). Those sites/situations are transvalued, negated, sublimated. “Almost anything goes” as art today from the art-criticism point of view, Cynthia Freeland remarks. She writes: “Even shocking art like Serrano’s Piss Christ can now count as art, an object with the right sort of idea or interpretation behind it...It communicates thoughts or feelings through a physical medium” (2001, 39). Conceptualists claim that a physical medium is not obligatory. Paradoxically, despite this theoretical claim, their activity does not create transparent, rational arrangements since the whole transaction of learning, judging, and appreciating the art-idea still transpires in a capitalist, profit-dominated society. Ironically, the motivation-idea becomes a value to be communicated or exchanged. While art-as-commodity may be intentionally transcended, the artist remains anchored and circumscribed in a world of alienated institutions and practices governed by the profit-motive, by capital MABINI REVIEW | Volume XI (2022) [5] accumulation. The conceptualist remains a victim of this illusion, his desire for knowledge free from object-attachment was left unsatisfied due to the inescapable reality of his reified, commodified milieu (Wood 1996). This epitomizes the irony of commodified de-materialized art. Aesthetic Discipline Allow us to offer a brief historical parenthesis at this juncture. Before venturing further into nomenclature and further inquiry, it might be illuminating to review the traditional field of aesthetics and, with it, the theory of art. Art and aesthetics need to be differentiated, the former dealing with the object produced or created and the latter with the experience and knowledge of the art-object. Ultimately, however, with the postmodern interrogation of the concept of art (in both the ontological and phenomenological senses), the two aspects coalesce in the conceptualist revision. Whether such a result is helpful in clarifying both remains to be resolved. Meanwhile, a historical investigation into the status of the art-object as a distinctive category might be instructive and heuristic. Foregoing a complete history of the origin of aesthetics from classical antiquity up to the Renaissance, we may begin with German philosophical idealism. Aesthetics (from the Greek aisthesis, “perception, sensation”), aesthetics was first theorized by Alexander G. Baumgarten in 1750 as “the science of sensory knowledge or cognition” whose aim is beauty, not truth. It was later elaborated by Kant as “the science of the rules of sensibility in general,”chiefly concerned with the a priori principles of sensible experience. In Thomistic aesthetics, the intuitive knowledge of the sensible is grounded in intellectual judgment as a knowledge of the universal. The artistic criteria of integritas, consonantia, and claritas are abstract ideas mediating the comprehension of the sensibles (Eco 1988). In his Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant posited aesthetics as involved with the subjective feeling of pleasure and pain, hence aesthetic judgments pertain to the subject, not the object represented. What is beautiful is tied with disinterested pleasure, a judgment of taste based on immediate intuition without a concept. Kant argues that “Beauty is the formal aspect of purposiveness, insofar as it is perceived in the objectified without the representation of purpose...[T]hat which is [6] MABINI REVIEW | Volume XI (2022) generally pleasing, without a concept, is beautiful” (quoted by Guttman 1963, 18). In effect, conceptualists reject this aesthetic speculation about beauty as meaningless. Formal purposiveness without purpose-- this axiom established the privileged autonomy of art which prevailed up to Clement Greenberg’s pontifications on abstract expressionism. Two additions to Kant may be cited here. First, Schelling proposed the romantic theme of beauty as “the Infinite infinitely presented,” while Hegel is said to have summed up the classic traditional thinking in his view that Beauty equals Idea, beauty as the sensuous manifestation of the Idea. However, the beautiful is nothing unless it is externalized or mediated in the work of art in which the beholder and the artist’s mind encounter each other. The idea then is the content of the art-work in its dynamic historical evolution. In the nineteenth century, the psychological approach dominated the investigations of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Herbart and Fechner, the latter inaugurating the empirical-experimental approach to aesthetics. This was followed by Theodor Lipps’s notion of empathy, with esthetic enjoyment conceived as “objectivized self-enjoyment,” an inner imitation of artistic creation. With Benedetto Croce, this idealist line of speculation culminates in art as intuitive activity, an expression of inwardness, eluding the screen of formal mediation. Hegelian Articulation To the rationalist-idealist line of speculation, Hegel introduced a historicizing orientation. He emphasized the philosophical function of art as a vehicle of reason in quest of universals realized in history. While Hegel believed art to furnish “the sensuous semblance of the idea,” for Croce, universals and history disappear. Croce reduced art to lyrical intuition, separated from the phenomenal contingent world, subsisting in pure intuition whose modes of expression germinate in the artist’s mind. The actualization of this intuition is secondary; expression and communication do not affect the value of the unreflected intuition. Unconcerned with the play of imagination or the immediacies of feeling, Croce absolutized intuition as a complex blend of idea, image, and expression whose singularity, however, resists philosophical generalization (Richter 1994, 145). Croce’s expression theory complements the formalist stress on essential form in Clive Bell, Roger Fry, I.A. Richards, and their American counterparts in the MABINI REVIEW | Volume XI (2022) [7] New Criticism. Whether the naturalism of John Dewey’s theory of art as intense experience can be reconciled with Croce, is still a debatable proposition. Aesthetics as an inquiry into normative concepts and values regarding beauty may have given way to the modern interest in a descriptive and factual approach to the phenomena of art (production and reception) and aesthetic experience. Beauty is now construed as an effect of form, of discursive signifying practice. One can mention Charles Morris’ idea of art as iconic symbol of value, as well as Susanne Langer’s conception of art as the symbol or expressive form whereby emotions are rendered apprehensible in their formal embodiments or styles. Both thinkers are anathema to conceptualism. More congenial to postmodernist aesthetics would be the semiotic approach of Charles Sanders Peirce. He proposed an innovative approach in which a constellation of signs (icon, index, symbol) in the art-work becomes the bearer of meaning and significance. These signs generate a dynamic network of interpretants that encompass form and its organic links with lived experience, exploring virtually all the mimetic and expressive possibilities of art that we have so far summarized here (for elaboration, see San Juan 2022). Historicizing Form Together with beauty and the sublime, the ideal of autonomy and artistic genius dissolved with the age of mechanical reproduction. Walter Benjamin dealt a fatal blow to the norm of authenticity intrinsic to the romantic idea of imagination. In capitalist society, the Here and Now of the original is constantly being destroyed by the commodification of labor and practically all domains of human life. Besides the formal properties that authenticate the art-work, the contents of art (idealistic content-aesthetics) have suffered the impact of contingency, chance or accident, entropy, the inexorable incursions of the unpredictable. Art is not timeless but changeable, subject to the process of becoming. Hegel’s “bad conscience” implies that art is never for itself but requires, in fact demands, the exegesis and interpretation of others outside the artist. Art’s truth-content cannot be fully exhausted by any single hermeneutic organon. Since interpretations are open and endless, all art is subject to historicity and the mutability of standards and criteria of judgment (Morawski 1974). [8] MABINI REVIEW | Volume XI (2022) Alas, have we finally entered the forbidden zone of undecidability, relativism, antifoundationalist skepticism, and cynical reason? So if anything goes, what is the point of argument, dialogue, inquiry? Bitcoins, derivatives, simulacra, expungible fantasies previously called “the sublime” now dominate exchanges, making precarious or unfeasible any agreement or consensus on purposes, motives, intentions, goals. Only the process of everyday living compels us to proceed as though we are all on the same page, using a lexicon and code understood by all participants in the interminable conversation. In this new catastrophic period of triumphalist globalism, the issue of materialist aesthetics appears not only anachronistic but also a perverse joke. Except those fashioned for immediate use- value (for therapy, etc.), all art in capitalism has become a commodity (exchange-value), as attested to by the auctions enumerated earlier. And since Marxist revolutionaries have allegedly become obsolete if not rare today, aesthetics has become the preserve of museum curators, academic experts/shamans, and pseudo-theologians attached to art galleries and auction houses. Except for Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, John Berger, Adolfo Sanchez Vazquez, and the late Polish philosopher Stefan Morawski, no serious Marxist thinker has devoted a wholesale engagement with the theory of art, with aesthetic criticism and inquiry in our late-capitalist stage. This is a conjecture, obviously open to future correction. Indeed, in a 1983 international conference on “Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,” Michelle Barrett bewailed the lack of adequate discussion of aesthetic pleasure and value among various tendencies in the left. Given the vogue of poststructuralist textualism and postmodernist nominalism, aesthetics was overshadowed by or subsumed in discourses on ideology, representation, and the deconstruction of the subject. Nature and objective reality have been cancelled out to give room to the floating