Untitled (Walang Pamagat)

Tags

#ChristineMurphy, #Filipino, #Indigenous, #InternationalWomensDay, #LindaLee, #Litranslation, #MotherEarth, #Poetry, #Sculpture, #Tagalog, #Transcreation, #translation, #WomensHistoryMonth

Original English by Linda Lee, Translate-created to Tagalog / Filipino by Su Layug

photo by Su Layug of the sculpture “Mother Earth” by Christine Murphy, as exhibited at the Illinois Masonic Hospital in 2019.

Dalwang babaeng
Nakaupo 
Sumisilong mula sa araw.
Kasaysayang nakalilim,
Saksi sa pagsulong na halaw. 
Minamasdan ang bukirin,
Sinasakang mga parang.
Dalwang babaeng nakaupo.
Dating dilag ng kumintang
Mababakas sa kasuotan
Ang kupas at kaigtingan
Ng sinakang mga taon,
Pinaglabang kasigingan
Mga brasong kulubot na
Mga guhit ng punyagi
Mga kamay na nag-aruga
Sa tahanang kinandili
Salaysay ng mga buhay
Dumadaloy, titigil din.
Dalwang babaeng nakaupo
Namamahinga sa tungkulin.
Minsan sila’y umawit din
Ng dasalin at adhika
Dalawang babaeng nakaupo,
Mutya’t ilaw ng gunita.

~ Linda Lee (original English)
Sinalin-likha ni Su Layug sa Tagalog 
(transcreated by Su Layug to Tagalog) 


Unititled
~ Linda Lee 

Two Ladies
They sit upon their shaded porch, 
A respite from the day, 
Living history under eaves, 
There sitting on display. 
They looked out on the fields and trees, 	
The land that held their soul, 
Two ladies resting from their work,
The young of long ago. 
Their apron stained with this and that,
Their gray heads both held high, 
Memories of a hundred years
Relived there in their eyes. 
The wrinkled hands that held the plow 
In furrows long and straight, 
Are hands that cooled a fevered brow 
And filled a supper plate. 
The lines of life are etched on them,
Their lives about complete, 
Two ladies rest there in the shade,
A respite from the heat.
Their cradles rocked so long ago, 
To tunes we’ll never know, 
Two ladies rest upon the porch, 
The young of long ago.


TRANSCREATOR'S NOTES:  It took me a while to decide to use this photo to accompany this translation because it only shows one woman sitting, versus two, as depicted in the original poem in English, and as translated to Tagalog. I was wavering between this and another photo wherein there is a real-life woman seated with (in) the sculpture. In the end, the decision was based on the merits of the artwork, itself -- and the idea that another woman -- representing any and all woman -- is understood to be seated beside this sculpture titled "Mother Earth." 

Halamanang Ligtas (Sheltered Garden by H.D.)a poetry translation from English to Tagalog

Tags

Beauty, Filipino translation, Poetry, sheltered life, Tagalog translation, violent beauty

This gallery contains 1 photo.

Sheltered Garden (excerpt) by H.D. (American poet, novelist, and memoirist,1886-1961) For this beauty, beauty without strength, chokes out life. I …

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Hango: Salamin ng Lumbay (Excerpt: Melancholy’s Mirror by Robert Cording)

Tags

death, Filipino, Filipino translation, grief, literary translation, melancholy, Poetry, Robert Cording, Tagalog, Tagalog translation, translation

A Translation from English to Filipino by Su Layug

Kabilang ako ngayon sa sarili kong anatomiya ng lumbay—

Sa tagal nitong paghihintay sa hindi mangyari-yari

Sa pagtrangka nito sa kinabukasan. Sa pagkaalam nito

sa lagpas-kamatayan na hanggang doon na lang 

ang alam. Ang pagkainutil nitong kumpletuhin

ang buhay na basta na lamang nagwakas. Imahe ni Durer,

may pakpak ngunit paralisado, napupung-aw, nakalatag 

ang mga kagamitan sa harap niya, ngunit hindi makalikha. Ang mga salitang ito

na wari’y mga insektong nagkukubli ngayong dapithapong taglamig.

I belong today to my own anatomy of melancholy—

its long wait for what never happens.

Its shut down of the future. Its after-

knowledge of death that knows no more

than it did before. Its inability to complete

a life that simply ended. Dürer's figure,

winged but paralyzed, moping, tools spread

before him, but unable to create. These words

that lurk like insects this winter late afternoon.

