AS A WIDE reader, important writer, occasional critic, and all-around man of letters (author, editor, anthologist, publisher, textbook writer, bookseller, and creative writing workshop director, among others), I think that, by now, I should be able to make good value judgments about other authors and what they write about without making you raise your eyebrow.
And so, pronouncements I shall make.
My solid word: Felino S. Garcia, Jr. is a force to reckon with in literary criticism for our generation. Probably the best literary critic-historian there is in Western Visayas based on output and track record. Felino is now based in UP Tacloban but continues to write creatively, win literary awards (like the inaugural NCCA’s Translator’s Prize), and establish himself as a foremost literary historian and scholar of Region 6.
Five years ago, recognizing his work in the field of literary history and criticism, The Peter Solis Nery Foundation for Hiligaynon Literature and the Arts, Inc. awarded him the 2014 Special Peter’s Prize for Excellence in Literary Criticism, and made him the first ambassador of The Peter Solis Nery Foundation for literary scholarship.
For the next two weeks, I am yielding my column space to Felino’s umbrella essay about the gift of essays crafted especially for my book of poems “At My Father’s Wake.”
“At My Father’s Wake” was published in the US on Jan. 29, 2019. It’s basically 10 elegies in English with their Filipino and Hiligaynon versions that I wrote/translated myself. But what made the book so much bigger than my poems are the smart introductions and intelligent commentaries by foremost Filipino writers, who happened to be my friends.
I’m not sure that I want to share my poems in my column. I mean, I want you to buy the book. But I surely want to share with you the big introduction that Felino wrote.
Have fun!
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Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night — A Prolegomenon of the Introductory Essays to the Elegies
by Felino S. Garcia, Jr.
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And you, my father, there on the sad height,/ Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray./ Do not go gentle into that good night./ Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
—Dylan Thomas
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Perspectives Unleashed
Peter Solis Nery’s elegies to his departed father are written in three languages, namely: English, Filipino, and Hiligaynon. All of them are gifted with a son’s heartfelt sincerity imbued with deep reflection and nourished by an enduring recollection. Not to forget, most certainly, the solid poetic craftsmanship that accompanies the poet’s incomparable mastery of each linguistic idiom.
Inseparable from these elegies are the introductory essays penned by writer-friends whose acquaintance with the poet, who has long been recognized as a l’enfant terrible in West Visayan Literature and continues to be an agent provocateur in the region’s social and literary circles, ranges from the professional, the smooth and casual, to one that has an intimacy akin to kindred spirits and bosom friends.
What is most amazing in these essays are the diverse perspectives on Death unleashed from each writer’s subject-position. This saddening event may have appeared as if it was a complete paradox—and indeed, it is. Because had it not for this regretful and untimely demise, the elegies would not have stood the chance of seeing the light of day. One thing, for sure, leads to another, so they say. However, this one exemplifies the spirit’s overwhelming tenacity beyond Death’s mortal blows to the flesh.
Lest I become thoroughly Bakhtinian and be tempted in fleshing out the polyvocal, polyphonic or heteroglossic in these voices, or even spend time pondering on the possibility of a dialogic imagination in these texts, let me now lead you, dear readers, to my own appreciative reading of each essay.
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Postcolonial English
- Randolph Graydon, or Randy to most of us who knew him very well, classifies Peter Solis Nery as a “necessary poet”. According to him, “necessary because his poetry is a response to a need for the expression of a human experience, even the most difficult, the most tragic—in terms and language—that readers can only identify with, but may not have the facility to articulate.”
Graydon compares Peter’s elegies to the Duino Elegies(Duineser Elegien) of Rainer Maria Rilke. Although Peter’s work may not be about the angelic folklore and salvific discourse as in Rilke’s, “they are close.”
Graydon goes on to write about a certain kind of allusion, which the elegies share with the “ontological torment” in Rilke’s work—“Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich. Und so verhalt ich mich denn und verschlucke den Lockruf dunkelen Schluchzens.”/ “Every Angel is terrifying. And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing.”—Stephen Mitchell’s translation.
Ever mindful of such philosophical concepts like human existence and existential suffering, Peter narrows them down to the most familiar yet poignant father-son estrangement in his poetry. Most succinctly said of the Rilkean influence on Peter’s brilliant elegies.
Lawrence Bernabe started off his essay in English, and continued it in Filipino. He has placed not only one best foot forward, but both feet—one foot in English, and the other one in Filipino. Entitled “Acts of Survivorship”, which shares the same title with the Filipino sequel, the essay unsheathes a sharp epistemological blade cutting into elaborate bits and pieces the dynamics that underlie the production of the poetic imagination. Bernabe cites Barthes, Lauterbach, and Goethe to fortify his armory of arguments on how the philosophical is discursively entangled in the interstices of the elegiac verbiage.
Methodical in both tone and structure, Melecio F. Turao’s introduction, “The Ambivalence of Self-Disclosure in Ten Elegies”, confirms the common sorrow experienced, and shared by humanity when a parent dies—the father in Peter’s case. Turao’s perspective, however, chooses to focus its attention to the inconsolable rift between father and son that accounts for the anguish and pain comparable to death. This is articulated in what Turao calls as “a series of emotional crisis relapse.”
For Turao, the rift may have been discontinued through the father’s demise yet it clamors to be fixed, mended even without a clear-cut assurance that it will ultimately be resolved because “what an utterly tiresome mending it is in these poems that risk self-disclosure.” (To be continued/PN)