signifier, differance, liminality, and contingency. Henceforth, the “free play” of the liberated signifier would call the shots. Subjectivity, or subject-positions, become reduced to simulacra, aporia, or undecidables wholly vulnerable to infinite semiosis,that is, interminable sequence of interpretations without any conclusion. MABINI REVIEW | Volume XI (2022) [9] Ironically, this putative chaos did not discourage Barrett from giving self-confident judgments. She nonchalantly dismissed vulgar concerns about art’s “truth” and social relevance because the meanings of art-works are not immanent but constructed “in the consumption of the work” (1988, 702). Readers/spectators actively co-create the meaning and significance of the art-work. Contrary to the orthodox ideas about typical characters and organic form, Barrett holds that ideological content and political implications are not given in the art-work but are effects or constructions by readers/audiences, an assertion justified within the framework of a reader-response/reception aesthetics. This position is clearly symptomatic of the move of Barrett’s cohort toward a more open-ended, adventurist, experimentalist stance, rejecting not only reflectionist theory (Lukacs; Goldman) but also interventionist approaches (Gramsci; Sartre). But what exactly do we mean by a Marxist approach to aesthetics as a mode of distributing the sensible (Ranciere 2004)? Interrogating the Messenger In the wake of the post-structuralist transvaluation of texts as the ceaseless play of differance, of the unchoreographable dance of signifiers, which one may interpret as a historically specific reaction in the Western milieu to dogmatist leftism in its various manifestations- -economistic, sectarian, mechanical, empiricist, etc.--I would like to reaffirm once more the occluded yet irrepressible matrix of art in the Marxist concept of praxis and political struggle based on Marx’s insight into commodity-fetishism. Enunciated by Marx in the “Theses on Feuerbach” and The Eighteenth Brumaire in particular, this inscription of the aesthetic in transformative action I would call the “Leninist moment,” the hegemonic or ethico-political crux in Marxist critical theory. Let us explore its relevance to understanding the politics of conceptualist writing as propounded by its main theoreticians (Alberro and Stimson 1999; Dworkin and Goldsmith 2011). The original intent of conceptual artists was democratic, subversive and revolutionary. Not only were art and its institutions converted by them into a field of negotiation in order to link it with the everyday politics of bourgeois society; they rebelled against the fetishizaion of art and its systems of production and distribution. But as Benjamin Buchloh (2006) observed, Pop art, and other postconceptualists [10] MABINI REVIEW | Volume XI (2022) achieved a “liberal reconciliation” and compromise of high art and mass culture. A test-case can be offered here in the controversial performance of canonical “uncreative” writer Kenneth Goldsmith. The Goldsmith Incident On March 13, 2015, in the program Interrupt3 sponsored by Brown University, Goldsmith performed a 30-minutes reading of the official St. Louis County autopsy report on “The Body of Michael Brown.” Brown is the 18-year old black man fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. The first report stated that Goldsmith introduced his poem as “something to do with quantified self,” but an artist Faith Holland remarked that Goldsmith had re-arranged the original text, focusing on the description of the Cranial Cavity in the line “The weight of the unfixed brain is 1350 gm,” with the poem ending in the line “The remaining male genitalia system is unremarkable” (Steinhaven 2015). The hands of the “uncreative” poet displayed itself quite obtrusively. He was no innocent bystander or naive witness. Immediately came an avalanche of negative responses, such as: “Goldsmith appropriates Michael Brown’s murdered body, reframed as his poetry, and retweets the angry reactions. A troll with tenure,” with even more violent condemnation mounted a few days later. Death threats ensued, prompting Goldsmith to apologize for the pain he had caused, asking Brown University to withold the video of his performance. C.A.Conrad summed up the outrage in quoting the poet Anne Waldman’s comment: “What was Kenny Goldsmith thinking? That it’s okay to self-appoint and perform the autopsy report of murdered black teenager Michael Brown and mess with the text, and so ‘own’ it and get paid for his services? No empathy no sorrow for the boy, the body, the family, ignorant of the ramifications, deaf ear to the explosive demonstrations and marches? Reeks of exploitation, of the ‘racial imaginary.’ Black Dada Nihilismus is lurking on the lineaments of the appropriated shadow of so much suffering” (Conrad 2015). Anatomy of an Inquest We have been ushered into the domain of ethico-political judgment. What seems on trial here are the central techniques of the allegorical gsture of appropriating a pre-existing object or text, and MABINI REVIEW | Volume XI (2022) [11] the procedure of montage. Is the artist free to do whatever he wants, at any time and place? True to his previous practice of copying and reproducing raw materials—eyewitness reports from radio/television broadcasts, as shown in his 2013 book, Seven American Deaths and Disasters, Goldsmith tried to prove that inflammatory material, handled in a certain way, can “provoke outrage in the service of a social cause.” His Facebook entry reveals the “idea” or motivating principle behind the import of information: I took a publicly available document from an American tragedy that was witnessed first-hand (in this case by the doctor performing the autopsy) and simply read it. Like Seven American Deaths and Disasters, I did not editorialize; I simply read it without commentary or additional editorializing... The document I read from is powerful. My reading of it was powerful. How could it be otherwise? Such is my long-standing practice of conceptual writing: like Seven American Deaths, the document speaks for itself in ways that an interpretation cannot. It is a horrific American document, but then again, it was a horrific American death... I indeed stated at the beginning of my reading that this was a poem called The Body of Michael Brown; I never stated,”I am going to read the autopsy report of Michael Brown’... That said, I didn’t add or alter a single word or sentiment that did not preexist in the original text, for to do so would be to go against my nearly three decades’ practice of conceptual writing, one that states that a writer need not write any new texts but rather reframe those that already exist in the world to greater effect than any subjective interpretion could lend. Perhaps people feel uncomfortable with my uncreative writing, but for me, this is the writing that is able to tell the truth in the strongest and clearest way possible.... Ecce homo. Behold the man....(quoted in Flood 2015) Evidently, in quest of the truth via reframing, the poet’s ethics became muddled in defending his habit. His mendacity exceeds the boldness of his disingenuous apologia. Contradicting his testimony that he did not editorialize, Goldsmith added that he “altered the text for poetic effect; he translated medical terms into plain English and [12] MABINI REVIEW | Volume XI (2022) narrativized the words “in ways that made the text less didactic and more literary.” The qualification sounds pathetic. Goldsmith claimed that he acted normally for an artist: “People behave very badly in the art world, but it’s what pushes boundaries and makes discussion” (Wilkinson 2015). A group called Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo called Goldsmith’s conceptual poetry “building blocks of white supremacy.” The repartee that persisted for quite some time provides lessons in how postmodern aesthetics, despite its claims to go beyond conventional ethics and morality, cannot elude public criticism if they are staged in public, paid by the sponsors, with the sanction of institutional legitimacy. Poetry has become a commodity too even in the groves of non-profit academia. Despite the conceptualist’s emphasis on context, sites, situations, Goldsmith failed to recognize the sociopolitical parameter of his performance and the institutional constraints of the information being moved. Concepts are historically grounded and mobilized/ immobilized. Instead of animating the fragments of copied texts, or satirizing them as quantifying modes, Goldsmith in “The Body of Michael Brown” evoked the “rigid immanence of the Baroque” devoid of any anticipatory, utopian sense of historical time,” fixed by an attitude of melancholic, awed contemplation—a deliberate theatrical gesture. His montage technique of fragmenting and juxtaposing depleted signifiers mimicked the fabrication of sold commodities. Thus, instead of rescuing the possible elements of communicative value in the report (for example, the excessive shooting inflicted on the victim’s body), Goldsmith allegorized his act of “uncreative” composition by accentuating the ethnic/racial resonance of the anatomical catalogue. Walter Benjamin presciently described the collage/montage aesthetics underlying conceptualist works: “The devaluation of objects in allegory is surpassed in the world of objects itself by the commodity. The emblem returns as commodities” (Buchloh 2006, 29). Goldsmith repeated and reinforced the instrumentalist devaluation enacted by the State, repudiating the classic avantgarde practitioner’s anti-conformist, anarchist stance. Revenge of the Immaterial Marx’s concept of commodity-fetishism exposes the irony in the post-Duchampian, conceptualist program of dematerialization. Goldsmith’s “uncreative” alteration of the “ready-made” did not issue MABINI REVIEW | Volume XI (2022) [13] into “immaterial” creativity; on the contrary, it materialized a racialized foregrounding of semantic features otherwise buried in scientific, empirical discourse instrumentalized by the State. As Boris Groys noted, the conceptual artist’s submission to the art institution (usually under academic patronage) and its commodifying hegemony is symptomatic of the failure of avant-garde movements in their avowed aims. What happens is the triumph of alienated abstract labor over non- alienated creative work so that, as Groys notes: “It