Translating Mga Larong Pambata
by Kabel Mishka Ligot Indebted to the work of Ryan Cezar Alcarde
[namimintog]
Fullness isn’t enough, it has to be bursting at the seams, gagging. The friars
scandalized by all our small tumescences: ruddy cheeks throwing the sun
back into their eyes, beehives, jackfruit, parcels of banana leaf, all the gold
men slung under their loincloths. Frogs full of frogs wailing in the broken field.
[sumubo]
Igloria: What’s known of the world is first known through the mouth;
Lim-Wilson: O, what joy in nourishing you, my hungry / Stove;
Gonzales: confident that I was with friends, I allowed my covetousness
to have its sway. Chewing and swallowing, however, are different matters.
[natiris]
Always summer, always Lent, always the year’s crop of children—one by one
their tangled heads bloom into congregations of birds, migratory and wingless.
The fine-toothed comb and a dish of brilliant kerosene sit on the low bench.
For the teardrop-beads, the simplest machine: the fulcrum of Inay’s fingernail.
[kumalat]
All things must eventually scatter in the wind: gossip, the ipil-ipil’s pods, a string
of pearls torn from someone’s neck, firecrackers. The sleeping sickness that set
half the town splayed like starfish on their mats, burning. There is no neat way
to distribute anything. There will always be a damp mark above your heart.
[garalgal]
There is something monstrous about the word, a grumble or roar, something
grating, boiling, corroding the container. Not the wound but its afterimage,
its proof, its half-life. The most monstrous sit quietly in the throat. Nothing
is more horrifying than the residual thunder after the storm has long passed.
[malamlam]
This is the sum of all your Februaries. Among the Roman pagans it was a time
of purification by purging. But there is nothing to wring out of the darkness.
The most uncomfortable temperature of water is the inside of your mouth;
the uvula, a lone lantern swaying in the not-breeze of the windowless room.
[pagsasaka]
Thanks to the advent of ____________ in the Western world, farming explodes
into agri-commerce, bottles of milk in even rows, gowned university students
synthesizing sugars, Sacramento: first the city of trees, now city of farm-to-fork.
Across the ocean, a spry man behind a massive plow under the purgatorial sun.
[dagli]
My grandfather is the lone doctor in this mountain town. The day is infinitely
chambered into fifteen-minute intervals in his clinic. Open your mouth, does
pressing here hurt, what do you eat for lunch, how many children do you have.
Then on to the next patient. This embodies the genre of flash fiction.
[humapon]
The word for dinner implies that we once ate as the sun idled on the clothesline,
but gridlock traffic and the calvarous workday has since changed that. In the exile
of our passports we drank Shiraz until the sky was bottle-dark, which was still
not late. We have a phrase for good evening. We don’t have one for good night.
[nila]
It is apparently a new development in this language we inhabit and dream in
that the third person pronoun can now doubly function as the demonstrative.
In English, simply: its becomes his or hers or theirs. The inanimate intimating.
Everything charged with personhood, a small life. Even parts of speech speaking.
