62 Raymundo Mata invokes Bathala, the Tagalog name for God first mentioned by Chirino, a Jesuit chronicler of the 1600s. Rizal disputes the term Bathala three times in his letters to Blumentritt. (Some scholars, in this postmodern world that disrespects the dead, blaspheme that the hero could have been wrong.) Rizal queries the term again in his annotations of the history of the Philippines by an official living in Mexico, the Morga, in which through anguished footnotes the hero Rizal re-examines colonialism via a colonizer’s blurry lens. He is so earnest in the Morga, so angsty, so personally crazed with bitterness against the katsila, I like it better than the novels. Rizal writes to Blumentritt: “It was two years ago that I told [Pedro Paterno, Filipino expat in Madrid] I was surprised that no Tagalog knew about the word Bathala. He then showed me a dictionary [sic] . . . [Chirino’s] translation of the saying [bahala na ang May Kapal] is not correct.” Rizal was clearly annoyed by the Jesuit Chirino’s lapses: Rizal pre-cursed Orientalism and bore Edward Said’s pet peeves way before his time. An unbearable burden, if you ask me! Woe to the lonely avant-garde! If Rizal is correct in his argument, that Bathala was an error by the Chirino, yet one more form of Orientalist idiocy rather than a genuine indigenous term, then Raymundo Mata’s reference to Bathala is erudite—learned from school, not from shitting. I’m sure he’s hiding a revolutionary code somewhere—maybe “Bathala” is some kind of password? (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
63 Revolutionary password?!!? I will explicate the above act for those undamaged by ideology’s miasma. Raymundo imitates his friend Miong and takes a shit by the river. As Raymundo shits he sings (and cribs from the anachronistic anthem Bayan Ko [c.1898], for no good reason—what was going on here, Ms. Translator?) and indulges in “feeble forays into zoologic insight” [Mürk, Mapping the Libido, vii]. Raymundo is observing insects (later he notes their colors with lyrical precision: “bluebottle, greymottle, veinsottle”) with minute attention that signifies a latent obsessive-compulsive schema in his psychic apparatus. This does not surprise me. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Vienna, Austria)
64 I would be the last person to question a renowned scholar such as Dr. Diwata, but I’d like to note here the hardship of translating texts—the terror, as she has once noted, of the linguistic abyss. Of course I make mistakes. All translators are confronted by territories for which they have no signposts, no cartographic schemes. As for this passage—it is a hypergraphic coil, a cacophone of contrapuntal tones, rich in its obscurity—I tried my best. Dr. Diwata should at least understand my situation before she throws stones, I mean footnotes! (Trans. Note)
65 Reminds me of my mom’s hometown, land of the morning shit. They had outhouses, no plumbing, so one had close encounters with nature. And on those road trips people took during my lost summers (when inland trucking had an entirely unmerited glamor), on Pantranco buses that passed through San Juanico Strait, the Bicol region, Southern Luzon—on those trips sometimes we had to improvise. I learned geology this way—the rocky grounds of Samar, volcanic grasslands of Bicolandia: the path to Manila littered by an organic gleam. I’m sorry, where was I? (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
66 Exact meaning unknown, but the declension may go like this: langgam means ant in Tagalog but bird in Cebuano; pikoy means bird—specifically parrot—in Waray but penis in Cebuano; utan is vegetable in Cebuano but slang for penis in Cebuano and Hiligaynon; the word for pepper, sili, in Hiligaynon means, yes, penis in Waray: a delightful round-robin of phallic syllogisms going from language to language via natural ephemera. The polylingual Filipino has no other recourse but sophistication—and a dirty mind. (Trans. Note)
67 And the winner of the award for the dirtiest mind? Cebuanos! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
68 Aha. I see. The mosquitoes who “speak bad things” are the frailocracy, rabid eaters of nineteenth-century Filipino flesh. The imagery of killing mosquitoes (i.e., friars) is original—much better than the reigning insect trope—that Moth and the Flame fable that the young Rizal (and copycat Aguinaldo, too) kept invoking. Enough of that already! Sorry, Rizal—but that Moth story was boring. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
69 “The killer’s eye.” Is that a reference to “mind’s eye,” as in Wordsworth, or Shakespeare? Did Raymundo Mata read Wordsworth or did the translator? Mürk, in his reading of Freud, understood that language is at the heart of the self’s opacity. If it is impossible for us to say what we mean, how much more problematic is a translated country? If language defers meaning rather than provides it, what static arises in this bouillabaise? This text is exemplary in that it teaches us that we must always read with this axiom in mind—we will never know history, but in the meantime we can always blame the translator. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Vence, France)
70 I know there are haters out there (see above), but I enjoyed working on these passages. Raymundo is scientific yet lyrical, which academics, who do not understand poetry, fail to appreciate. His wordplay was fascinating to read and challenging to translate, for instance the image “half-moon-script” of ladybugs (“pagsusulatang mala-biyak-ng-buwan . . .”) to describe the flutter of their wings. I hope others enjoy my poor attempts at parlaying this energetically tactile yet philosophically absorbing section. (Trans. Note)
71 Ahh. I get it. Filosofong Tae. Heisenberg in the hornal. The dignity of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy is at stake here. There it is again: he says “King’s world.” Then he capitalizes Kingdom. Pun on his name Raymundo. “Rey-mundo.” King-world. Now I’m getting Mimi C.’s point, how she had to resolve the translator’s dilemma. Let me see. Hmm. Puwitic poet. Now I’m looking for the puns, the language shifts. Is “killer’s eye” a pun on his name: “Mata”? “Mata” means eye, in Tagalog, but he/she kills, in