is is this alienated labor of transporting objects combined with the labor invested in the construction and maintenance of art spaces that ultimately produces artistic value under the conditions of post-Duchampian art. Other concrete, historically specific examples, such as the artistic labor of Vito Acconci, Yoko Ono, Bruce Nauman, Lawrence Weiner, and others, may be scrutinized in Peter Osborne’s graphic documentation, Conceptual Art (2002). The crisis of conceptualism originates from the stoic acceptance of a unity of opposites: marketed art produced by the culture industry enabling the sophisticated elite culture of the oligarchy. In 1979, Adrian Cristobal, a bureaucrat-spokesman for the Marcos authoritarian regime argued that mass culture serves profit-making big business, while the State sponsors its opposite, humanist culture. Amid widespread human- rights violations committed by State agencies, Cristobal pays homage to the dictator and his wife: “One sees and one appreciates the role of the First Lady in her sponsorship of such ventures as the Cultural Center of the Philippines, the Folk Arts Theater, the Metropolitan Theater and all other similar ventures. For these are, in the main, institutions which are designed to deliver that redeeming humanist culture to the people. A point of view no doubt shared by the President himself who is, in his own right, a competent writer and more than this, himself a contribution to the development of a truly national culture” (1979). Today, the conjugal dictatorship’s “humanism” has been exposed as euphemistic alibi for barbarism, with the brutalization of thousands of victims by the Marcos “martial law” regime (1972-1986; see McCoy 2001). Provisional Epilogue In the new millennium, the Philippine neocolony deteriorated further with the neoliberal rampage of the U.S. crusade against global “terrorism.” The “humanist” culture so highly extolled here coincides [14] MABINI REVIEW | Volume XI (2022) with the religious imagination, the realm of illusions, which is the antithetical reflex of the world of commodities in “the heartless world” invoked in Marx’s double-edged praise and rejection of the people’s opium: “Religion is, in fact, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet gained himself or has lost himself again....It is the fantastic realization of the human being because the human being has attained no true reality....The wretchedness of religion is at once an expression of and a protest against real wretchedness. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people....The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is a demand for their true happiness. The call to abandon illusions about their conditions is the call to abandon a condition which requires illusions...(1970, 131). Here, Marx grasps the superstructure (religion) not as phenomenon but as an integral element of an all-pervasive social practice. Religion, like art, subsists on the fixation with illusions. In conceptualizing the contradictory relation between intellectual objectification and social reality, Marx laid the groundwork for the active, dynamic and creative intervention of transformative agents such as artists and intellectuals fully cognizant of the power of fetishized objects, beliefs, practices, and institutions. In a recent inventory of “the ideology of the aesthetic,” Terry Eagleton distinguishes Marx’s singular theory of art from Romantic humanism, “with its expression/repression model of human existence” (1990, 219). Marx’s vision of an “all-round human self-actualization” is premised on the establishment of socialist relations of production, with a communist ethic where mutual or reciprocal self-realization of persons is cultivated. Eagleton argues that Marx resolves the Kantian dilemma of the noumenal/phenomenal split—the problem that aesthetics/art endeavors to dissolve—by locating “the unity of ‘fact’ and ‘value in the practical, critical activity of men and women—in a form of understanding which is brought to birth in the first place by emancipatory interests, which is bred and deepened in active struggle, and which is an indispensable part of the realization of value” (1990, 226). Thus, the moment of “revolutionary practice” posited in Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach”(1978) is essential to fully appreciating the dialectical-materialist theorizing of art/aesthetics as a mode of the MABINI REVIEW | Volume XI (2022) [15] realization of human powers, capacities, virtues for the sake of universal happiness and well-being (see Lifshitz 1973; Solomon 1973; Williams 1977; Johnson 1984; Eagleton and Milne 1996). We have noted earlier that conceptual art-practice vitiates its radical impetus due to its nominalist tendency, “an essential scepticism about the existence of an objective reality, or the possibility of arriving at an agreed understanding of it by rational means,” as Eric Hobsbawm diagnosed the postmodernist malady. But an antithetical tendency exists within it of engendering a “socialist art practice” if it returns to its original inspiration in Russian art following the October Revolution (Burgin 2002, 256-58). One evidence of a hopeful revitalization of the anti-commodity impulse in postmodern art may be found in Yoko Ono’s recent intervention, a billboard in New York’s Times Square inviting people to read its message: “Imagine Peace.” It appeared on a screen at Broadway and 45th Srreet. The message was spelled out in black letters on white, lasting three minutes; it appeared every night in March 2022 in public areas in London, Los Angeles, Milan, Melbourne and Seoul (Smee 2022). Before being overshadowed by Beatle John Lennon, Yoko Ono was acknowledged as one of the most sophisticated and bold artists of post- World War II, inventing the Event performance (such as “Cut Piece”) as part of the Fluxus art-movement in the fifties and sixties (Higgins 2002; Menand 2022). Her timely peace activism somewhat vindicates the flaws and inadequacies of conceptualists and other anti-Establishment projects over-determined by their disparate historical situations. One conclusion emerges from this brief survey of the nodal stages in the vicissitudes of our brief reflection on the politics of aesthetics, with special reference to conceptual art. A fallibilistic proposition can be offered here: without the focus on the moment of praxis--the artist’s or critic’s intervention in the concrete arena of political struggle for hegemony, any reflection on the nature of art and its function will compulsively repeat the metaphysical idealism (Kant, Hegel, & Croce) it seeks to overcome. It is in the arena of political and ideological conflict that consciousness is grasped in its overdetermined trajectory as a complex of material practices functioning in conserving or disintegrating a determinate conjuncture, a lived situation. The problematic dialectic of conceptualist art that was previously discussed is an example of such a conjuncture. Without positing this moment of rupture or opening for intervention, we shall reproduce the predicament [16] MABINI REVIEW | Volume XI (2022) of the bourgeois intellectual that progressive thinkers such as Brecht, Lukacs (San Juan, 1972), Gramsci, Caudwell, Berger, and others (Arvon 1973; Laing 1978), acutely diagnosed: the division of mental and manual labor; the antinomy between subject and object, society and individual, nature and history, which revolutionary practice hopes to gradually and eventually resolve, despite the mistakes that were made by avant-garde artists who lack the totalizing vision and dynamic praxis of intellectuals working in the socialist tradition. REFERENCES Alberro, Alexander and Blake Stimson. 1999. Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Arvon, Henri. 1973. Marxist Esthetics. Ithaca: Cornell. Barrett, Michele. 1988. “The Place of Aesthetics in Marxist Criticism.” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Berger, John. 1980. The Success and Failure of Picasso. New York: Pantheon Books. Bothamley, Jennifer. 1993. Dictionary of Theories. London: Gale Research International Ltd. Buchloh, Benjamin H.D. 2006. “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art.” In Art After Conceptual Art. Ed. Alexander Alberro and Sabeth Buchmann. Vienna: Generali Foundation. Burn, Ian. 1999. “The Sixties: Crisis and Aftermath (or the Memoirs of an Ex-conceptual artist).” In Conceptual Art: A critical anthology. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Caudwell, Christopher. 1937. Illusion and Reality. New York: International. Conrad, C.A. 2015. “Kenneth Goldsmith Says He is an Outlaw.” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/06/kenneth- goldsmith-says-he-is-an-outlaw MABINI REVIEW | Volume XI (2022) [17] Cristobal, Adrian. 1979. “Mass culture also means big business.” The Sunday Times Journal (Nov. 25): 12. Eagleton, Terry. 1990. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. ________ and Drew Milne, eds. Marxist Literary Theory. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Eco, Umberto. 1988. The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Flood, Alison. 2015. “US Poet Defends Reading of Michael Brown autopsy report as a poem.” The Guardian (March 17)L 7-8. Freeland, Cynthia. 2001. Art Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Godfrey, Tony. 1988. Conceptual Art. London: Phaidon. Gramsci, Antonio. 1957. The Modern Prince and Other Writings. New York: International. Groys, Boris. 2010. “Marx After Duchamp, or The Artist’s Two Bodies.” e-flux journal # 19 (October). Guttmann, James, ed. 1963. Philosophy A to Z. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. Higgins, Hannah. 2002. Fluxus Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1994. Age of Extremes. London: Abacus. Jameson, Fredric. 1971. Marxism and Form. Princeton: Princeton University. Johnson, Pauline. 1984. Marxist Aesthetics. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Laing, David. 1978. The Marxist Theory of Art. New Jersey: Humanities Press. Lenin, V. I. 1967. On Literature and Art. Moscow: Progress. [18] MABINI REVIEW | Volume XI (2022) LeWitt, Sol. 1999. “Sentences on Conceptual Art.” In Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. Eds. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Lifshitz, Mikhail. 1973. The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx. London: Pluto Press. Lukacs, Georg. 