Auden: BATAS AY TULAD NG PAG-IBIG

Pahabol sa Valentine's Day.


W.H. AUDEN
Batas ay Tulad ng Pag-ibig


Batas, sabi ng mga hardinero, ang araw,
Batas ang siyang
Sinusunod naming lahat
Ngayon, kahapon, bukas.

Batas ang dunong ng matatanda,
Tili ng mga lolong inutil at mahina;
Inilalabas ng mga apo ang matinis na dila,
Batas ang pandama ng mga bata.

Batas, sabi ng paring banal na banal,
Nagsesermon sa bayang walang kabanalan,
Batas ang mga kataga sa banal kong libro,
Batas ang aking pulpito at simboryo.

Batas, sabi ng hukom na may matang nanlilisik,
Habang nangungusap nang malinaw at mabalasik,
Batas ay tulad ng lagi kong isinasaad,
Batas ay tulad ng palagay ko’y batid ng lahat,
Batas ay hayaan ninyong muli kong ipaliwanag,
Batas ay Ang Batas.

Pero ayon sa mga pantas na masunurin sa batas:
Batas ay hindi mali o tumpak,
Batas ay mga krimen lamang
Na may pook at panahong pinarurusahan,
Batas ang damit na isinusuot ng tao
Kailanman, saanmang dako,
Batas ay Magandang umaga at Maraming salamat.

Sabi ng iba, Batas ang ating Tadhana;
Sabi ng iba, Batas ang ating Bansa;
Sabi ng iba, sabi ng iba,
Batas ay wala na,
Batas ay kung saan-saan nagpunta.
At sa tuwina ang maingay at galit na madla,
Lubhang maingay at galit na lubha:
Batas ay Tayo;
At sa tuwina ang sinto-sinto, pabulong: Ako.

Kung alam natin, mahal, na tulad nila’y
Wala tayong alam tungkol sa batas,
Kung ako, tulad mo, ay walang kamalay-malay
Sa dapat gawin at sa hindi dapat
Bukod sa nagkakaisa ang lahat,
Nalulungkot man o nagagalak,
Na ang batas ay umiiral
At hindi ito kaila kaninuman,
Kung, samakatwid, itinuturing nating kakatwa
Na iugnay ang Batas sa iba pang salita,
Tulad ng marami pang iba’y
Hindi ko masabing ito pa rin ang Batas,
Tulad nila’y hindi natin kayang supilin
Ang kagustuhang manghula
Para makaiwas sa tungkulin,
Hindi natin kayang magkibit-balikat na lamang.
Bagamat maaari ko nang ilimita
Ang pagyayabang nating dalawa
Sa kiming paghahambing
Na kiming bibigkasin,
Atin pa ring igigiit:
Tulad ng pag-ibig.

Tulad ng pag-ibig di natin alam kung saan o bakit
Tulad ng pag-ibig di natin matakasan o mapilit
Tulad ng pag-ibig sa atin ay nagpapaiyak
Tulad ng pag-ibig madalas nating nilalabag.


Salin ni Jose F. Lacaba

Mula sa kalipunan kong SA DAIGDIG NG KONTRADIKSIYON: MGA SALING-WIKA (Anvil Publishing, 1991).

Salin ng tulang “Law Like Love.”
Mababasa ang orihinal na tula dito: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/law-like-love/

W.H. Auden (1907-1973)
Ang retratong ito sa pabalat ng kanyang talambuhay
ay kuha noong dekada 1960, noong panahong ginawa ko ang salin ng “Law Like Love.”
Retrato mula sa:
http://johntranter.com/reviewer/auden-rdh.shtml

EDSA 1986

This was a column I wrote for the Manila Times in 1996, a decade after the people power uprising that is now known as EDSA 1.


