MGA KAUNTOKAN: Pinili asin Binikol na mga Berso (SILENCES: Selected Poems and Translations)

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Category:	Books
Genre:	Literature & Fiction
Author:	Rudy F. Alano † Aug. 23, 2010

On the outset, let me say that this is not a review of the book (although I have no doubt it is an excellent one). It is just that I don't think I am in any position to review much less give a critique of the work of my Literary professor in college. Yes, you read it right. Mr. Rudy Alano was my English Lit teacher way back in college at the Ateneo de Naga. So, perhaps I will just briefly introduce him to you as I know him.

Mr. Alano or Rudy as he'd like us to call him (and we'd like to call him that, too), is just a few years our senior. I can say that as an English Lit teacher, he surely knows his stuff. And I think nobody but nobody during our time was better than him when it came to Literature. As a mentor, many of his students will attest to his unique way of bringing out the talent and excellence among them. He is a living and real-life John Keating in the movie "Dead Poets Society" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097165/). He is no prisoner to rules or norms or school standards, but is nonetheless sincere, serious, reasonable and sensible. As a friend, he is not inhibited by age or assignment in life. He is as spontaneous and as irreverent as his students. He can enjoy a good laugh, a few (maybe more) bottles of beer and even loud music. (During our time of course, loud music was the Beatles, James Taylor, Chicago, and occasionally, The Doors). His favorite song is a folk song entitled, "Don't Think Twice It's Alright" by Bob Dylan. He has retired from active teaching and does so sparingly now allowing him the time to focus on working on his dream - writing/publishing a book. And on Sunday the 21 of March 2010, that dream will become reality. He will launch his book in Naga City (without much fanfare) with only a select few of his friends and colleagues in attendance. I am lucky enough to have been invited. Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it.

As to the book itself, it is a 116-pages anthology of poems he wrote through the years, mostly written in English, but he has provided Bicol translation as well. Below is the book introduction written by one of his students, Tito Genova Valiente, an excellent writer himself, a professor at the Ateneo de Manila and an Art and Media critic of the national broadsheet, Business Mirror.
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Where Silence is a Pause, and Poetry a Place of Pains, Sweetness and Sex


In Rudy F. Alano’s collection of poetry, silence is a pause, a momentary stop even. Kauntukan.

In that space of silence, so many things take place. The extraordinary is disclosed; the ordinary evinces.

The origins of these silences are discrete and diverse. When from these breaks, we return – for the cessation is never complete – the relief and recollection are also transitory. We wonder also to what point we are returning, what time or period we are settling in. The poetry has caused us to move, and from them on things are never same again. The words allow us an embarkation and disembarkation, and in these many flights, we forget and remember as well the lands as we forget and recall even more the distances.

There are tricks up the sleeve of the poet and these are his tricks: that memory is itself caught in between silences and these pauses render themselves in geographical forms, manifest in some charming metaphysics but all the time retaining the wink of the physical, run the range of the sublime and the gross, the directly sexual and the spiritual, the political and the philosophical.

Come to think of it, these are not really tricks, but more of a set of warm stratagem. The poet offers a ruse: remembering the past is already a prediction of the burden of sadness and joys for the present and the future. Put them together, and you have a proposal for coping, where the mind assaults the heart for question and the heart assuages the mind for the cruel analysis it is wont to offer, inside of poetry and outside of prose.

But I am being prosaic. And Rudy will not like that.

May I then offer you a journey to that which is never a metaphor for transporting: silence? May I propose a toast for that act which cannot inhabit action: pause?

Therein, perhaps (perhaps and perhaps), lies the power of these poems.

They unsettle. Gloriously and unashamedly.

The collection opens with “This Recollection” (Ining Pagrumdom). Here the silences are about aging: out of my old silences in the ways of youth. Here silences can be touched and measured: … soft silences/shushing time and space.

Calendrical silences are present in the collection. Two poems contain the silences in the two months of the year, October and September. The two poems are outstandingly similar not only by their location in months, and in being dated by the felt season; the two poems are blistering and relentless in their employ of internal rhythm and a passion so external one either embraces them or turns one’s face away from them, with a smile or smirk.

We can only marvel at their English and Bikol version, for in both the passion is unbridled and the technique for achieving the breathless cadence is present in English form and in the Bikol translation.

In “September Somewhere,” the alliteration is breathtaking but not facile because they are not externalized: Still in this room silence strains the music/of the laughter you sang betraying shadows/that betoken pain, deep and quick. In Bikol, the lines run: Liwat sa kuartong ini and kauntokan hinihigotan/an musika kang ngising inawit mo na túyong pinapaluwas/ang mga aninong nagpapasabong kulog, hararom asin hidali’an.