1970. Writer and Critic. London: Merlin. Macherey, Pierre. 1978. A Theory of Literary Production. London: Routledge. Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital, Volume 1. Tr. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin. ________. 1978. The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert Tucker. New York: Norton. McCoy, Alfred. 2001. “Dark Legacy: Human Rights Under the Marcos Regime.” In Memory: Truth-telling and the Pursuit of Justice. A Conference on the Legacy of the Marcos Dictatorship. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University. Menand, Louis. 2022. “The Grapefruit Artist.” The New Yorker (June 20): 24-29. Morawski, Stefan. 1974. Inquiries into the Fundamentals of Aesthetics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT. Mulhern, Francis. 1974. “The Marxist Aesthetics of Christopher Caudwell.” New Left Review, No. 85 (May 1974): 37-58. New York Times. 2013. “Grisly Warhol Painting Fetches $104.5 Million, Auction High for Artist.” (November 14). www.newyorktimes.com. Osborne, Peter, ed. 2002. Conceptual Art. New York: Phaidon Press. ________. 2005. How to Read Marx. New York: W.W. Norton. Raphael, Max. 1980. Proudhon Marx Picasso. New Jersey: Humanities Press. MABINI REVIEW | Volume XI (2022) [19] Richter, David H. 1994. “Croce, Benedetto.” In The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 174-176. San Juan, E., ed. 1973. Marxism and Human Liberation Essays by Georg Lukacs. New York: Delta. ________. 2022. Peirce’s Pragmaticism: A Radical Perspective. New York: Lexington Books. Smee, Sebastian. 2022. “That’s been Yoko Ono’s message all along.” The Washington Post (March 26): C1. Smith, Roberta. 1994. “Conceptual Art.” In Concepts of Modern Art. Ed. Nikos Stangos. New York: Thames and Hudson. Solomon, Maynard, ed. Marxism and Art. New York: Alfred Knopf. Steinhauer, Jillian. 2015. “Kenneth Goldsmith Remixes Michael Brown Autopsy Report as Poetry.” Hyperallergic. Wilkinson, Alec. 2015. “Kenneth Goldsmith’s Controversial Conceptual Poetry.” The New Yorker (October 5). Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. Wood, Paul. 1996. “Commodity.” In Critical Terms for Art History. Ed. Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [20] MABINI REVIEW | Volume XI (2022)

TRANSLATION ART: ENGISH-FILIPINO PLAY-DRIVE (SPIEL-TRIEB)

San Juan, Jr. / Filipino/English Play-drive 1 FILIPINO/ENGLISH PLAY-DRIVE Reflections on the Translation Game E. San Juan, Jr. University of Connecticut, USA philcsc@gmail.com About the Author E. San Juan, Jr. is emeritus professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut and Comparative American Cultures at Washington State University. He was recently visiting professor in the Department of English of University of the Philippines Diliman and Cultural Studies professor at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines. His recent books include Faustino Aguilar: Kapangyarihan, Kamalayan, Kasaysayan, Metakomentaryo sa mga nobela ni Faustino Aguilar (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2020); Carlos Bulosan—Revolutionary Filipino Writer in the United States: A Critical Appraisal (Peter Lang, 2017); In the Wake of Terror: Class, Race, Nation, Ethnicity in the Postmodern World (Lexington Press, 2007), and Sisa’s Vengeance: Jose Rizal’s Sexual Politics and Cultural Revolution (Vibal Publishing, 2021). Kritika Kultura 37 (2021): 1–025 © Ateneo de Manila University San Juan, Jr. / Filipino/English Play-drive 2 What does it mean to speak of the “interpretation” of a sign? Interpretation is merely another word for translation . . . What are signs for, anyhow? . . . They are to communicate ideas, . . . some potentiality, some form, which may be embodied in external or in internal signs. But why should this idea-potentiality be so poured from one vessel into another unceasingly? Is it a mere exercise of the World-spirit’s Spiel-trieb—mere amusement? —Charles Sanders Peirce, “The Basis of Pragmaticism” (388) What is translation? On a platter / A poet’s pale and glaring head. / A parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter, / and profanation of the dead. —Vladimir Nabokov, “On Translating Eugene Onegin”(531) If all discourse is effectuated as an event, it is understood as meaning... It is this dialectic of event and meaning which makes possible the detachment of meaning from the event in writing. —Paul Ricouer, ‘“Writing as a Problem” (321) Translation studies as a disciplinary research field has recently become institutionalized in the Western academy, with university courses and publication programs devoted to it. Translators of European authors are highly paid in the trade-book industry. The Modern Language Association of America (MLA) has a flourishing trade in publishing English translations of obscure, esoteric texts. In a recent MLA Newsletter, Barbara Fuchs laments how, when the singer Jennifer Lopez interrupted her medley of songs in English with the Spanish translation of two lines of the Pledge of Allegiance during the 2021 Presidential Inauguration, her computer screen inserted the caption: “Speaking foreign language,” thus negating the point of her intervention. Fuchs objects to that “automated, mechanistic force of its characterization” as negating the singer’s “gesture of political inclusivity”: “While the performance was undoubtedly an important moment of signaling, its immediate framing as an interruption of the foreign, the untranslatable, the unknown—in the form of a language spoken by over fifty million people in the United States—signals the important work yet before us” (2). Fortunately, in the Philippines, we sing the national anthem in Filipino, spoken by at least 80 percent of 110 million citizens, not distracted by English captions. But in the daily practice of Filipinos in social media and in government and business affairs, English easily trumps Filipino or any of the vernaculars. Translation may indeed be more than a gesture of political inclusivity. The Vulgate translation of the Hebrew and Greek Bible by Saint Jerome (347–420), adopted by the Roman Catholic Church, underwent diverse mutations in the national languages of the Protestant countries in Europe. Luther’s German Kritika Kultura 37 (2021): 2–025 © Ateneo de Manila University San Juan, Jr. / Filipino/English Play-drive 3 rendition and the King James version are easily the most influential. Incidentally, they all followed St. Jerome’s error of translating the Hebrew word keren (meaning “radiated light”) into “grew horns,” thus Moses was sculpted with horns. St. Jerome should have followed Constance Garnett’s habit of leaving out words she did not understand for her translation of the Russian classics into English. The usual expectation that a cross-language version must be a carbon copy of the original, transferring facts, style, and structure of the source into the target language, is what business and government interpreters/translators must fulfill. But the literary translation of poetry, in particular, imposes more exacting demands. The complexity and singularity of the languages involved, not just structure (grammar and syntax) but also idiomatic or metaphorical networks, demands more rigorous standards. It thus involves what Schiller called “Spieltrieb” (407), an instinctive play- drive, whose object is the living form of beauty (Lebende Gestalt), the coalescence of material and form, being and becoming. Schiller’s concept may be seminal but arguably utopian. Almost all practitioners seek a balance between extremes (the literal and tropological), between what Croce called “faithful ugliness or faithless beauty” (Holman 451). This may explain why the impulse to translate mutates into a demiurgic motivation to create an original, such as Edward Fitzgerald’s The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859). In any case, translation is not just a matter of producing verbal equivalents, either literal or not. All translators produce what Charles Sanders Peirce calls “interpretants” linking signifiers to their objects on some ground, purpose, or rationale, not arbitrarily as Ferdinand Saussure assumed in his semiology. In Peirce’s semiotics, translations produce interpretants of three kinds: immediate, or the specific way that signifiers can be actualized in various ways; dynamic, or the “single actual event” or experience of making sense or getting the intent of the signifiers; and the final or logical interpretant, which is the understanding of or belief in the purpose or purposes for which the signs/signifiers are being used (“Lady Welby” 412–21). What this amounts to is that there may not be any agreement about the ultimate purpose or intent of the translation (the dynamic and final logical interpretant) except the attempt to actualize the immediate interpretant. In Peirce’s semiotics, “there is no final confluence of interpretations” (Short 187–90), that is, there is no such thing as correct, accurate, or faithful translation leading to a consensus of beliefs because authors/translators vary in time and place, as well as readers/ listeners. Sociohistorical contingencies cannot be eluded and must be taken into account, one way or another. Kritika Kultura 37 (2021): 3–025 © Ateneo de Manila University San Juan, Jr. / Filipino/English Play-drive 4 HOMO LUDENS BECOMING HOMO FABER This does not imply that anything goes, since meaning has to be formulated in further signs, into intelligible discourse for some community or other. Translation is then the versatile exercise of the play-drive. It is an artful linguistic game sui generis, its criticism a heuristic method for its appreciation. That is why, perhaps, Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), who at nine years old translated Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” into Spanish, advised that we attend more to the context (the cultural horizon of communication and nuanced speech-acts) than the text or the formalized referent (178). In short, the six functions of linguistic communication outlined by Roman Jakobson needs to be given appropriate assignments. To be sure, translation is a human, not machine, performance. This may explain why translators such as Edward Seidensticker (in the case of the Japanese Yasunari Kawabata) and Gregory Rabassa (with Gabriel Garcia Marquez) produced versions more genuine-sounding or authentic to their English readers. Consider