In the first Translation Tuesdays column of 2023, Cebuano poet Cindy A. Velasquez take us to sea as we find our bearings in the new year. With a sensuousness at once personal and geological, Velasquez’s poems look for a sense of connection in water bodies, drifting continents and connecting islands. Start your year of reading voraciously—and widely—with us here every week!
“I first read Cindy A. Velasquez in Kabisdak: Cebuano Literary Lighthouse, edited by poet Michael U. Obenieta, and later on, in her first collection Lawas [Body]. Lawas was in so many ways antithetical from the poetry collections of Velasquez’s contemporaries within Binisayâ’s school of feminist poetics in particular, and the literary ‘Bisaya-sphere’ in general. The Oliverian lucidity is rich, far from being rife and banal, a contrast to the Instagram-Pinterest school of ‘poetry’ or the ‘hugot’ impulse that perpetually plagues the local spoken word and performance poetry scene. The islands and coastlines left and missed are seascapes we have never been to but have always known. And then, there is Dong, a recurring or haunting character almost always addressed like an apostrophe, whom the poetic I-persona, Day or Inday, perpetually yearns for.
Velasquez’s body of works is a lingering on bodies of women and water as well as a story of love, romantic, familial, platonic. Oceanic in topicality, her poems could be read through the lens of ‘sea-poetry’—a literary tradition from Homer, Shakespeare, Whitman, to the British Romanticists writing about the English channel and even Derek Walcott—very male, mostly white, very Western. Be that as it may, I find the act of reading Velasquez an evocation of the tender eroticism of Syria’s national poet Nizar Qabbani, the meditative ease of Brazilian neosymbolist Cecília Meireles, and the hydropoetic enigma of T’ang dynasty Taoist elegist Ts’ao T’ang.
But she doesn’t try to be any of the above. Her writing is her own accord; she is a poet of her own island.”
—Alton Melvar M Dapanas
The Reason
Theory of continental drift: the continents were once one,
bound to each other, and we have been told that the origin
of one is also another’s. But to birth new homelands,
the world has devised tremors deep in its own core.
So fret not when now and again, as you hold onto
my hand, it would swiftly quiver until you let me go.
Why is it better to love only one
I.
You gazed at the dimmed skies, enraged once more
for the moonlight was found wanting
then I told you: “Would you be more pleased if this world
had two moons?
True, it would be better if we have more of them, dong. But aftertime,
they’d come across each other, collide, break the other,
and bring ruins.”
“And their wreckage would rain from the sky, razing this world
to the ground,” was your reply.
II.
“Dong, you didn’t answer my question.”
“I already did, Day. Sorry.”
On the Many Ways to Return
I.
Hearts left behind are like houses,
some are outlawed from visiting,
but others can freely come in.
Each room worships a memory
of how it is rotten to the ground
as if it kneels before the earth.
Is it really meant to decay?
Emptying my old bag after a long journey
is an act that brings forth new worlds.
Elsewhere, the rain claims my footsteps,
echoing the flaws I have come into terms with.
For every mistake is a homecoming
to an unwelcoming city where what belongs to the self
have become whispered tales laid out in the open:
vows that have overrun, mapping a high density
of greed, a filthy ego,
and a soul that’s rowdy and restless.
I await with patience for enough strength
to tidy the clothes still unwashed
but stained with laughter,
and even marked of names
I shudder at the thought of forgetting.
Here, there is not enough space,
and so, I move around a few old belongings
to give room to a newfound self.
Before long, the sun flares its first light
against the aged windows at the crack of dawn
like a fledgling bird, learning to spread
its wings, its unhurried flight towards me,
welcoming me home.
Some things do not change,
the same morning seen through different eyes.
II.
Learning how to swim at an early age is a lesson on taming the body, to not seek refuge to safer waters. Sometimes, I mistook my failures for the unrelenting search of the self, wandering towards the uncharted and indistinct geographies of my inner landscapes. Ergo, I abandon the homes I knew to forge new ones, for even this earth no longer has a meaningful abode to forgive oneself.
To be with the sea is to sit inside a room in silence, to pore over intricate diaries of the old, leafing through its pages, this time, with a lighter hand: an entry about holding a starfish with a lost arm for the first-timer. The gray-haired fishermen from the village had the habit of recounting a tale about how a starfish will lose its arm, how it will grow new ones, and how it can even grow an entire body. For the sea houses itself with stories, dispersed throughout its expanse. Even so, the sea, too, swears to piece them back together.
III.
As you get lost in an unfamiliar city,
in a conversation, in someone’s heart,
or within the labyrinth of your guilt,
a sea turtle comes home at long last
to the shore of its birth
after untold years
in the depth of the oceans, its infinite stretch.
It returns to this island
despite a legion of threats.
It is an ancient compass,
guiding the rawness of hearts
to its destined place,
a secret keeper of the faith
in the passageway of life.
Translated from the Binisayâ by Cindy A. Velasquez and Alton Melvar M Dapanas
Cindy A. Velasquez is an associate professor at the University of San Carlos in Cebu City, Philippines. An alumna of several fellowships in creative writing and art criticism, she received a National Commission for Culture and the Arts grant for Basabalak Kanunay, the poetry podcast she produces and hosts which features Bisaya poets and their works. Among her forthcoming projects include an illustrated children’s book which aims to preserve the ethnomedicinal practices and knowledge of the indigenous Ati community in eastern Cebu Province and the anthology she edited, Dagat ug Kinabuhi: Translating Contemporary Cebuano Poetry [Sea and Life]. Also a performance poet and lyricist, Dr. Velasquez and her co-composer Jude Gitamondoc won the 43rd Gawad Urian Awards for Best Music for the song “Usa ka Libo ug Usa ka Panamilit” [A Thousand and One Goodbyes] in 2020. Her first poetry collection Lawas [Body] was published in 2016, while her second, Your Soul is Home: A Collection of Photo Haiku in Tokyo and Yamagata, was released in 2022.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them) is Asymptote‘s editor-at-large for the Philippines. They’re the author of Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021), assistant nonfiction editor at Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature and Atlas & Alice Literary Magazine, and former editorial reader at Creative Nonfiction. Their works of translation from the œuvre of Stefani J. Alvarez appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation (England), Asymptote, Rusted Radishes (Lebanon), Tolka (Ireland), Oxford Anthology of Translation; and from ancient Binisayâ texts in Reliquiae: Journal of Landscape, Nature, and Mythology (Scotland) and forthcoming elsewhere. As a poet and essayist, they’ve been published in Sweden, China, Australia, Germany, Nigeria, Austria, Singapore, South Africa, Canada, Japan, and the Netherlands. They currently translate Fernando A. Buyser from the Binisayâ and Adelina Gurrea Monasterio from the Spanish. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
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