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Reviewed by:
  • SipatSalin: TransFigurations
  • Vincenz Serrano
Maria Luisa F. Torres SipatSalin: TransFigurations Marikina City: Talindaw Publishing; Yogyajarta: Research and Community Service Institution, Sanata Dharma University, 2011. 185 pages.

SipatSalin: TransFigurations is a collection of thirty-five poems in English and Filipino by Maria Luisa F. Torres, Professor of English at the Ateneo de Manila University. These poems, produced starting from the 1970s and well into the 1990s, have been translated into a number of languages, among them, Iloko, Chabacano, Bikol, Kapampangan, Indonesian, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Spanish, and German; this makes SipatSalin’s linguistic variety one of the more recent outstanding examples of both poetry and translation. In her preface, Torres remarks on the milieu which occasioned her work: the poems were forged during the martial law (1972–1981) years of “activist thought and thoughtful activism” (3) for her and her peers, a milieu that “taught [them] that faith and suspicion, like compassion and sufferance, were two faces of one and the same metaphor” (3).

Although SipatSalin—published a year after the author’s award-winning book of criticism, Banaag at Sikat: Metakritisismo at Antolohiya, appeared in 2010—puts equal emphasis on both her poems as well as their translations into multiple languages, this review will comment on the original poems (be they in English or in Filipino) and not on the translations. I claim that the poems—with their attention to aspects of the physical world and to interior feeling—are, in German critic Theodor Adorno’s felicitous phrase, “subjective expression[s] of a social antagonism” (“On Lyric Poetry and Society,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, 45; Columbia University Press, 1991). These expressions, moreover, propose to extend the resources of the lyric: in dealing with personal and historical materials, Torres’s handling of the lyric form troubles fixed and unitary temporal and spatial categories.

One key feature of SipatSalin is the lyric voice of the personae—the attentiveness to detail depicted in the interior scenes of poems such as “Letters to Mama” where things like dry leaves, a candleholder, an ashtray, and scrapbooks are assigned places in the apartment. This focus extends to aspects of the landscape, where the persona in “Sagada” describes the road leading to Bontoc as a “higanteng sawa” (110) or where the surroundings of Scotland—complete with trees, shrubs, and rivers—are typified as both “so sacred [End Page 147] and so sensual” (134): “a scenery of seduction” (134). This lyricism, moreover, accommodates a wide range of feeling: the sarcasm in “To the Poet of The Year,” where the persona asks the lauded poet if his/her feats were “death-defying” and if he/she “totter[ed] and traipse[d] on the tightrope of language” (46); the resolute stance in “After a Rally,” where “fighting” is considered as “the art of the survivor” (15), the persona making distinctions between “deadened but not dead,” of “dying without dying” (15); the sense of searching hopefulness, articulated by the persona in “Paalam,” in discerning “between the notes / in the voice of the guitar / for the time that was to come” (94).

This lyrical disposition and the emotional range are, to be sure, inseparable from social critique: these are not poems of mere interiority; rather, the poems are for Adorno “subjective expression[s] of a social antagonism” (Adorno, 45). For him, “the lyric reveals itself to be most deeply grounded in society when it does not chime in with that society” (Adorno, 43). Moreover, the work of interpretation involves “discover[ing] how the entirety of a society [is] conceived as an internally contradictory unity, [and] is manifested in the work of art, in what way the work of art remains subject to society and in what way it transcends it” (Adorno, 39). In other words, in contrast to ways of thinking about the lyric as an expression of interiority (which, certainly, is still a valuable approach to lyric poems), I would offer the proposition, following Adorno, that the poems in SipatSalin distinguish themselves from other examples in the lyric genre insofar as they offer subjective and personal expressions of social antagonisms: for all their emphasis on lyricism, the poems nonetheless demonstrate social paradoxes and contradictions...

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