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Bardolatry and Glossophilia: A Short Autobiography of My Obsessions

First an apology: this is neither academic nor prescriptive, but purely


descriptive and confessional. At the risk of embarrassing myself as I air my dirty
laundry, I will take this opportunity to publicly conduct an autopsychotherapy via
talking​ cure -- I will narrate the history of my two interconnected obsessions and
hopefully purge myself of the psychosis. My prospects are not bright, since I
have been rewarded for indulging my fixations. My twin obsessions are
Shakespeare​ (thus Bardolatry, or an idolatrous love of the Bard of Avon) and
Languages, specifically Translation (thus Glossophilia, love of tongues).
I start at age 6. ​My father​, a stage actor, brought me to his production of
Lysistrata, directed by ​Dr. Ricardo​ Abad. My father left me to the stage manager
as he prepared. The stage manager toured me around the backstage. I am
shocked by giant phalluses onstage, and traumatized by monstrous actors
vocalizing in the dressing room, wearing heavy ​Greek​ cosmetics; they were
giant, baggy monsters with thunderous voices. After trauma followed a strange
attraction. At age 6, I fell in love with the theater.
Age 7, ​my mother​, in cahoots with my father, bought me three
Shakespeare books: ​The Merchant of Venice​, Julius Caesar, and King Lear. I
picked up the slimmest of the three, ​Julius Caesar​, and decided to read it. Did
not understand a single word, but was mesmerized by its lilting music. I locked
myself in my grandmother’s room alone, and pretended to rehearse scenes from
the play, still not understanding a single word but fixated with the oral exercise of
what I would later on learn to label as “iambic pentameter” and “masculine” and
“feminine endings.”
Age 8, I had a bout of separation anxiety from my mother as she began to
come home late everyday from work as an interior designer. One Friday evening,
as I stayed awake waiting for my mommy, I re-opened Julius Caesar and
decided not to close the book until I’ve understood every single passage of the
play. Aided with footnotes, I stayed up till 6 or 7am the next day, vanquishing the
text. That was my gateway drug to Lear, Hamlet, Merchant of Venice, Othello,
etc.
Age 9, my father brought me to the theater to watch a production of
Macbeth. Instead of seeing brown Filipinos in Scottish skirts, I saw a troop of
Japanese samurai wielding giant fans as swords in heavy Kabuki makeup. And
the language was in Filipino. ​Shakespeare​, made to speak in Filipino. The
translation was by National Artist ​Rolando Tinio​. New neuron pathways and
connections formed in my brain. This opened my eyes to translation.
Jump cut to age 16, I joined a high school theater company in the Ateneo
de Manila. We were going to stage Macbeth -- in Tinio’s Filipino translation. I was
cast as Macbeth. License to indulge in my unhealthy obsession. The feel of
Tagalog rolling and swishing in my mouth, the sudden shifts of mental images as
I recite poetic language. Rapturous bliss.
Age 17, our director, ​Ron Capinding​, a student of Dr. Abad’s, impressed
by my command of the Filipino language, commissions me to translate
Shakespeare’s ​Comedy of Errors​. My first foray into the craft of translation.
Emulating Tinio, I used a mixed register of Indigenous Tagalog and Castilian
Filipino. A short background on the Filipino language:
Filipino is an amalgam of many languages, mainly three: Tagalog, which is
native to the National Capital Region; Spanish by way of 300 years of
colonization, and English by way of the American occupation. Tagalog and
Spanish (or Castilian) Filipino is considered the poetic diction, while English
Filipino (or Taglish to us) is considered informal argot. I fixated on a crisp, rolling
registry of hard-edged guttural, onomatopoeic Tagalog, and smatterings of soft,
gossamer Spanish. Translation, I learned, is not only sense, but also sound.
Orality and performance must be central to the work of a translator for stage --
the mouth and voice of the actor is an instrument that aids us in understanding
the thoughts and emotions of characters. One context you have to understand is
that translation in the Philippines, especially in Manila, is hardly functional. We
come from a bilingual context; most of us have a mastery of the English
language. The purpose then of translation into Filipino is sometimes, if not all the
time, a purely aesthetic or political choice. We are attentive to translation not out
of necessity, but to hear the changes, the mutations, the reinterpretations in the
linguistic shift. Thus, I’ve always taken on the belief that translation is merely
partially about accuracy, and almost always about musicality. As the Italians say,
Traduttore, traditore​ -- Translator, traitor.