Translator’s Notes:

1 “Hindi mangyari-yari” — the repetition of the root word, “yari” (to happen) at the end denotes the (non-) fruition of the action verb “happen.” (“that never happens”). An alternative is to say “hindi mangyayari” (will never happen) but the earlier phrase, “hindi mangyari-yari” suggests a recurring wish for something to happen, and the recurring end-result of that something never happening.

2. What I found especially difficult to translate are the lines, “Its after-/ knowledge of death that knows no more / than it did before.” The question arises: what does “that” refer to?” Does it refer to “melancholy,” to which the persona belongs to, and thus represents them? Or does it refer to “after-knowledge” (that knows no more than it did before)? I took the liberty of interpreting “that” as referring to “melancholy” which existed before and after the death being talked about. Thus, the Filipino translation, “sa kaalaman sa lampas-kamatayan” (the knowledge of (what is) beyond death) “na hanggang doon na lang ang alam” (which is its (melancholy’s) limit of knowing)

3. Through Cording’s article (a personal essay, its link below), which I found online after writing this translation, we can confirm that this poem is an autobiographical one — that, indeed, it refers to the death of Cording’s son. The poem refers to the visual artist Albrecht Dürer‘s work Melencolia (1513/1514) in the last stanza. The grief of the persona due to the death of his son is juxtaposed with his grief of not being able to create, juxtaposed with the realization that his son, himself, will no longer be able to create, his life having been taken too soon.

4. I chose to say, “Filipino translation,” rather than “Tagalog translation” because I chose to use the word, “napupung-aw” (moping, being melancholic) which is not Tagalog, but Bicolano — the native language of my late mother. I wish I learned her language more.

This is the link to the whole poem in English: https://poems.com/poem/melancholys-mirror/
This is the link to Robert Cording’s personal essay, In the Unwalled City: https://imagejournal.org/article/in-the-unwalled-city/

A Friend of Mine (Aking Kaibigan)

Tags

#Friendship, #Unrequited Love, FilipinoSong, FriendofMine, Love, music, OdetteQuesada, Tagalog, translation

Composed and sung originally in English by Odette Quesada, translated to Tagalog and sung in Tagalog by Su Layug.

Lately I find myself translating English songs to Tagalog. I find this task extra challenging on a couple more levels than translating poetry. My self-imposed challenges are the following:

1. Transfer of meaning: the meaning of the song must be preserved as much as possible in a culturally resonant way, meaning, the translated lines must sound as though they were written in the target language.
2. The phrasing must fall naturally, as much as possible, for singability.
3. If possible, maintain a rhyming scheme, again to contribute to the translated song’s singability. And the most challenging and rewarding one:
4. The translation must have a turn of phrase or two that is poetically particular to the target language.

The originally English song that I’m featuring here was composed, recorded and immortalized by Odette Quesada — an icon in the Philippine music industry. I chose this particular song as my first (public) adventure in song translation because it has a personal back story, not in the sense of the song’s meaning – a one-sided romance between two friends – but in the twists and turns of friendship and romance that childhood friends sometimes get intertwined in. Many times, these love triangles are not as obvious as the coming-of-age Hollywood movies portray them to be, nor quite as well-defined as the triangle imagined by the non-recipient of the unrequited love. In any case, I’d like to think that in such love-and-friendship stories, friendship ultimately prevails, as it is, in many times, greater and more enduring, than romantic love.

Aking Kaibigan 

Kaibigan ka noon 

Kaibigan pa rin ngayon

Hanggang kaibigan na lang nga ba tayong dalawa?

Mahal kita noon

Mahal pa rin ngayon

Ngunit gayunpama’y kaibigan lang pala.

Pag-ibig mo’y sa kanya lang,

Pag-ibig ko’y sa iyo laan

Ngunit kapag malungkot ka,

Lagi akong nandiyan 



Ako ang siyang takbuhan mo,

Kakwentuhan ng lambingan niyo,

Ngunit di mo man lang pansin 

Ang damdaming nananaig

Sa iyo’y nananabik 

Ngunit heto pa rin ako.




Excerpt of the original English, A Friend of Mine
Music and lyrics by Odette Quesada

I've known you for so long

You are a friend of mine

But is this all we'd ever be?

I've loved you ever since

You are a friend of mine

But babe, is this all we ever could be?

You tell me things I've never known

I've shown you love you've never shown

But then again, when you cry

I'm always at your side

You tell me 'bout the love you've had

I listen very eagerly

But deep inside you'll never see

This feeling of emptiness

It makes me feel sad

But then again, I'm glad

To put to the test the viability of the translation, I sing the translated song in a lower key than the original singer does (I am an alto).