PRESENT AT THE CREATION


FEBRUARY 22, 1986, was a Saturday. At that time I was editor of a magazine, the now defunct National Midweek, then a small, almost invisible part of that committed conglomeration that the Marcos regime derided as “the mosquito press.” Saturday was normally a day off, but we had not succeeded in closing the issue the night before, and on this particular Saturday I was helping the staff artists with the pre-computer cut-and-paste layout.

Late that afternoon, our landlord—we were renting a room on the ground floor of his Sta. Mesa house—came down with his radio to bring us the latest news: Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile had announced his break with dictatorship and was holed up in Camp Aguinaldo. We immediately sensed that something really big was happening, or about to happen. We decided to stop work on the issue of Midweek that we were planning to close.

The rest of the night and the next three days are now a blur of memories that I can no longer get in proper sequence. The magazine temporarily moved its base of operations from the office to my house, which was near the corner of EDSA and only two blocks away from the Bohol Avenue studios of what was then Channel 4, the government station.

I remember going with my wife every day to EDSA—or rather, that strip of EDSA between Camp Aguinaldo and Camp Crame. Sometimes our 15-year-old son joined us, though he and his high-school buddies had their own EDSA itinerary.

We never camped out, however. Part of the reason, on my part, was psychological. Crame was prison and painful memories. But now the festive crowd was compelling me to view Crame as a symbol of freedom and democracy. I remember bumping into playwright Boni Ilagan, my cellmate in the early years of martial rule. Outside the camp gates, we reflected on the irony of being in a crowd that was guarding our jailers and torturers.

So my wife and I never stayed long in the Crame-Aguinaldo area. When we weren’t home offering snacks and drinks to correspondents and photographers of various publications who asked to use our telephone and our toilet, we moved around.

We were outside Channel 4 when reformist troops captured it. Afterward, they threw huge oil paintings of Marcos and Imelda to the crowds gathered outside, who stomped and spat on the canvases and finally set them on fire.

We were on a late-morning jog when we chanced upon a firefight between reformist troops on the ground and loyalist soldiers guarding the Channel 9 transmission tower on Panay Avenue.

When word got around that Radio Veritas in Novaliches was to be attacked by loyalists, we rushed there with a contingent from the Concerned Artists of the Philippines. We joked that, while the rest of the Filipino people were protecting Enrile and General Fidel Ramos on EDSA, we were protecting the Apo Hiking Society.

Much has been written about Nora Aunor going to Aguinaldo and being booed away by the crowd because she had campaigned for the Marcoses, then gutsily going back the following night and being tearfully embraced by Enrile. Me, I remember seeing bold star Sarsi Emmanuel on Quezon Avenue, seated on the hood of a car and gleefully announcing that Marcos had fallen.

It was the night of February 25, the fourth day of the people’s uprising, and my wife and I were with Sarsi’s Boatman director, Tikoy Aguiluz. This was the second time word of the Marcoses’ leaving Malacañang had spread, and we were not sure if this was another false alarm. But we hitched a ride with Tikoy to Sta. Mesa and from there walked to the Malacañang gates. I briefly caught sight of my brother, the one who would later be imprisoned under Cory’s administration, just before he disappeared behind the closing gates.

Shut out of the Palace, we walked back to Tikoy’s car on Sta. Mesa. I picked up a piece of barbed wire that someone had shaped into a crown of thorns, but I dropped it somewhere along the way because the crowd was so thick I was afraid of hurting someone. On Sta. Mesa, I remember seeing Joker Arroyo and Teddyboy Locsin momentarily getting out of a car that couldn’t get past the crowds. I exchanged a few words with Joker, and then he and Teddyboy got back into the car and inched their way toward Malacañang, while I walked on to oblivion.

Senator Gringo Honasan wonders whether Cory Aquino was on EDSA during those four momentous days in February. This is a foolish question. On those four days, EDSA was not just a strip of road between two military camps. EDSA was the entire country.