then this conundrum: can the translation claim to be a sovereign, original source-text, with a life of its own not dependent on its author? We are then plunged into the abyss of endless semiosis. Modern literary criticism since the romantic period posited the organic fusion of form and content, thus questioning the possibility of translation as a faithful convergence of linguistic life-worlds. Shelley, for instance, likened translation to subjecting a violet to chemical analysis while Robert Frost opined that poetry is “what gets left out in translation” (Hyde 200). Surely, no one expects a rigorously strict correspondence between source and target texts. The English poet John Dryden translated many classic works into the contemporary idiom of his time. He distinguished his practice as an act of paraphrasing the translated work’s style, “to vary but the dress, not alter or destroy the substance,” thus violating the axiom of the organic unity of form and content (Hyde 201). Contradistinguished from Dryden’s formula of paraphrasing, imitiation as a mode of synthetic mimesis or reconfiguring of the original may be exemplified by Robert Lowell’s “Imitations,” as well as by Ezra Pound’s “Homage to Sextus Propertius” and Louis Zukovsky’s mimicry of Catullus’ Latin originals (Hyde 201). Wether paraphrase or imitation, this mode of translation seeks to capture the complex, singular phenomenology of a given artistic creation or artifice for their respective audiences, thus bridging disparate times and spaces. We are reminded of Walter Benjamin’s concept of translation as the purgation of profane language so as to reach a higher spiritual divine level, releasing the “unexpressed and creative word” from its merely communicative use. However, paradoxically, we begin with the literal rendering of the syntax of words to capture the “intentio of the original”: “For if the sentence is the wall before the language Kritika Kultura 37 (2021): 4–025 © Ateneo de Manila University San Juan, Jr. / Filipino/English Play-drive 5 of the original, literalness is the arcade” (79). The more incomprehensible the translation (as Holderlin’s version of Sophocles) since it is further up the ladder of truth or doctrine that language is the symbol of the incommunicable, Benjamin concludes, so much the better! The more wayward the translation, the more cogent it is, thus confirming the indictment: traduttore, traditore. This accords with Peirce’s semiotics and the hierarchy of interpretants (immediate, dynamic and final/logical), still cognizant of the six linguistic functions already invoked. Before situating translation in the Philippine context, I want to remind would-be linguistic traders and word-players of the dangers involved in this act of transfer as a mode of communication. In the global conflicts today, thousands of Afghan translators/interpreters who worked for the U.S. military are facing assassination by the Taliban for their services. About three hundred of roughly 18,000 Afghanis have been killed since 2014; and thousands today face certain death as the U.S. finalizes its withdrawal from that war-torn country (Zuccchino and Rahim). Iraqi interpreters suffered the same fate when the U.S. destroyed and then withdrew from Iraq. One wonders whether Filipinos who translated captured revolutionary communiques for the American invaders in the Filipino-American War of 1899- 1913 were prosecuted, or those who translated/interpreted for the Japanese aggressors in World War II were ever brought to trial as collaborators of the enemy. Translation then becomes treason or treachery and betrayal depending on which linguistic, political camp one happens to find oneself in the end. Historical specificity thus informs and determines the ethical-political valence of linguistic exchanges. What is instructive is the fate suffered by Arab scholar- translator Mohamed Yousry in the wake of 9/11. Yousry, a graduate student at New York University, was then employed by attorney Lynne Stewart who was convicted for allegedly aiding the blind Muslim cleric Abdel Rahman; Sheik Rahman was then serving a life-sentence in federal prison for conspiring to bomb New York City landmarks (Preston). Because Yousry translated from Arabic to English the messages of the cleric for attorney Stewart, he was implicated in the charge of violating prison rules, deceiving the government, and aiding terrorism. So translators, beware! Your scholarly talent and linguistic skills might render you vulnerable, since even the American Translators Association and the National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators would not come to your succor in times of need or emergency, in a climate of moral panic and jingoistic exceptionalism. Kritika Kultura 37 (2021): 5–025 © Ateneo de Manila University San Juan, Jr. / Filipino/English Play-drive 6 THE PERSONAL IS NOT YET POLITICAL One of the more provocative commentaries on the politics and ethics of translation has been made by Steven Ungar in his contribution to the anthology Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (2002). Ungar summarizes the opinions of various scholars who assayed the poetics of translation as a cultural political practice open to ethical dimensions involving greater respect for linguistic and cultural differences. He cites Sherry Simon’s feminist view urging a cultural turn so as to promote a critical, pragmatic, or functionalist approach: “Instead of asking the traditional question which has preoccupied translation theorists—‘What is a correct translation?’—the emphasis is placed on a descriptive approach: ‘what do translations do, how do they circulate in the world and elicit response?” (131) (For the application of Jakobson’s functionalist linguistics on translation, see Aveling; also Heaney and Hass). From that perspective, the historical-ethical situation of the translator in the Philippines is anomalous if not an affront to their Western counterparts. Who cares about Filipino/Tagalog poetry and its translation into English or other prestigious languages? In the early years of Spanish colonization, the Spanish missionaries destroyed much of the pre-contact literature composed in syllabary and initiated the lexicographical inventory of the vernaculars. The first translations of Tagalog poetry into Spanish were ascribed to Fernando Bagong-banta, a ladino or bilingual native. They were included in a religious instruction book entitled Memorial de la vida cristiana en lengua tagala (1605) by the friar Francisco de San Jose. Bienvenido Lumbera describes the priest’s “archaic metaphorical prose” expounding the basic doctrines of the Catholic faith (27). Translation was thus a utilitarian, pedagogical instrument for proselytizing; in effect, it was weaponized for sustained evangelization in the service of imperial domination. Analogous to that pattern was the systematic imposition of American English as the official language in the first three decades of US colonial pacification of the Philippines (1899–1930). Three centuries after Bagong-banta’s intervention, the Jesuit-tutored Jose Rizal deployed his language skills to educate his relatives by translating Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell and the French 1789 Declaracion des droits de l’homme et de citoyen (1789) into Tagalog (Ocampo 120, 341–472). Katipunan leaders Andres Bonifacio and Emilio Jacinto followed Rizal’s example. In the period of revolutionary ferment, Filipinos who engaged in translation pursued a conscienticizing (to use Paulo Freire’s term) agenda—one might even label it “tendentious” translation—dictated by the needs of the embattled community. When English became the official and aspirational language of the US colony, the imperative to translate vernacular writing lost its rationale with the establishment of universal public education, the Kritika Kultura 37 (2021): 6–025 © Ateneo de Manila University San Juan, Jr. / Filipino/English Play-drive 7 wide circulation of mass media in American English, and the inferiorization of indigenous speech-acts. DECOLONIZING IMPERATIVE AND AGENDA It is only in our recent history that translation—between the colonized and colonizer’s tongue—can be conceived as an emancipatory act. Moving from one language system/conceptual framework to another can be construed as not just a mode of cross-cultural understanding. It is also an exploration of our motives and purposes in engaging in the translation-act. One recent example is Bienvenido Lumbera’s adaptation, not translation, of Carlos Bulosan’s classic ethnobiography, America Is in the Heart. Lumbera’s artifice was not a symmetrical transfer but a re-functioning of narrative episodes in response to the political exigencies of the mass movement after Benigno Aquino’s assassination in 1983, a strategy inspired by Paula and Carolina Malay’s earlier translation of the book into Tagalog, Nasa Puso ang Amerika, praised by Lumbera as endowed with rich, sutble, vigorous, “contemporary urban flavor” (Suri 291). It is now difficult to obtain copies of Bulosan’s filipinized chronicle of the early diaspora. Those two play-drive attempts at verbal gaming may be compared with Jose Lacaba’s efforts to adapt (“halaw” is his rubric) to colloquial Filipino poems by Sappho, Marvell, Neruda, Brecht, Pound, Tu Fu, etc., and Pia Arboleda’s skillful translation of Ninotchka Rosca’s stories into Filipino, in order to gauge the distance between acts done under pressure (the mass protests against the Marcos dictatorship), and those performed in more leisurely, self-reflective fashion. The simple lesson is that we cannot appreciate and judge the art of translation detached from the historical-political situations of the translators, as well as their intentions, and the audiences that their projects addressed. Such variables constitute the parameters for evaluating the success or failure of translation-experiments. This brings us finally to the question why we need to measure the power and potential of our vernacular tongue (in this case, Filipino) by the amount and quality of the works that have been carried out. The hypothesis is challenging, if not scandalous. In 2000, Mario Miclat cited the inventory of translations into Tagalog made by Lilia Francisco Antonio: two titles a year in 400 years since the Doctrina Cristiana (1593), the first book published in the Philippines. If it were not for the ladino Tomas