This poetry collection by Merlinda Bobis is perhaps the fastest poetry collection I’ve ever read. I found little to no problems understanding the poems in English; I wish it was the same with Filipino, although I’m a Filipino speaker. I’m grateful I revisited this book, which I regard as an epitome of immaculateness, because it reacquainted me with the Filipino language after being immersed in English for quite a while now in a mission to master it.

I strongly believe every multilingual poet should release a project like this, in which they translate their own poems from their mother tongue into English and other languages they’re fluent in. I sense a need of translation because, another language offers new style and meaning to the original. In this collection, for example, we can sense the struggle of putting into words an idea or image that hardly exist in English. To work around this problem, Bobis resorts to generalization and omits a few things while managing to retain the thought and emotion of a piece. There’s a feeling of resistance throughout this book, and so in our reading experience we choose which among the three versions of a poem provides the best representation.

Translation, I believe, most often works well when the multilingual creator, the author, themselves carry it out. The author is the source of the images that spring from the page to the minds of the readers, so there’s no justice firmer than that meted out by the author.

Of course I am aware that translation is not an easy job, even if an author is fluent in all the languages they know. What I’m saying is that poems translated by their author are more authentic and deeply appreciated, as they are more accurate and further enrich the reading experience.