The poem “Until Next October” is more relentless in its beat and in its emotion. The poet pleads first that he be not remembered in the withering of roses and the coming of the rain. The images of romance beguile because as the poetry terminates, the poet goes into self-effacement that is terrifically original in its self-condemnation: For it’s I/the evil one,/ shall remember you with a murderous mind. Savor the Bikol translation: Ta ako,/ang maraot na tawo,/na may makagadan na isip, an marumdom saimo.”

Where memory reconstructs a past, in “Until Next October,” the mind that promises to remember is the same mind that may shatter the act of bringing back those things that happened before and are now being brought back again. The thought is sad but it is the mechanism of nostalgia at work here. Will I remember? When I remember, shall it come back? The poet tosses back and forth the possibilities in his mind and the prospects and infinitely painful and no transcendence is at the horizon. He seeks no resolution either. He then accepts the prospect of the month coming back and what the murderous mind might offer: …full of trees and mountains/and maya and twilight and rain/and roses and you are you and I am/I and love is love forever and forever until/next October when I shall tell you again/how lonely it is to be lonely.

I will not spare you of the Bikol translation: …pano’ ning kakahoyan saka kabukidan/saka maya saka sulnop ning saldang saka uran/saka rosas saka ika saka ako/ako saka pagkamoot pagkamoot sagkod ang daing-/kasagkuran daing kasagkuran sagkod sa sunod/na Oktubre kung nuarin ako masabi giraray saimo/kung gura’no kapu’ngaw ang mapu’ngaw.

Still, love is not all in Rudy’s works. If it were all, then we might as well pack up our bags and leave for the universe next door of real pains and real sorrows and graces. And so Rudy regales us with his stories and in his stories we encounter a world where in death, his lines bear what Pablo Neruda calls the “implacable sweetness.” Two elegies bear witness to this: one is titled “”Late Elegy: To My Father.” The poet remembers a father leaving “empty shells of love and regret.” The poet then sticks his “ears to them” and hears “your silence roaring/for immortality.”

The other poem is to a poet, Deme Briñas, a member of our group who died young. The poem brings to mind the anger of Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night." The comparison stops there. In “Perhaps The Words You Shall Tell me, Deme,” the poet shifts from fury to exasperation (But this darkness mocks your faith./The blood of your father stirs again to strengthen/your soul to soar and to reach the sky). From heathen to believer (you stare at your cold,/ask for a drink of blood, and fall upon your knees.)
Those who love Rudy say he is deathly afraid of death. In his poem for Deme, he closes it with these lines: And there/in the unknown air/some dark angel stares with unbelieving eyes/at the steady beating of your heart. Here is the Bikol translation: Asin duman/sa dai ta aram na estaran may sarong anghel/sa diklom nakaturuhok ang paghiling na dai/,makatubod sa nadadangog niyang daing-pundong/bagting kang saimong puso.

The beating is music in that place that has no name. I like the idea that the music in our heart when we are there in the unknown air can surprise an angel. Mortality shocks the boring immortality. Terrible and beautiful. And he has many poems for those who think they are up there. There is a poem for the gov’nor where corruption is akin to magic, stealing to disappearances: We’re like mice pulled out of a magician’s hat/Just like that – from nowhere to nowhere.

There is a poem for moralists telling them of a scene when Sometimes, being/dogs, they just fuck right there. He asks: If only we could look straight –/ and smile – we could be saved. But our redemption is also near if we could read the lines in Bikol: Minsan/komo ayam, diyan na mismo magkarastahan.

The French poet and critic, Stéphane Mallarmé, said, “It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.” Rudy has done more than that. He has charted for us silences and spaces where God is dark and we have access to the toilet habits of the angels, where time is realized to be overrated, and where rains have million meanings, and where love involves the fingering of the hair of the armpit, my darling, and “Such fucking bores/Kasta ninda!, ‘where my manhood aches/an boto’ ko sigeng kulog” until people see that the body is also the site of love, and where silence is there between sounds, and where if one forgets because sometimes there is nothing to remember the “memories dim but (wonderfully) everlastingly.’
Now, if the mind fails, then, he assures us with the memories of his city, Naga on summer afternoons and the smell of asphalt on the road dotted with candle droppings from recent processions, we can rise, try to rise with all the loves we can recall.

Tito Genova Valiente
March 7, 2010
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NOTE: The book is being sold at P250.00 only (per copy). If you are interested, please let me know so I can arrange/reserve a copy for you. Rudy is a friend and I would like to help him just like my artist friend, Cesar Natividad (http://chitoirigo.multiply.com/photos/album/60/)

Update: Rudy suffered a stroke noon of August 22. He passed away around midnight August 23. May he rest in peace.