Pinpin and his progeny, Miclat insinuates, we would still be barbarians, unlettered savages awaiting tutelage by our Castilian and Yankee conquerors. Kritika Kultura 37 (2021): 7–025 © Ateneo de Manila University San Juan, Jr. / Filipino/English Play-drive 8 Miclat is pleased to inform us of the three-volume translation of Alejandro Dumas’s Ang Konde ng Monte Cristo by Pascual Poblete, but he bemoans the fact that no one has yet translated Don Quixote. He therefore urges more Westernization, following the path of Japan and China, forgetting the status of Chinese and Japanese as exemplary, archetypal languages with thousands of years of usage and elaborate refinement compared to our relatively primitive vernaculars. Miclat remarks that we are too lazy; however, he abruptly concludes that “Having defined the Other, we have defined ourselves”—a wholly mystifying conclusion. Undeterred, Miclat observes that we need to “define our translation needs” and rouse ourselves to satisfy those needs without which we cannot belong to the affluent industrialized nation-states of Europe and North America. INVENTORY AND RECONNAISSANCE A brief personal history may be instructive here. Long before I read Miclat’s alarming call and enjoyed the artifices of Lumbera, the Malays, and Arboleda, I had been recruited by the late Rogelio Mangahas in the 1960s to work with the collective Kapisanang Aklat, Diwa at Panitik (KADIPAN) compatriots. I helped Alejandro Abadilla edit his avant-garde magazine Panitikan. Long before I encountered the charge of “traduttore, traditore,” I had been engaged in this treacherous pursuit for some time. After a lengthy correspondence with the poet, I translated selected works of Amado V. Hernandez into English, published in 1966 as Rice Grains by International Publishers in New York—perhaps the first international edition for a Tagalog poet. The motive? Inspired by his fortitude during Cold War McCarthyism, I struck a friendship with the poet while completing my graduate studies at Harvard University where I discovered William James’s anti-imperialist writings. The nationalist resurgence in the sixties combined with the Civil-Rights anti-war mobilization in the US produced an incalculable impact. Our generation shifted its bearings and orientation. In that conjuncture, I had begun to write in Filipino when I became more involved with other vernacular writers, especially with the feisty maverick Abadilla. Throughout the decade, I cooperated with Abadilla in publishing his anthology Ako ang Daigdig and other projects, and with Rogelio Mangahas in gathering materials for his 1967 anthology, Manlilikha, a project of KADIPAN, and the volume Makata by Makata, Inkorporada. We were also immersed in anti-martial-law agitprop and research into Filipino labor struggles, in particular the farm-workers movement in California and the Northwest where Bulosan and his comrades were active in the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union. Kritika Kultura 37 (2021): 8–025 © Ateneo de Manila University San Juan, Jr. / Filipino/English Play-drive 9 Historical circumstances ineluctably overdetermine personal choices. The nationalist upsurge from 1970 to 1986 influenced my decision to write fiction and poetry in Filipino and to publish in Liwayway, Free Press in Filipino, and other venues. I was encouraged in this by Hernandez, Abadilla, Mangahas, Ben Medina Jr., Teodoro Agoncillo, Anacleto Dizon, and others. This was before the bold effort to “intellectualize” the vernaculars in line with Virgilio Enriquez’s invention of “sikolohiyang Pilipino” and Lumbera’s historical inquiries into Tagalog poetry. In high school, we were assigned Balagtas’s awit as an exercise in grammar and syllable-counting, oblivious to its ethico-political function. This is still the standard way of teaching this classic touchstone. In 1969 I ventured a philosophical exegesis of “Florante at Laura” entitled Balagtas: Art and Revolution, which Patricia Melendrez-Cruz and Apolonio Chua included in their anthology Himalay. Around the same time, the artist-critic Rodolfo Paras-Perez invited me to translate Balagtas’ poem accompanied by his drawings for a limited deluxe edition issued in 1978. The background for this translation is my Filipinization of Western poetics ranging from the Anglo-Saxon “The Seafarer” and “The Dream of the Rood” to Horace, Gautier, Holderlin, Lu Hsun, Brecht, McDiarmid, Hemingway, Mayakovsky, Hikmet, Langston Hughes, Vallejo, Mao Tse-tung, Ernesto Che Guevarra, McGrath, and assorted Vietnamese poets (see my Sapagka Iniigbig Kita at Iba Pang Bagong Tula). The milieu and vocabulary of those writers, not that of the hallowed George St. Clair version, mediated my play-drive performance or creative rearticulation of Balagtas’s epic narrative. MODERNIZING THE LEGACY My English reworking or, more precisely, my prosaic imitation of Balagtas’s masterpiece was finally given wider reception in the NCCA 2019 publication of Florante at Laura: The Exhibition, curated by Annatha Lilo Gutierrez. The flavor of that postmodern rendering of the archaic awit may be discerned in my transfiguration of the penultimate stanza: “Therefore the militant masses, in gratitude, raised their clenched fists to the sky. The king and queen thought of nothing but to scatter the fruits of production to their partisans.” The original was bare: “Kaya nga’t nagtaas ang kamay sa langit, / sa pasasalamat ng bayang tangkilik; /ang hari’t ang reyna’t walang iniisip / kundi ang magsabog ng awa sa kabig” (Paculan 99). The interpretants I marshalled above were intended to activate the emotive and conative potentialities of the source-text. Since my focus was on the target text/ contemporary audience, I had resorted to the alchemical strategies that Andre Kritika Kultura 37 (2021): 9–025 © Ateneo de Manila University San Juan, Jr. / Filipino/English Play-drive 10 Lefevere had catalogued in Translating Literature. Taking account of the ideological/ political frame of the original, its illocutionary nuances, and contrived tactics to modernize a dusty canonical text, I opted to register the spirit, the structure of feeling, not the referential veracity of my source. Hence, the “clenched fists,” “fruits of production” and “partisans” conformed to the universe of discourse of the third- world, left-wing youth, and civil-rights movement of the translator’s time (compare the Victorian idiom and monotony of George St. Clair’s version). Immersed in the author’s milieu, I recalled how that awit inspired Rizal and the 1896 revolutionary propagandists. The aim of readability coincided with the imperative of capturing the ambience, the contour of sensibility, of the original. NAVIGATING ORIENTAL PASSAGES Before the West Philippine Sea controversy, we were already fascinated with Taoism and Zen Buddhism via Ezra Pound and my teacher at Harvard, I.A. Richards, who had annotated Mencius’s speculations on thinking/mind. Mao’s Yenan Forum on literature was not far behind. The next act of “traitorship” occurred in the last decade of the twentieth century, with my Filipino version of Lao Tzu’s classic Tao Te Ching based on the interlinear translation of Gregory Richter. This method accords with Walter Benjamin’s tongue-in-cheek advice endorsing interlinear models as “the prototype or ideal of all translation” (82). Why this experiment? Well, before I studied Peirce’s semiotics, I was inspired by Pound’s technique of capturing the ambience of canonical texts (from Propertius and troubadours to the Analects and Japanese Noh plays). I was also then engaged in inquiries into materialist dialectics and its analogies in Taoist/Zen Buddhist dynamics. So the Tao was re-christened: “Landas & Kapangyarihan sa Makabuluhang Buhay.” My other purpose in grappling with Tao Te Ching was to find out if the maxims of Taoism can be expressed in the vernacular idiom. Consequently, from the two last lines of the text in the English of Ames and Hall, “Thus the way of tian [heaven] is to benefit without harming; The way of the sages is to do without contending” (204), I inferred this insight: “Ang landas ng langit ay nagsasabog ng buti at pakinabang; hindi ito pumipinsala. /Ang landas ng pantas ay nagsasakatuparan nang walang pakikipag-unahan” (66). Notice that I do more “explicitation” or emendation, as well as compensation, to use Lefevere’s terms, to foreground the senses of “benefit” and “contending,” as well as insert the notion of achieving or fulfilling some intent or mission. Viewed from Peircean semiotics, I yoked the logical (legalistic) with the immediate interpretant (enigmatic), eliding the dynamic moment of interpretation which would reconcile contradictions by dialectical mediation. This preference for analogical mirroring or mimicry as a recreative mode of translation has been Kritika Kultura 37 (2021): 10–025 © Ateneo de Manila University San Juan, Jr. / Filipino/English Play-drive 11 observed by Prof. De Villa in her comparative appraisal of various translations of Amado Guerrero’s Philippine Society and Revolution, a problematic field of power/ knowledge which requires a longer analytic inquiry we reserve for another occasion. BEYOND THE LURE OF VERBALISM What are the lessons deducible from the trials and ordeals of the Spieltrieb discourse of translation? Suffice it to mention one, for now. My discovery is that the Filipino lexicon needs to expand its power of abstraction. It is rich in feeling- words, gestures, vocabularies of perception and sensory apprehension (see Maggay’s Pahiwatig). But this sensorium, this organon of cognitive investigation, needs universalizing terms to appeal to a cosmopolitan audience schooled in the language-games of public argumentation from Plato/Aristotle to Kant, Hegel, Peirce, Freud, Russell, Wittgenstein, and so on. The vernacular contains words that are condensed or compressed, e.g., “buti,” that needs spelling out to elaborate its various semantic possibilities when used in diverse frames. The frame enables various scenes (connotations, tropes, expressive nuances) to surface, with the cultural/ideological contexts determining which ones are appropriate in conveying shades of meaning. Again, however, the translator’s paramount objective—to transport the source-text’s original vision, temper, modus of sensibility—serves as the controlling principle of the transfer strategy. The spirit of the original should dictate the final