ABOUT THE BOOK

The title of Mesándel “Ayer” Virtusio Arguelles’s new collection, Walang Mabanaag, suggests his desire to give readers a glimpse into his creative process of deliberately making homophonic poems after reading Jona Branzuela Bering’s poems in Alang sa Nasaag, merely by listening to the sounds (and rhythms) of Cebuano-Visayan as compositional framework. This formal gesture of bypassing sense through sound is, in his own praxis, serious play: a leaning into the limitation of not knowing the sense of Cebuano-Visayan words in Bering’s poems, but being inspired by this very limitation to do sound-alike poems that make sense on their own terms. Arguelles posits in his brief preface that he calls his Tagalog poems mis-translations of Bering’s works, which they are, if you are hankering after the problematic translation practice of the source language’s original meaning conveyed commensurably into the target language. But in Arguelles’s art practice of making things up, he brings us to the heart of an inventive trickster’s poēisis of appropriation. And it is a peculiar delight for this reader (who believes that all poets are tricksters) to realize that the onus of translational fluency is intentionally dis-placed by the poet onto the bi- or multi-lingual reader who now listens differently to new musical tensions and  harmonics produced by two voices singing near-synchronously in two tongues, mostly about  vastly dissimilar things, unintelligible to each other, even as the structure and vocabulary of their languages come from the same originary tap root.

—Marjorie Evasco

Awtor ng It Is Time to Come Home: New & Collected Poems

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Si Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles ay full professor sa Departamento ng Literatura sa De La Salle University-Manila. Awtor siya ng higit tatlumpung aklat ng tula, sanaysay, maikling kuwentong pambata at nobela.