A Translation from English to Filipino by Su Layug

Kabilang ako ngayon sa sarili kong anatomiya ng lumbay—

Sa tagal nitong paghihintay sa hindi mangyari-yari

Sa pagtrangka nito sa kinabukasan. Sa pagkaalam nito

sa lagpas-kamatayan na hanggang doon na lang 

ang alam. Ang pagkainutil nitong kumpletuhin

ang buhay na basta na lamang nagwakas. Imahe ni Durer,

may pakpak ngunit paralisado, napupung-aw, nakalatag 

ang mga kagamitan sa harap niya, ngunit hindi makalikha. Ang mga salitang ito

na wari’y mga insektong nagkukubli ngayong dapithapong taglamig.

I belong today to my own anatomy of melancholy—

its long wait for what never happens.

Its shut down of the future. Its after-

knowledge of death that knows no more

than it did before. Its inability to complete

a life that simply ended. Dürer's figure,

winged but paralyzed, moping, tools spread

before him, but unable to create. These words

that lurk like insects this winter late afternoon.

Translator’s Notes:

1 “Hindi mangyari-yari” — the repetition of the root word, “yari” (to happen) at the end denotes the (non-) fruition of the action verb “happen.” (“that never happens”). An alternative is to say “hindi mangyayari” (will never happen) but the earlier phrase, “hindi mangyari-yari” suggests a recurring wish for something to happen, and the recurring end-result of that something never happening.

2. What I found especially difficult to translate are the lines, “Its after-/ knowledge of death that knows no more / than it did before.” The question arises: what does “that” refer to?” Does it refer to “melancholy,” to which the persona belongs to, and thus represents them? Or does it refer to “after-knowledge” (that knows no more than it did before)? I took the liberty of interpreting “that” as referring to “melancholy” which existed before and after the death being talked about. Thus, the Filipino translation, “sa kaalaman sa lampas-kamatayan” (the knowledge of (what is) beyond death) “na hanggang doon na lang ang alam” (which is its (melancholy’s) limit of knowing)

3. Through Cording’s article (a personal essay, its link below), which I found online after writing this translation, we can confirm that this poem is an autobiographical one — that, indeed, it refers to the death of Cording’s son. The poem refers to the visual artist Albrecht Dürer‘s work Melencolia (1513/1514) in the last stanza. The grief of the persona due to the death of his son is juxtaposed with his grief of not being able to create, juxtaposed with the realization that his son, himself, will no longer be able to create, his life having been taken too soon.

4. I chose to say, “Filipino translation,” rather than “Tagalog translation” because I chose to use the word, “napupung-aw” (moping, being melancholic) which is not Tagalog, but Bicolano — the native language of my late mother. I wish I learned her language more.

This is the link to the whole poem in English: https://poems.com/poem/melancholys-mirror/
This is the link to Robert Cording’s personal essay, In the Unwalled City: https://imagejournal.org/article/in-the-unwalled-city/