configuration of the product, as Heaney and Gass affirm in re- validating the efficacy of Pound’s practice. As a testimony to what I have suggested above, I confess to fabricating an early specimen of traitorship. One can verify my failure to transliterate or transcode verbatim, but nonetheless generating a nexus of interpretants yielded by the actual process of reading/glossing on the purport of the chain of signifiers. In short, what beliefs or actions are stimulated in the reading process? Here is a famous poem by Pound entitled “The Return” followed by my version: See, they return; ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet, The trouble in the pace and the uncertain Wavering! See, they return, one, and by one, With fear, as half-awakened As if the snow should hesitate And murmur in the wind, Kritika Kultura 37 (2021): 11–025 © Ateneo de Manila University San Juan, Jr. / Filipino/English Play-drive 12 and half turn back; These were the “Wing’d-with-Awe,” Inviolable, Gods of the winged show! With them the silver hounds, sniffing the trace of air! Haie! Haie! These were the swift to harry; These the keen-scented; These were the souls of blood. Slow on the leash, pallid the leash-men! (Pound 24) _______________ Ang Pagbabalilk Masdan mo, bumabalik sila; ay, sundan ang nagbabaka-sakaling Paggalaw, at mga paang mabagal, Ang bagabag sa paghakbang at ang walang katiyakang Panginginig! Masdan mo, bumabalik sila, isa, at isa pa, Natatakot, at nangangalumata, Wari bagang nag-aalinlangan ang yelo At bumulong sa hangin, at lumingon Iyan ang mga “May-Bagwis-ng-Sindak,” Di masalang, Bathala ng mga paang may bagwis! Kasiping ng mga asong pilak, inaamoy ang bakas ng hangin! Ay! Ay! Ito ang maliksing umusig Kritika Kultura 37 (2021): 12–025 © Ateneo de Manila University San Juan, Jr. / Filipino/English Play-drive 13 Mga matalim na pang-amoy; Mga kaluluwa ng dugo. Malumanay sa buntot-page, maputlang umuusig! (San Juan 133). The biographer Noel Stock considers this poem exemplary for “the poet’s feeling for the weight and duration of words,” illustrating Pound’s belief in “absolute rhythm . . . which corresponds exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed” (1964, 89–90). Sensory, feeling-ful cognitive mapping of interpretants is primary. In comparison to the accentual music of English, the Filipino syllabic mode demonstrates the possibility of a different tempo, the staccato rhythm, which evokes approximately the emotion of diffidence, anticipation, surprise. Each language enables a range of illocutionary effects that parallel or resonate with those of other languages, hence fidelity to what the poet wants to accomplish. SEMANTIC EXTRAPOLATIONS When I wrote my 1966 essay “Translation and Philippine Poetics” after the Balagtas experiment, my orientation was primarily empiricist and formalist (following the American school of New Criticism). After my course with I.A. Richards in English poetics at Harvard University which utilized Roman Jakobson’s linguistics, I was fascinated by Jakobson’s schema of language functions, specifically his judgment that “The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination” (358). What was missing was the historical or syntagmatic process in which discourse is inflected by the cultural shifts and ideological/political contingencies of addresser and addressee. The reason why the referential function of language, the context (out of the six functions of any communication that Jakobson diagrammed), is often sidelined is due to the stress on the message/the code. Of course, the other functions—the emotive (addresser), conative (addressee), the phatic and metalingual, are operative, in accord with the structuralist paradigmatic/syntagmatic formula (353–57). Jakobson’s hierarchy of functions explains the varying qualities of translation, depending on which other function is allied with or catalyzed by the strictly poetic function. This then accounts for my tendency to conjoin the poetic with the conative or agitational impulse, as evidenced in my manner of translating my poems below. Kritika Kultura 37 (2021): 13–025 © Ateneo de Manila University San Juan, Jr. / Filipino/English Play-drive 14 Historical context is the desideratum for grasping what is worthwhile transferring. This is what I highlight when rendering the following three poems in Filipino, with the premise that readers today are familiar with the historical events and sociopolitical conflicts surrounding “Bangkusay,” “Smokey Mountain,” “Mendiola,” etc. “Elehiyang Nabuking Binigkas ng Batang Tubong Blumentritt” itself alludes to Ferdinand Blumentritt, the Austrian scientist and close friend of Rizal. “Bangkusay” designates the Spanish conquistador’s defeat of the Muslim indigenes of Tondo, near Fort Santiago. “Smokey Mountain” connotes ongoing impoverishment of a neocolony ruled by oligarchic violence (killing of Mendiola demonstrators during Cory Aquino’s presidency). The same goes for the second poem, “Lakbay ng Baguntaong Naglagalag,” where the most important reference is the recent event of a fishing boat rammed by the Chinese in the disputed zone of the West Philippine Sea, as well as to allusions of historical events from the Tamil Tigers (the Maoist guerillas) in Sri Lanka to Rizal’s tulisan filibusteros/ rebels mounting an attack on Fort Santiago in Intramuros, the famous Walled City, signifying the hoary centuries-long burden of Spanish colonial heritage. Parenthetically, innovative transfers, not just faithful imitations, can create miracles. Consider how the Portuguese singer Dulce Pontes transformed the erotic resonance and ambience of Ennio Moricone’s “Love Song” (from the Italian spaghetti Western film, Once Upon a Time in the West) into “Amor a Portugal,” which has become a Portuguese anthem via the Internet—a dazzling performance witnessed by millions on YouTube. She converted the original text’s imagery of “Your love shines in my heart” into the impersonal “A thousand fires burn without being seen” in Portuguese, evoking the spirit of fado and the generic thematics of longing. Could we do the same with a new version of “Dahil sa Iyo” or “Bayan Ko” via traitorous transmigration? INTERPRETATION COHABITING WITH TRANSLATION Lest I end with a futile apologia for betrayal, allow me to use my translation of an older poem that captures the sense of estrangement linking various personae, locations, and historic intervals. My translation of “Biyernes nang Hapon sa Oktubre, Willimantic, Connecticut, USA” hopes to earn the trust of those already instructed not to expect fidelity, only assurance of the effort to aspire for being worthy of it. Deploying a mock-surrealist tone in this poem, I attempt to suture the referential and phatic to the conative function of Jakobson’s linguistic chain so that a chain of immediate and dynamic interpretants are generated simultaneously. Meanwhile, Kritika Kultura 37 (2021): 14–025 © Ateneo de Manila University San Juan, Jr. / Filipino/English Play-drive 15 the contemplative voice of the speaker reflects on the historical transition from rural-farm town to urban-money economy (neoliberal globalism) in the United States, especially after 11 September 2001, which inaugurated the “Global War on Terrorism.” The speaker observes the cracks in the asphalted road (like wounds) from the town of Willimantic, Connecticut, to the American-Indian-operated Foxboro Casino near New London, a nuclear-submarine base. The pasture-land where Pequot Indians lived long ago have been covered by a bridge with sculpted frogs on each side, reminiscent of the legend in which frog-cries warned colonizing villagers of Indian attacks. Gone are the frogs like cigarette stubs while pigeons fly around, searching for food. Especially on Friday at dusk, folks drive southward to the Foxboro casino to gamble, chance governing future stakes. Here I combined immediate, dynamic, and logical interpretants so as to fix a belief in doubting the propaganda about extremism when the inaugural genocide against native Americans (Pequots) remains stark proof of the lethal irrationality of disastrous neoliberal casino imperialism. Indeed, after 9/11, what’s the future for migrant Filipinos avoiding the lack of employment in “shithole” countries threatened by Abu Sayyaf Muslim extremists? Is Willimantic a refuge for non-white “strangers”? Is the dream of success in milk- and-honey America an illusion behind curtains of decrepit windows in decayed towns? Here, the referential/denotative function blends with the sound symbolism of the Abu Sayyaf, Pequot, Bridge of Frogs, and Foxboro casino, in a climate of fear, doubt, and unpredictability evoked by “sugat na umaantak sa lamat” and “Naupos na sigarilyo’y ibinurol . . .” The last two lines cannot really be conveyed by the English phrases because the efficacy of the words “sumingit” and “sinisilip sa gunita ang kutob at kilabot” depends on recursive sound echoes, while “Abu Sayyaf” and “Amerika” fuse into a menacing brew of hope and aversion. I recommend that readers just listen to the sounds of Filipino after the English prose summary to apprehend the sense/meaning as well as somatic resonance and import of the original poem, as Benjamin suggested. Given the discordant texture of the Filipino text, I am doubtful if the English version can really convey the poignancy of the anger and pain in the source-text. This is only to say that the translator ironically succeeds by urging the reader to learn Filipino, to go back to the original, since the traitor always betrays. The melancholy ordeal of translation—as transubstantiation or sublimation of the source-text— confirms our tragic plight in the Tower of Babel, wondering if silence can be the only viable or feasible alternative. We can afford to be lazy, not translating Don Quixote, because we live in a more violent, quixotic time with nuclear windmills Kritika Kultura 37 (2021): 15–025 © Ateneo de Manila University San Juan, Jr. / Filipino/English Play-drive 16 all defying control. But why do we need Google’s translation engine when we are plunged in jouissance, singing the refrain “magkasiping buong gabi” from a popular Rico J. Puno song? Kritika Kultura 37 (2021): 16–025 © Ateneo de Manila University San Juan, Jr. / Filipino/English Play-drive 17 SAMPLE SPECIMENS Three Poems with English Translations by the Author ELEHIYANG NABUKING BINIGKAS NG BATANG TUBONG BLUMENTRITT Oo, tapos na, ’di