Here’s a link to Odette Quesada’s Facebook, where a video of her recent rendition of this song in the original English is posted: https://www.facebook.com/odetteq

The Roses Bleed

Tags

Autumn, Filipino, Filipino translation, poem, Poetry, Tagalog, Tagalog translation, Visual Art

(in English and Tagalog)

The Twitter poetry tradition goes back to when the then-Twitter (now X) platform posed a challenge to poets to write within its restrictive 140 characters, to when the character count expanded to 280, and to now, when the longer form is allowed for premium subscribers.

I continue to write in the restrictive form of 280 characters or less, being used to delivering poetic thoughts in bursts of Tweets, albeit they are no longer called that.

As a Tagalog translator, I (human) also translate my English tweets to this Philippine language, constantly comparing it to the renditions of Google Translate or Bing Translate, which are readily available on The X platform, itself. The evolution of AI in translation is part of my self-study as a translator and as a poet.

“Rose Gardens” (mixed media on watercolor paper) by ThompsonNFT on Twitter / X with the author’s permission https://twitter.com/thompsonNFT/status/1713194138869387659/photo/1

The Roses Bleed 

onto the page of autumn
where bleeding is allowed
with abandon
in grief, in passion, in remorse --
or to let stand still
what briefly was or what could've been
in a tiny light --
that it may perchance, shine --
another time. Again.

~ Su Layug

Nagdurugo Ang Mga Rosas

sa pahina ng taglagas
kung saan hinahayaan ang pagdugo
nang walang pakundangan
nang dahil sa dalamhati, pusok, pagtitika --
o upang patirikin lamang
ang isang saglit, o ang isa sanang saglit --
nang harinawa'y, 
isang araw
ito'y muling magningning.

~ Su Layug

Filipino translation: “Water Lantern Festival”

Tags

Autumn, death, Filipino translation, Love, Poetry, Tagalog translation

Human poetry overlaid on AI-generated visual (Midjourney)

Pista ng Mga Lampara sa Tubig

Paalam, Tag-init – ikaw
na isinulat ko sa mga dingding
ng lamparang papel, hanggang pumanaog ang mga salita
sa daloy na hindi na/kayang
bigkasin ang ngalan mo, ang iyong mukha/ng --
suminag sa langit at tubig. mga piraso
ng pagkatao ko – isang hardin
na lumago at huminga/inihinga
nang walang pag-aalala o alinlangan/iniwan
habang pinaliliyab ang sandaling
padapithapon.

translated to Tagalog/Filipino by Su Layug

My Life: A name trimmed with colored ribbons

(excerpt) Poetry Translation

BY LYN HEJINIAN

The    leaves    outside    the window   
tricked the eye, demanding that one see them, focus on them,   
making it impossible to   look   past   them, and though holes   
were opened through the foliage, they were as useless as port-  
holes underwater looking into a dark sea, which only reflects   
the room one seeks to look out from. Sometimes into   
benevolent and other times into ghastly shapes.

The full text in English can be found at Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47892/my-life-a-name-trimmed-with-colored-ribbons

Translator’s notes:

1. To understand how the porthole is “useless” in this context, one needs to realize that portholes of a ship are never found on the part of the ship that is underwater, but above the waterline. A porthole by definition is an opening, a window that lets light and/or air in. It is useless underwater. At first, I thought that maybe the poet was mistaken to have likened the holes in the foliage to portholes below the waterline (there are no portholes below the waterline.) But upon the 2nd or the 3rd reading, it becomes clear that the poet is likening the holes among the foliage to portholes precisely because such openings would be useless, should they be constructed on that part of the ship that is submerged. Thanks to my gigs interpreting tor the US courts in cases that involve maritime laws (albeit, few and far-between), they have given me the insight for rendering this excerpt’s meaning.
2. I wanted to use the equivalent of “porthole” in Tagalog/Filipino, if there is an exact equivalent. Searching the usual dictionaries online did not give me a jargon, thus I resorted to using two AI chat portals. Google Bard came up with “bintana ng barko” which translates to “window of a ship.” Microsoft Bing came up with a total mistranslation: “butas ng puwit” (butt hole).

Cocoon

Tags

belonging, butterfly, cocoon, creature, emergence, evolution, isolation

by Su Layug (also published here: https://medium.com/ai-poetry-and-art)

(AI-co-created image using the author’s own photograph)

Resplendent fragile creature, 

you are the light and beauty that you seek, 

when your sanctuary walls have shed,

and the almighty sun has blessed you, 

come out and grace our world.

You’ve always belonged here, too.

Tilas

Maningning na talusaling,

ikaw ang ilaw at gandang hanap mo. 