Jose F. Lacaba
MATTER OF FACT
Manila Times
1996 February 21

Ka Pete: EDJOP AND THE FIRST QUARTER STORM

http://kapetesapatalim.blogspot.com/2009/08/in-memoriam.html

EDJOP AND THE FIRST QUARTER STORM

Today, January 26, 2010, is the 40th anniversary of the start of the First Quarter Storm of 1970. In commemoration of that now historic event, I am posting the following piece, a belated apology to the late Edgar Jopson, which appears as an appendix to the updated edition of my book Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage (Anvil Publishing, 2003). The appendix comes with the following note: “Slightly revised version of the foreword to Edjop: The Unusual Journey of Edgar Jopson, by Benjamin Pimentel Jr. (Ken Incorporated, Quezon City, 1989).”


STRANGE ODYSSEY

I never really knew Edjop. I expect that he and my brother Eman knew each other, since they were at the Ateneo de Manila at about the same time; and we had a mutual friend in the poet Alfredo Navarro “Freddie” Salanga. But we never really met face to face, Edjop and I; we were never formally introduced. I saw him from a distance at various demonstrations, and I have a vague recollection of seeing him at closer range inside a University of the Philippines dorm, when the Bantay refugees were briefly housed there.

He had the misfortune of coming into my line of vision just when I was, as a writer, undergoing what was then known as “politicalization.” I had come from the Ateneo myself (AB ’65, Dropout ’64), but I had this ambivalent attitude toward my alma mater: no doubt it contributed to my intellectual growth, but it turned me into a misfit, because at the Ateneo I was a poor boy (on scholarship) in a school for the rich, and after the Ateneo I was Adam after eating of the apple, Persephone after tasting of the pomegranate.

The social discomforts notwithstanding, I was almost completely apolitical in college, though the Tagalog poems I was beginning to write at the time already betrayed an incipient disquiet hiding behind a pose of gentle irony. “Politicalization” was a by-product of journalism, which took me to cocktail parties at chi-chi hotels and to drinking sessions in foul-smelling slums, which in turn intensified both philosophical and physiological nausea, which thereby sharpened the existential angst and the essential rage and gave them political shape.

It was at that point in my “politicalization” that my work brought me into contact with the various shades of student activism, and it was therefore not surprising that I was not disposed to look kindly upon any hoity-toity Atenean claiming to be fighting for the upliftment of the hoi polloi. My sympathies were with the scruffy firebrands coming out of the public schools and even the diploma mills, rather than with the Ms. Cleans and the Little Miss Muffets from the exclusive schools.

This explains the ill-concealed antipathy for Edjop and his kind in the reports I wrote at that time. When I started collecting the articles that would go into my book, Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage, Edjop was dead, and I wondered whether I should write an afterword or appendix tracing the amazing routes that the dramatis personae in my reportage had taken since martial law: fire-breathing radicals had become apologists for fascist dictatorship, while Edjop, the epitome of reformism and moderate student politics, had joined the armed struggle. In the end, not without a nagging sense of guilt, I decided to let the collection stand as a historical document without benefit of updates or post mortems. I subsequently expressed my mea culpas to Edjop in a Tagalog poem, “In Memoriam,” written sometime after the Ninoy Aquino assassination, but I knew that wasn’t really enough.

I am glad that Benjamin Pimentel Jr. has decided to redress the balance with a book that takes up where Days of Disquiet leaves off. If there is anything to be learned from Pimentel’s extremely absorbing account of Edjop’s “strange odyssey,” it is the fallibility of first impressions and of built-in prejudices. For here, in various unpredictable circumstances, is where the children of the First Quarter Storm are now, almost twenty years later: some betrayed the passions of their youth and some kept the faith; some backtracked and some persisted; some moved on to other lifestyles and some simply changed their methods of struggle; some went on fighting and some were immobilized by fear or weariness or domesticity or the frenzy of the rat race or all of the above; some took the high road and some took the low road and some, like Edjop, chose to veer away from the well-worn paths to take “the road less traveled by.”

This is not just the biography of one person; it is the history of a generation.

Jose F. Lacaba
April 1989