This sensorial approach (as opposed to cognitive) carries through my


translation practice till the present. This sensuality in language reaches a climax
at age 19, with my collaboration with Dr. Abad in ​Sintang Dalisay​.​ Although
strictly not a translation but a devised fusion of different literary and cultural texts,
SD utilized my translation practice as Dr. Abad and I fused the word salad which
is G.D. Roke’s lengthy 1901 metrical romance poem ​Ang Sintang Dalisay ni
Romeo at Julieta​ and Rolando Tinio’s Filipino translation of Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet. I dare not claim any disciplined, systemic dramaturgical
process -- it was cut-and-paste. The logic of oh-that-works! and the science of
that-sounds-right! Then add to that the choreographic vocabulary of ​Igal​ of the
Sama-Bajau people via Dr. Santamaria’s research and movement design, and
the entrancing ​music​ of Prof. Abraham’s gamelan. European names like Romeo
and Julieta and Verona, turned into Rashiddin and Jamila and Semporna.
Retelling the Shakespearean tragedy through a concoction of Southeast Asian
amalgams might invite accusations of exoticism. I was forced to reach that
conclusion in my own research work when I decided to study my own adaptation
for my undergraduate literature thesis (yes, how auto-cannibalistic of me). But
now I dare reframe our adaptation as a counter-colonial gesture. One cannot be
blind to the fact that our Shakespeareana is a product of colonial education. But
to repackage the white man’s work and turn it into something seemingly,
convincingly native and traditional
-- isn’t that colonizing the colonizer? I don’t know. I’d like to think it is. Later
tonight, please watch and tell us what you think.

Age 20, I translated Shakespeare’s ​Troilus and Cressida​. Then I tinkered


with the script and added informal diction (that is, Taglish) to create a hip-hop
version of the play, which I co-directed with Brian Sy for his senior’s thesis.
Inspired by Filipino and African-American hip-hop, we turned Shakespeare’s
romantic absurd tragicomedy about sex and war into a street gangland rap and
dance battle. Pure fun.

Age 25, I collaborated with dramaturg-actress ​Ness Roque-Lumbres​ and


performance maker Chris Aronson to create a three-actor devised piece using
Shakespeare’s Hamlet. For 6 months, we three met twice a week in Chris’
bachelor's pad doing open-ended explorations and amateur seminars on
Shakespeare’s notoriously difficult play. Frustration, admiration, obsession gave
birth to a strange creature of a performance which we titled ​The Mousetrap​:
Anti-Hamlet.​ What did we go against the play that earned the title “Anti?” Against
deadly theater, the impositions of Western tradition on our native actors,
questioning the institutionalized modes of theatrical productions in capitalist
postcolonial Manila, the undeniability of this aura of greatness around
Shakespeare that we both loved and abhorred. We shredded the play into tatters
to serve OUR purposes as angry young theater-makers. We wept onstage as we
openly discussed our financial struggles, and the pressures of forcing our
Shakespearean fixations to mean something bigger than our literary-dramatic
myopia. During that time, national election had just ended, and our current
president, ​Rodrigo Duterte​ won, championed by a bloodlust for criminals, drug
addicts, and political enemies. We fixated on Hamlet’s line, ​“The play’s the
thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King​.” So after metatheatrical
vignettes about textual analysis, scene work, process, and our bank accounts,
we ended with a “skit” where we portrayed the Players hired by Hamlet to “catch
the conscience of the King.” Sensing that the play we were about to stage was
“political” and critical of the King, we took deep breaths and accepted the fact
that actors will always be in the line of fire as voices of resistance and revolt.