Sa pagbaklas ng santuwaryo mong dingding,

at sa pagpapala ng bathalang sinag,

sumilip ka’t sumali sa aming mundo. 

Ito ay mundo mo rin. 

Translator’s Notes:

There is a dual or even triple tense/mood in the translation that is not in the original English. Back-translated, the lines can be read in the present: “As your sanctuary walls are shed […] you (now) look outside and join our world.” It can also be back-translated in the imperative mood this way: “When your sanctuary walls will have been shed […] look outside and join our world.” Or alternatively, in the past: “When your sanctuary walls were shed […] you looked outside and joined our world.” And so we find it here that as we switch languages, we switch our paradigms of time, too. And with these, also our worldview. How often do we find that, when we leave our psychic cocoons, we sometimes weave another one into which we retreat, and from which we reemerge (if we ever do) when we are ready to face the world, once again? Life is a constant cycle of advances and retreats, it seems, and we are never finished evolving and devolving until we cease to exist. And even after then, who knows?

Bad. Good. Better Witch

English Haiku written by me, triggered by an AI-assisted image based on my photograph, and translated into Filipino haiku with the same strict 5-7-5 syllabic structure.

Copyright © 2022 Su Layug on text. May re-post without alteration and with linkback to the original wordpress post.

TRANSLATION NOTES:

Translating with a strict syllabic requirement limits the words that can be used. A recent conversation with a reader of one of my translated poems commented that it's like translating a song. But a song has more leeway, I said, because the song translator does not even have to stick to translating the original words. 

In this translation, it occurred to me that restricting the poem to the same 5-7-5 syllabic pattern renders it almost impossible to translate the words per se. The closest way to translate it, thus, now comes close to translating a song, becomes "translating its sense." The whole haiku is trying to convey a certain meaning, but each line has to also say its own unit of meaning. The challenge then becomes to make the translated line make sense on its own, while limiting it to the required number of syllables, and still keeping it contributary to the whole sense of the haiku.

To back-translate the Filipino (without making another English haiku): 

(my) Pet is a bird
I dress up like autumn ~
Emancipated witch

A poet who writes in Tagalog, who is also a long-time friend, and who wishes to be identified as Pogi, has the following translation, instead:

Aking liparan
Kunwa akong taglagas
Tawang Dalisay

(back-translation)

My mode of flight
I pretend to be autumn
Pristine laughter 

What I couldn't satisfactorily achieve (and wanted so much to do) in my own translation -- the use of the word "taglagas" ("autumn," literally "season of shedding") -- falls naturally in Pogi's alternate translation of  "I camouflage as autumn."  But the real delight for me is the surprise reintroduction of "laughter." (which I lost in my translation) in its naturally positive state, "Pristine laughter."

Pogi's translation is intricately intertwined with the imagery, in the sense that the reference to the "witch" is nonverbal and thus, relies on the AI visual to be explicit. On its own, "Aking liparan" - my "mode of flight" extends beyond the visual, and can be construed as a metaphorical flight.

NOTES on Literary Translation: Hesitate (excerpt)

Tags

#AI, #AIart, Filipino, Filipino translation, poem, Poetry, Tagalog, Tagalog translation

English and Tagalog excerpt from a poem by the author inspired by an AI image generated from a photograph by the same creator

To cast a spell
on all that could be done easier:
to sleep, to go places,
to fix
broken vases
of meanings and being

©su layug (image and verse may be reposted with reference to the creator, Su Layug)

Ang maghasik ng engkanto
sa lahat ng maaaring
gawin nang mas madali:
ang matulog, ang maglakbay,
ang ayusin
ang mga nasirang sisidlan
ng mga kabuluhan
at pagiging nilalang

©su layug (image and verse may be reposted with reference to the creator, Su Layug)
----------------------------------

Two words that were challenging to me, even as I knew what I meant in the original English poem:

1. “vases” — the literal translation is “plorera” which is derived from the Spanish “florera” = container for flowers. By using “sisidlan” (container), instead, the reference becomes “container (of different things, both literal and abstract).” The word “vase” here is used in the Greek sense of vase being the same as pot or vessel. https://www.panoply.org.uk/about-vases
2. “being” — There is no one word in Tagalog/Filipino that is self-contained in its meaning and connotation that translates back to “being” (the state of existing, or of being alive or real). The word “pagiging” (the state of something) needs to be followed by a noun: “being ___ (human, somebody, a creature). I chose “pagiging nilalang” (being a creation/ being human). The root word “lalang,” which means “create,” leads us to the basic ontological notion that a person is “created” by someone/something/a force beyond such being, an epistemological belief rooted in both pre-colonial and post-colonial Filipino spirituality.