Glossolalia, originally published in 2013 by the Philippine poet Marlon Hacla, is an engrossing work. Longer and shorter prose poems employ twisting sentences that tentacle out to pretty much all of our existence on earth. “Glossolalia” is the name of the last poem in the collection, and could also be said to comment on the overall book’s effect on the reader. The poet speaks in tongues, although Kristine Ong Muslim’s translation has taken pains to elucidate the language in service of an English-speaking readership. More about this later. If paradoxes can be clear, most of her phrases are crystal clear but they’re still rich and baffling, which makes these poems so attractive.
The contents aren’t pretty or pleasant. They deal mainly with earthly sin in the form of betrayal, lust, greed and what have you. “Can our rot ripen? According to the books, our future is on fire like a child pelted with kerosene and lit, pushed to start walking. (‘Stairs’).” The apocalypse is coming, and yes, there are heavy Biblical overtones: “What we take for air is actually a storm, and what we take for a storm is actually a gentle wind of vengeance. What we take for a lover is actually just gullible rashness (the beginning of ‘Ecclesiastes’).”
Like in the Bible book of Ecclesiastes, there is nothing new under the sun in Glossolalia. However, death cannot bring redemption, since the thought that our former lives will have been forgotten and totally meaningless, is a point of great desperation for the poet. In “Death’s Muse,” decay and death don’t provide the expected contriteness or visionary insight that can turn things around: “… to tell the world that a soul will be taken from it, this will not have any major impact, more will come to replace it, the world will not run out of darkness.”
While the reader’s complicity in the frequently jaw-dropping litany of transgressions is articulated in the communal “we,” I was curious to figure out who the “you” is. In most poems the poet addresses himself and by extension the reader and people in general. In some, the (or a) beloved of the poet is addressed, and in some the reader of these poems is imagined to be God. The tone may be different, but I think these direct calls serve to express a sincere declaration of proposed betterment, outbursts of faith and faithfulness; clarifying in the same breath that those efforts will not be sustained. The repeated futility of our actions gets a bit comical, like reprimanding a child while not explaining what it can do, nor expecting it to improve. The poems are not a confession. Why the poet is so unsatisfied about his actions is never spelled out. There isn’t an outpouring of penitence either. And as the poems lack a narrative arc, I don’t get the sense that the poet, or we, can learn anything or need to follow the path of the poet (there is no path). The only release might be in the afterlife with God, and here it is that the word can shed light to achieve this goal. Unfortunately, Paradise remains just a longing sigh, as this remarkable passage shows:
“In a life that mirrors this present life, the light of words will explode for the oracle, for porcelain grief, for the bold statement on the mathematics of probability inherent in glory, weak counterbalance, a sound, like a dropped spoon, like a gasp on the first night of honeymoon, that one plied with white sanctity like a newly emerged fang, like a rice grain, and is later burned by its solid goal of becoming the music of a universe married to the promise of dismantling another universe (which is unlike the aforementioned universe) with natural sweetness, but, because of fate’s limitations, became a sigh at the end of a prayer (also from ‘Death’s Muse’).”
The only cracks in the downputting circular reasoning of Hacla’s universe are the lyrical passages. “Arrow” contains some lovely depicted longing for a home, and one of few instances where physical intimacy is untainted by sin: “Count the stars for me, nurture the gables that I planted, always lust after the prospect of touching my Adam’s apple once again, I will do my best to come back before the end of days.” That last addition does make it slightly odd, of course (besides touching the Adam’s apple); does the poet mean that he wants to be with his lover before the world ends or just before his own life ends, or maybe those two overlap?
“Glossolalia” (the last poem) sounds more mellow, too, with its outlandish list of endearing things that we absolutely must save to hold the example of the loving as well as angry God before our eyes. With a more optimistic or traditionally devout poet, those handfuls of collected rainwater, as well as boats riddled with holes, would be signs of God’s grace, but in Hacla most things in our lives are manmade and they take precedence.
“Do we need new terms of endearment? The only thing we own is a few handfuls of salt, soft hair, collected rainwater, a calf now sleeping after overeating and which we are willing to slaughter if needed, several mountains that keep eroding to inundate our houses, thorns we cannot uproot from our memory, mouths that have learned prescience, legs that are tempting but hidden under a long skirt embroidered with things that will remind us of your faithfulness, picture books for successive days of quiet, old maps for days of roaming around, new spoons for our changing tastes, unspent bullets, one hundred names for the planets, cargo bundles for sorcery, wristwatches, loose change, patched-up songs, boats riddled with holes, screens for panning gold, lists of atrocities, nude sketches for our daydreaming, Lord, there are way too many things here and way too many things that we can still do, we have ideas for training our minds to capture the extent of your glory, there are models for how we can summarize testimonies about your wrath and love, there are idols we covertly hide and do not speak of, perhaps because of fear, perhaps because of shame, perhaps because we are busy moving away from you, Lord, and even now, in a smooth sweet moment such as this, we do not know where we are going.”
Apparently, the translation of Glossolalia has been somewhat doctored with. According to Muslim’s explanation in the afterword, she deliberately spent time to “explain, to illuminate” Glossolalia’s dense “expanding maze of unexpected imagery.” This sometimes takes the form of small extra phrases that replace footnotes to throw light on a Filipino word or to tease out a metaphor that otherwise wouldn’t ring a bell to English readers. For example, Muslim added a phrase to the word “dahumpalay —those green venomous snakes—.” Those extras don’t make the poems longer, though, since often the Filipino original counts more words. Anyhow, the result is that, as Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III says in the foreword, the English text is plain sailing, relatively speaking, whereas the Filipino is more opaque: “For English-language or first-time readers, things are somewhat simpler. They get to experience Glossolalia and the full force of Hacla’s poetry in a language that is more or less familiar to them.” We can only thank Muslim and her publishers for giving us such an ecstatic and wonderful window into a fascinating poetic creation.
Glossolalia is published in a bilingual edition by Ugly Duckling Presse, December 2023.
Find the book here.
JACQUELINE SCHAALJE is Translation Editor at MAYDAY.
MARLON HACLA is a poet and artist living in Quezon City, Philippines. His first poetry collection, May Mga Dumadaang Anghel sa Parang (Manila: National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 2010), was published as part of UBOD New Authors Series II. His second book, Glossolalia, was published by High Chair in 2013. Kristine Ong Muslim’s English translations of his books are Melismas (Oomph Press, 2020), There Are Angels Walking the Fields (Broken Sleep Books, 2021), and Glossolalia (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023). Find Marlon here.
KRISTINE ONG MUSLIM is the author of The Drone Outside (Eibonvale Press, 2017), Black Arcadia (University of the Philippines Press, 2017), Meditations of a Beast (Cornerstone Press, 2016), Butterfly Dream (Snuggly Books, 2016), Age of Blight (Unnamed Press, 2016), and several other books of fiction and poetry. She has co-edited numerous anthologies of fiction, including Destination: SEA 2050 A.D. (Penguin Random House SEA, 2022), Ulirát: Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines (Gaudy Boy, 2021), and the British Fantasy Award-winning People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! (2016). Her translation of Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III’s novel, Book of the Damned, won a 2023 PEN/Heim grant. She is also the translator of nine books by Filipino authors Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles, Rogelio Braga, and Marlon Hacla. Widely anthologized, Muslim’s short stories have been published in Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, and World Literature Today and translated into Bulgarian, Czech, German, Japanese, Polish, and Serbian. She lives in a small farmhouse in Sitio Magutay, a remote rural highland town in southern Philippines.