Tongues upon Tongues: Review of Glossolalia by Marlon Hacla, translated by Kristine Ong Muslim
by Amanda L. Andrei
Muslim’s decisions to shape precise, vivid images in English reveal to the reader Hacla’s zealful lyricism and otherworldly drama.
Glossolalia, by Marlon Hacla, translated from the Filipino by Kristine Ong Muslim. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023, 200 pp., $20. ISBN 978-1-946604-01-9
When I was a child, I witnessed church members speaking in tongues. Some would be “overcome” by the Holy Spirit, so filled with God’s glory that mysterious syllables poured from their mouths as other congregants lowered them to the ground until their convulsions ceased. Others would murmur softly, heads bowed and hands clasped as they prayed over a supplicant, their susurrations providing angelic protection and warding off demons. This phenomenon—also known as glossolalia—imparts a feeling of intimacy and terror, of a conversation with divinity that leaves its listeners forever transformed. It’s an apt title for Marlon Hacla’s diluvial poetry collection, translated from Filipino to English by Kristine Ong Muslim.
Glossolalia consists of 63 poems: 31 of Hacla’s flowing Filipino verses, 31 of Muslim’s exuberant English versions, and one final pair of texts that share the same title (which also happens to be “Glossolalia”). In the introduction, scholar and novelist Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III points out that one way to read the book is “as an entirely new work resulting from a translation” (2), which in turn renders Muslim’s process of translation more than “absolute fidelity or replication,” but rather “the very site of the production of sense and meaning” (3). He suggests that for bilingual readers, the contrast between Filipino and English offers new ways of experiencing Hacla’s words. And for Anglophone readers, Muslim brings forth Hacla’s fervid imagery and orphic language in a way that celebrates maximalism, excess, and the spectrum of sacred and profane. Consider this imagery from “Arrow”:
I will say that we tried to kill time by measuring the depth of the cliff. But who is actually saying that time can die? Perhaps, perhaps, but you know as well as I do that it keeps coming back and lives on like a corpse reanimated by a sorcerer for a good reason, to give justice to chores we forgot to do in the name of our fate’s good name, for the sake of those arriving after we’ve abandoned them without fulfilling our dues such as offering a solution to problems that stem from our flirting with times in which blessings pour like rain. You need forgiveness in small amounts and salvation in droves. (151)
In this quote and throughout the poems, the narration shifts and subsides, moving from “I” to “we,” an anonymous speaker—perhaps a prophet or babaylan, perhaps a parent or a neighbor—to a collective, a village, a family, a possession. And the notion of time stretches beyond Christian imagery into an animistic form. It becomes embodied, something that can cease and return, but in the disturbing form of a corpse. And it may have a sinister force (the sorcerer) behind it, the morality of which immediately comes into question, for perhaps this conjurer has a “good reason” for resuscitating time and will deliver “justice.” The narrators are unreliable, but less from some inner desire to deceive and more from the sense of crushing circumstances around them, whether environmental (the cliff, the rain), social (our flirting with times), or spiritual (blessings, forgiveness, salvation).
This excerpt exemplifies what Muslim describes in her translator’s note as maximalism, “a means to obfuscate or clarify through a persistent barrage of incongruous ideas and questions” (179), yet is still cohesive, stirring within the reader a sense of enigma. And even when images are fragments and sentences are one word, the implications are historically epic and archetypal. From the first few lines of “Ivory”:
Dim-witted chemist. Mirror smashed by a fist. A rock that wanted to whistle. Acapulco. A phrase guttural and casting a shadow. Gust of wind. Golden knot. (43)
The concrete images of chemist, mirror, wind, and knot mix with the surrealism of whistling rocks and intangibles that have shadows. Amidst this mélange, “Acapulco” stands out. Acapulco, that bay on Mexico’s Pacific coast, that territory under Mayan and Aztec rule, that port city under Spanish conquest serving as an essential transportation hub in the Manila galleon trade of the 16th-century colonial era. That connection between hemispheres and continents, that site of hybridization and syncretization. With this fragment, a whole new web of meaning is made between objects and the abstract, a shard of memory and geography bringing together household items and soul-filled entities.
Even if the reader is encountering Acapulco for the first time, names of places and people pose invitations to rabbit warrens of discovery. Three poems (“The World According to Josef Koudelka,” “The World According to Manuel Alvarez Bravo,” and “The World According to Shomei Tomatsu”) reference international photographers, opening up curiosities about these luminaries’ bodies of work in relation to Hacla’s text. In the Josef Koudelka poem, the second-person narration posits that the reader, like the narrator, has multiple versions of their parents and even their own doppelganger:
And two versions of yourself exist in the road that leads to where you began. One has sprouted horns, while the other is a mountain ceaselessly inundated by darkness. It is already eight in the morning. Where are you headed? (61)
To this unsettling question, the poet offers no answer. And this moment is one of many where the translator has given the English-language readers a subtle, powerful turn in her rendering of the Filipino. “Saan ka pupunta?” the source poem asks, which could easily be expressed as “Where are you going?” Muslim’s choice to give us the word “headed” cleverly echoes the horns on the multiple versions of self, gives a body to the verb, and in relation to the other sentences, makes the question even more unsettling. Muslim’s decisions to shape precise, vivid images in English illuminate the generative quality of her translation process and simultaneously reveal to the reader Hacla’s zealful lyricism and otherworldly drama.
Reaching the final poem leaves me struck, filled with conviction, immersed in the “Glossolalia” within Glossolalia. Framed with a bilingual partial Bible verse from John 6:68, the poem becomes a torrential prayer to God when the page is turned, revealing long and massive sentences that beseech, testify, confess, and implore. “…may we turn to a prophet whose lips burst from uttering sweet words, Lord, in order to compare the morning’s truth against night’s madness against the security of our accumulated wealth…” (161), “[h]ere is a list of our utterances that became a cradlesong that lulled our faithfulness to sleep and roused the narrow alleys that open out to the infidelities we are hiding…” (163), and, in two blunt declarations that seem to contradict each other, “Lord, we do know where we are going. We have no idea what our future holds” (165). But it’s not a contradiction. It’s a collective, anonymous vulnerability in the face of total glory: a kind of faith bordering on madness, the kind of faith that inspires devotees and martyrs, one that comes from a wellspring of love or despair beyond what human hearts can hold.
Suddenly, Hacla and Muslim have transported me back to the feelings of childhood churches, the witnessing and crying out to a force greater than any individual, the feeling of immersion in the glory and awe-fullness of Heaven. Is this the faith of my ancestors, of yours? Of ours? Where is that faith today? “Lord, there are way too many things here and way too many things that we can still do” (175), and though in these disturbed and disturbing times we do not know what the future holds, perhaps we can know what we are doing: what we are reading, speaking, interpreting, translating, listening to. And in Hacla and Muslim’s Glossolalia is a force of reckoning that must be heard in all its magnificent intensity and multiplicity.
Amanda L. Andrei is a playwright, literary translator, and theater critic based in Los Angeles. She writes epic, irreverent plays that center the concealed, wounded places of history from the perspectives of diasporic Filipina women, and she translates from Romanian to English with Codin Andrei, her father. Recent translations include Tatiana Niculescu’s Brancusi v. United States and Oana Hodade’s Scenes from the Life of the Family Stuck. MA: Georgetown, MFA: University of Southern California. www.amandalandrei.com
Originally published on Hopscotch Translation
Tuesday, January 9, 2024
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