ANGEL OF THE ANNUNCIATION: A Filipino Rendition--E. SAN JUAN

Multimedia performance of a poem in Filipino by E. San Juan & Delia D. Aguilar. Below is a translation:

MESSAGE FROM THE ANGEL OF THE ANNUNCIATION

[Not to mention the worst drug--ourselves--that we suck on while we're alone.--WALTER BENJAMIN]

... without any hint at all touched by what wing what feathers
shocked awed surprised taken aback
soon mustered enough gumption to put himself beside this sly companion and whispered:

My Dear, I can't quite make out if I have shared this already with you:
I want you to know that I love you--
I want you to understand that I am enamored of you--

Are you already aware and informed of this? Do you perceive this now?

Did you hear what I said? Did you gather the drift of my confession?
Do you comprehend the message of this desire?
Do you grasp the meaning of my words?
Did you apprehend this announcement or were you not able to pierce and pick it up?

You are mute and still, so I can not quite judge if you sized up fully what the language is conveying?

I cannot infer if, in your breast, what was revealed nested there--
Not a murmur from you so I cannot make head or tail if you took the measure of what I was intimating--

I don't know if you construed the signification of the utterance--
I don't know if you were able to decipher the value of what has been entrusted to you--
I don't know if we caught on to each other and made up for what is lacking--

Did you sense my tongue approach you and feel it penetrating your ear?

I can't figure it out, but I want to let you realize before I depart, my Beloved--
In the mirror I divined your smile, mysterious and unfathomable

(fluttering and ready to fly to soar upward....) Somehow intuiting
That however light this fate, how heavy that one leaping and struggling to escape
In your womb.....
Dearest one, darling, accept the invitation now
so that your other half won't suspect this liaison
for he/she is the only one who can redeem.....

[Translated by the author, E. San Juan, Jr., first published in SAPAGKAT INIIBIG KITA, University of the Philippines Press, 2004]

NOTES & TIPS FOR PUZZLED VIEWERS:
The Hebrew word for Mary is Mariam, which means "rebellion" (Osho, THE SPIRITUAL PATH, 2006, p. 294). Aside from its play on the Biblical mise-en-scene of the Angel and the Virgin Mary, and on the enigma of medieval Courtly Love, this poem intends an allegorical rendering of the disparity between the Saussurean (structuralist/ poststructuralist) theory of language and meaning-production, and Charles Sanders Peirce's triadic semiotics of the sign, which has been sorely neglected. The quote from Benjamin is a comment on the poetic persona speaking, as well as on the academic vogue for Freudian & Lacanian speculations.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Video
• Art
• Filipino
• Poetry
• Performance
• Conceptual
• Surrealism
• Counter-hegemonic
• Agitprop