What has happened to my twin obsessions, ​Bardolatry and Translation​,


at this creative juncture? They’ve metastasised into mutant forms. Bardolatry
turned into an ambiguous iconoclasm, and translation turned into devise work
and aggressive adaptation. Last year, age 26, I collaborated with five other
actors to do a similar devise or reworking of Shakespeare’s ​Julius Caesar​. Now
President Duterte has shown his full monstrosity, with thousands of corpses of
drug addicts piling up in Manila’s streets, and persecution of political opponents,
mostly women, taking over the headlines, and the sneaky burial of the carrion of
Ferdinand Marcos in our Hero’s cemetery like a thief in the night, and constant
proliferation of fake news -- but instead of directly assassinating the tyrant as
Brutus did, we decided to scrutinize ​Brutus himself​. We, the angry, educated
middle class, are Brutus. What do we do? What is left for us to do? We offered
no answers, as Shakespeare failed to do, so we merely posed questions and
titillating what-ifs. It’s a work-in-progress. Frustrating, but at the same time
productive. We recorded interviews with Duterte supporters in our social circles,
and forced ourselves and the audience to see the “other” side -- their confusing,
but enlightening logic, and our collective desperation and moral confusion.

The metastasis of my obsessions worked with an overlying principle, an


oxymoron which I call “​cleaving away​.” Shakespeare remains the subject of my
obsession, but in order to stick fast to him with the maximum amount of pleasure,
I find now that I have to swerve away from him, only so that I might find fresher
ways of how much he can matter to me more than ever before. In order to come
nearer, I have to go far. This undulating motion, proximity and distance, is the
current trend of my psychosis.

I am turning 27 this April, and I find myself neck-deep in a new


glossophiliac mania: translating from the Greek. This will be my last confession
today.
I find that Ancient Greek is a highly onomatopoeic language, not so much
as mimetic of sounds from nature, but the inner buzzing noises of thought in
basso profundo. The brain churning and thinking thoughts has a sound, and it is
Greek. While on the other hand, Filipino’s onomatopoea captures the sound of
emotion and affect in melismatic tones. Notice how I seem to completely ignore
meaning and metaphrasis, or accuracy. I leave that to classicists and professors.
I choose to obsess over sound.
I will seek to demonstrate this via a short reading of the Greek, and my
Filipino translation of it. This time, I chose to forgo the Spanish registers of
Filipino and focus on the Tagalog side of it. That way, the diction sounds more
elemental, like the cognitive music of things even before things meant anything.
Never mind that some, if not all, of you will not understand the Greek, and only
Filipinos here will understand the Filipino. Never mind the meaning. Be attentive
to the music. Bear witness to my psychosis and obsession. Here are the opening
lines of Oedipus Rex in the ​Ancient Greek​:

O tekna, Kadmou tou palai nea trophe,


tinas poth' hedras tasde moi thoazdete
ikteriois kladoisin eksestemmenoi;
polis d' omou men thymiamaton gemei,
homou de paianon te kai stenagmaton?
ago dikaion me par' angelon, tekna,
allon akouein autos od' elelytha,
o pasi kleinos Oidipous kaloumenos.
all ' o geraie, phrazd', epei prepon ephys
pro tonde phonein, tini tropo kathestate,
deisantes e sterksantes; os thelontos an
emou prosarkein pan? dysalgetos gar an
eien toiande me ou katoiktiron hedran.
Here it is in my ​Filipino translation​:

Mga ANAK KO,


kayóng bagong kinalinga
mulâ sa lahi ni Kadmos,
bakit nauupo sa aking harapán
nang tangan ang mga sangá ng pamamanhik
na pinalamutian pa ng mga pamutong?
At bakit napupuno ng kamanyang
ang buong lunsod,
kasabay ng linggal
ng mga papuri at panambitan?
Naisip kong mali, mga anak,
kung maalaman ko pa sa ulat ng iba,
kaya sumadya ako rito, akong
si Oidipous
kung tawagin,
tanyag sa lahat.

Halika, tanda,
magwika sa akin
yamang ikaw ang pinakanababagay
mamalita alang-alang sa kanilang lahat,
ano ang kalagayan mo,
bilang nasisindak baga
o isang nagsusumamo?
Alaming handa akong maglaan
ng anumang uri ng tulong;
magiging lubhang matigas ang puso ko
kung di-madarampian ng habag
sa ganiyang pagmamakaamo.

Thank you for indulging me, and obviously, this session is a failure. My
obsession will run its course whether I will it or ​no​.

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