na tayo pupunta sa Tondo ng ating kamusmosan— Kung saan sabi mo mahal mo ako, di malilimutan—Tapos na iyon! Di na tayo babalik doon—Oo, sa Bangkusay o Plaza Moriones— Hindi ko na matandaan kung sa Tayuman o Bambang tayo unang nagkita O baka sa tren sa Tutuban o sa loobang sanglaan sa Divisoria . . . Oo, ’di na tayo babalik sa Tondo, doon sa lumundong dulo ng buhay— . . . Hindi ko na nga maalala kung saang liko sa Juan Luna ang daan . . . Oo, tapos na, ngayong gabi nagpasiya kang tapos na ang pagsuyo— Gabing kay lungkot, umaapaw hanggang sa estero ng Binondo Hindi na tayo babalik doon tulad nang nakalipas—Ay, hindi na! Hindi ko na magunita kung saang sulok sa Tondo tayo nagtapo Tapos na, hindi na tayo babalik sa Gagalangin—mundong kaylupit! Kung saan ang sumpang binitiwan ay naligaw sa tulay ng Dimasalang . . . Hindi ko na nga matandaan kung saang liko sa Dapitan lumisan . . . Oo, ’di na tayo babalik sa pook ng lambingang ngayo’y Smokey Mountain . . . ’Di ko na nga maalala kung saan kita naiwan, saang lugar babalikan— Kapus-palad na pag-ibig, ay, nasawi sa mundong nagsalabit sa pangako— Ay tapos na, ’di ko na nga matandaan ang daang papunta sa Tondo— ’Di ko na magunita ang tipanan sa Quiapo? Sa Mendiola ba o sa Luneta? Oo, tapos na, ’di na tayo babalik sa tinding niyapos, ay, kumilig sa pag-sinta— Kritika Kultura 37 (2021): 17–025 © Ateneo de Manila University San Juan, Jr. / Filipino/English Play-drive 18 . . . Dito na lang kayo muna sa Blumentritt pagkagaling sa Culi-Culi, Nakalimutan ko na ang ruta papunta sa sementeryong La Loma— Oo, hindi na tayo babalik, hindi na, tapos na, magpakailanman— Pagkasiyahin ang pira-pirasong pulutang napanis sa gabi ng sumpaan . . . ______________________________________________________________ FOILED ELEGY RECITED BY A BLUMENTRITT NATIVE Yes, it’s over, we’ll not go to the Tondo of our childhood Where you said you loved me, never to be forgotten—That’s finished! We’ll never return to that spot—Yes, Bangkusay or Plaza Moriones— I can’t recall whether it’s Tayuman or Bambang where we first met, Perhaps in a Tutuban train or an indoor pawnshop in Divisoria... Yes, we will not go back to Tondo, there where life’s horizon-line sagged— . . . I can’t remember now which street-turn in Juan Luna marked our path . . . Yes, all over, tonight you decided that our dalliance is ended— A night so wretched, overflowing up to the stinking canal of Binondo . . . We will not go back there as we did before—Aie, no more! I cannot remember at which corner in Tondo we first met, It’s finished, we’ll not retreat to Gagalangin—a world utterly ruthless! Where our promises, disavowed, got lost on the bridge in Dimasalang . . . Indeed, I cannot remember which street-corner in Dapitan I fled from . . . Yes, we will not withdraw to the place of caressing, now Smokey Mountain . . . I can’t recall now where exactly I left you, where I should retrieve you— Curse-stricken love, Aie, victimized in a world bewildered by promises— Kritika Kultura 37 (2021): 18–025 © Ateneo de Manila University San Juan, Jr. / Filipino/English Play-drive 19 Aie, it’s done, I can’t remember the streets leading to Tondo— I can’t find in memory our trysting spot in Quiapo? Or Mendiola or Luneta? Yes, it’s finished, we’ll not go back to the pain we embraced, amorous shudder— Let’s stay here, linger in Blumentritt after visiting Culi-Culi, Anyway I have forgotten the route debouching to the La Loma cemetery— Yes, we will not go back, no more, it’s over, forever and ever— Let the fragments of this appetizer suffice, spoiled in the night of avowals and disavowals . . . ______________________________________________________________ LAKBAY NG BAGUNTAONG NAGLAGALAG Pumalaot na, walang tiyak na daungan o dalampasigan— Kung saan ko naisip makarating, wala ako roon, humantong man . . . Sandaling sumungaw sa butas ng aking himlayan, bulalakaw! Nakabalik ka rin mula sa Taormina, sintang balikbayan, Tumupad sa pangakong magbabalik kung kinakailangan “Kusang binangga kami ng Intsik, di kami tinulungan— Umikot muna upang tiyaking lumubog na, tapos tumakbo!” Batid mong ngayon ay inaanod, napapadpad sa kinabukasan Kaya hindi ka na tumigil sa Thessaloniki, naibsan ang pighati— Sabi ng pilosopo, ang gumugulong ay di hihinto hanggang di pinipigil . . . Umiiwas ka sa unos o sigwa, di mo akalaing babanggain ka . . . “Oo, umikot sila, nilente kami, nang matantong lubog na, Dagling sumibat, tumakbong palayo! Walang awang mga hayup!” [Testimonyo ng kapitan ng GEM VIRI, 6/14/2019] Kritika Kultura 37 (2021): 19–025 © Ateneo de Manila University San Juan, Jr. / Filipino/English Play-drive 20 Nakabalik na mula sa Colombo, Sri Lanka, taglay sa pusong nawindang Ang memorabilya ng Tigreng Tamil, mandirigmang nakaligtas . . . Kung hindi ikaw, sino ang sasagip sa nasawing manlalayag? Umiwas ka sa lagim ng sakuna, sa tukso ng Mutya ng Bali, Kundi ngayon, kailan pa? Saan isusugod ang katawang naipit? Binangga kaming pumalaot, lumayag, tinawid ang panahong masungit . . . Binangga nga—Gulat, nasindak, daigdig mo’y abot lamang sa hiyaw Ng saklolo sa dalampasigan ng Davao, Jolo, o Zamboanga— Buti’t di ka napikot ng aswang sa Siquijor o tokhang sa Mindoro— Binangga ka ng maamo’t mailap na buwitre ng imperyong sumasakop— Di na kailangang humibik, ngitngit ng himagsik sa kapalarang nasapit— Bakit nga ba tumawid ang hayop sa kabilang ibayo? Tanaw mo na sa pinto ng San Agustin ang kumakaway na bisig— Sa Balwarte ng San Diego naglalamay armadong kaluluwang lagalag . . . ______________________________________________________________ JOURNEY OF THE YOUNG MAN WHO WANDERED [From the Philippine Customs Declaration Form No.117, Item #7 prohibited: “Materials advocating or inciting treason, rebellion, insurrection, sedition against the government of the Philippines”] Shipped out, no definite pier to reach or shoreline— Where I thought of arriving, I am not there, even if the drift compels the traveler . . . For an instant, through a hole in my sleeping quarter, flashed a shooting star! Kritika Kultura 37 (2021): 20–025 © Ateneo de Manila University San Juan, Jr. / Filipino/English Play-drive 21 So you’ve returned from Taormina, beloved expatriate, Fulfilling the promise that you’ll come back if needed— “We were rammed by the Chinese, they didn’t help us— They circled first to make sure we’ve sunk, then scrammed!” You know now you’re being carried away, floating toward tomorrow So, therefore, you did not tarry at Thessaloniki, with grief subsiding— The philosopher taught: what is rolling will not stop until it is impeded . . . You were trying to elude squalls or storms, you didn’t suspect they will strike . . . “Yes, they turned around, spotlighted us, when sure we were sunk, Swiftly they fled, sped away! Beasts devoid of pity or mercy!” [Testimony of the captain of the fishing boat GEM VIRI, 6/14/2019] You’ve returned from Colombo, Sri Lanka, bearing in your bruised heart Memorabilia from the Tamil Tigers, guerilla warriors who survived . . . If not you, who else will save the disaster-stricken voyagers? You evaded the misery of accident, seduced by the Muse of Bali, If not now, when? What will the wrecked body assault? We were rammed, far out in the ocean, defying the miserable weather . . . They hit us—Shocked, panicked, your world touched only by the shout Of succor at the shores of Davao, Jolo, or Zamboanga— Lucky you were not tempted by the Siquijor witch or police-killers in Mindoro— You were rammed by gentle but sneaking vultures of the colonizing empire— No need to cry out for help, rebellious anger at the fortune encountered— Why indeed did the animal cross the road to the other side? You can glimpse from the door of St Agustin’s church those arms waving— At the San Diego rampart, in nightlong vigil, armed souls wandering . . . ______________________________________________________________ Kritika Kultura 37 (2021): 21–025 © Ateneo de Manila University San Juan, Jr. / Filipino/English Play-drive 22 BIYERNES NG HAPON SA OKTUBRE, WILLIMANTIC, CONNECTICUT, USA Sa hapong tag-lagas may sugat na umaantak Sa lamat ng mga kalsadang aspalto sa lungsod na dating pastulan ng mga katutubong Indyang Pequot. Anong kabulaanan ang itinatago ng mga kortina sa durungawan? Hindi alam ng mga kalapati kung ano ang kulay ng pag-asa. Naupos na sigarilyo’y ibinurol ko sa tabi ng Tulay ng mga Palaka Habang patungo ang prusisyon ng trapik sa Foxboro Casino na pag-aari ng Indyang Pequot. Kung bakit sumingit sa isip ang Abu Sayyaf? Sa takipsilim ng taglagas sinisilip sa gunita ang kutob at kilabot bago tayo naglakbay patungong Amerika. (Oktubre 1, 2005, Willimantic, Connecticut, USA) ______________________________________________________________ FRIDAY AFTERNOON IN OCTOBER, WILLIMANTIC, CONNECTICUT, USA In the autumn afternoon a wound festers in the crack of the asphalt roads in the city once a pasture field for the native Pequot Indians. What fraud and deceptions do the window-curtains hide? Doves and pigeons do not know the color of hope. Kritika Kultura 37 (2021): 22–025 © Ateneo de Manila University San Juan, Jr. / Filipino/English Play-drive 23 My cigarette stub I interred beside the Bridge of Frogs while the traffic procession headed for the Foxboro Casino now owned by the Pequots. But why does the Abu Sayyaf sneak into the mind? In the Fall’s twilight hour I sneak into memory’s fissure, a voyeur filled with apprehension and terror before we journeyed to America. Kritika Kultura 37 (2021): 23–025 © Ateneo de Manila University San Juan, Jr. / Filipino/English Play-drive 24 Works Cited Ames, Roger T., and David Hall. Daodejing: Making Life Significant—A Philosophical Translation. Ballantine, 2003. Arboleda, Pia, translator. Barkada ng Lima/Gang of Five. By Ninotchka Rosca, Villarirca P, 2015. Aveling, Harry. “Two Approaches to the Positioning of Translations: A Comparative Study of Itamar Even-Zohar’s Polysystem Studies and Gideon Toury’s Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond.” Kritika Kultura, no. 6, 2005, pp. 6–22. doi:10.13185/1541. Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, Schocken, 1969, pp. 69–82. Borges, Jorge Luis. Borges: A Reader. Edited by Emir Rodriguez Monegal and Alastair Reid, E. P. Dutton, 1981. De Villa, Ma. Theresa. Teorya at Praktika ng Pagsasalin ng Philippine Society and Revolution ni Amado Guerrero 1968–1982. UP Center for Development and Integrative Studies, 2002. 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