Glossolalia

Marlon Hacla

Translated by Kristine Ong Muslim

Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III, Contributor

POETRY, TRANSLATION  |  $20 $18

December 2023
Read an excerpt

Bluebush

Rooms that kill time until burglars decide to leave them. What is the homework all about? Making a neat stack of off-key tunes? Order? A dead tree? Or a chorus of epiphanies for unscrambling an executioner’s motivations and desires. Funeral birds that you gave as gifts. A parade of tied-up legs headed towards a beckoning forest. A paradise hastily put together. 

Half a kernel of corn. Extravagance of roots. Broken bell forcibly deformed until it is mangled beyond recognition.

This is a performance of an upcoming part. Electric fan blades unraveled. I will be right behind you as you walk out the door, be the first to whisper. This is the part of the body that thirsts for sensation. Orange table piled high with bones. Is the source of my joy real? 

If the wedding pushes through, it will turn out to be a slippery hitch. If the snag catches again, needles will flow like water. Angel with many faces and many weapons. Fear that latches onto the hem of a dress splattered with blood and mud. One answer to a question about teaching murder. Desire blanketed by light.

Casket that entombed a ritual. A treacherous act to devotion. The eye closing. Our happiness watered down. Poem chased down from a crash-landed dove. Mouth choking from having swallowed whole yet another body.

Triangular open space whose vertices correspond to the kitchen, staircase, scene of the crime.

Beautiful figure that had been ravaged. Dawn vandalized by contrails of warplanes. 

Feverish from the engrossing revelatory arcs of the uncanny, Glossolalia is a mind-bending foray into the twisted underlying logic of material reality and a rip-roaring romp through Philippine urban legends, psychogeography, and the uncomfortable, often seedy aspects of music, cinema, and art. Marlon Hacla—who is a computer programmer as well as a poet and created the first robot poet in Filipino, Estela Vadal—is a significant innovator in the Philippine poetic tradition. As Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III notes in his introduction, Hacla “eschews the spare language, subtle imagery, and quietism featured in most contemporary Philippine poetry. Hacla’s poems, especially here in Glossolalia (and in its informal sequel Melismas), read like an unapologetic statement against the New Critical tradition that has been pushing its weight in the Philippine literary scene for more than half a century.” This collection of relentless, densely layered prose poems is the third of Hacla’s books to be translated into English by Kristine Ong Muslim.

About the Author

Marlon Hacla is a poet and artist living in Quezon City, Philippines. His first poetry collection, May Mga Dumadaang Anghel sa Parang (Manila: National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 2010), was published as part of UBOD New Authors Series II. His second book, Glossolalia, was published by High Chair in 2013. Kristine Ong Muslim’s English translations of his books are Melismas (Oomph Press, 2020), There Are Angels Walking the Fields (Broken Sleep Books, 2021), and Glossolalia (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023).

Praise

Through the use of both warm and cold imagery as well as the exploration of nature, Marlon Hacla’s work, originally published in Filipino, builds and collapses two beings (human and beast) and two states of being (alive and dead) to explore what it means to actually live... [Kristine Ong Muslim's] thoughtful translation of Hacla’s work [allows] us to experience the beauty of haunting and the in-between.

Sakinah Hofler, The Cincinnati Review

There is discernible gloom in Marlon Hacla’s Glossolalia, where ‘Moths slowly gobble up light. This is a lingering effect of the night of blindness.’ The collection is further composed of fires, storms, ruins, violence, and various permutations of these, but this fabric intimately rests on the lives and afterlives of objects, and even the flora and fauna of a tropical gothic, executed with persistent resolve and eroticism. Precarious beauty is what drives forward the internal cadence of each prose poem, some of which are as brief as a few verses while others sprawl into several pages. Ultimately, ‘The deluge wants to say that it does not speak the language of ­destruction but of music.’ This is exactly what Kristine Ong Muslim’s translation captures; this is exactly what her translation unleashes.

Eric Abalajon

Disparate fragments attract and repel to form a cohesive barrage of shifting images in Glossolalia’s vignettes, consistent with its namesake: an attempt to access insights of the divine (and perhaps the damned) by speaking a language unintelligible to the speaker yet possibly decipherable by a discerning listener. Hacla transcribed transcendent enunciations as prose poems, translated by Kristine Ong Muslim—less to be interpreted than to be experienced as textualized oralities, comparable to indulging in foreign-­language music that strangely speaks to your soul in your mother tongue: otherworldly speeches with quotidian parts that estrange yet resonate.

Tilde Acuña


Praise for Previous Work

In Marlon Hacla’s Melismas, destruction and restoration live in the same breath. This stunning book-length poem, translated from the original Filipino by Kristine Ong Muslim, explores loyalty, despair, suppression, love of country, love for the other, and the way the struggles of daily life are compounded by large-scale structural failings.

Ashley Wagner, Ligeia Magazine

About the Translator

Kristine Ong Muslim is the author of The Drone Outside (Eibonvale Press, 2017), Black Arcadia (University of the Philippines Press, 2017), Meditations of a Beast (Cornerstone Press, 2016), Butterfly Dream (Snuggly Books, 2016), Age of Blight (Unnamed Press, 2016), and several other books of fiction and poetry. She has co-edited numerous anthologies of fiction, including Destination: SEA 2050 A.D. (Penguin Random House SEA, 2022), Ulirát: Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines (Gaudy Boy, 2021), and the British Fantasy Award-winning People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! (2016). Her translation of Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III’s novel, Book of the Damned, won a 2023 PEN/Heim grant. She is also the translator of nine books by Filipino authors Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles, Rogelio Braga, and Marlon Hacla. Widely anthologized, Muslim’s short stories have been published in Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, and World Literature Today and translated into Bulgarian, Czech, German, Japanese, Polish, and Serbian. She lives in a small farmhouse in Sitio Magutay, a remote rural highland town in southern Philippines.

About the Contributor

Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III teaches courses on Southeast Asian literature and creative writing at the Department of Filipino and Philippine Literature, University of the Philippines Diliman. He is the author of  the novel Aklat ng mga Naiwan (Book of the Damned), coeditor of Ulirát: Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines, and co-editor and co-translator of Wiji Thukul’s Balada ng Bala (The Ballad of a Bullet). His research and other creative works have been published in Likhaan, JONUS, Southeast Asian Studies, Talas, and Tomas.

In the News

Links

“This Creature” by Marlon Hacla in The Cincinnati Review

“Miniatures” in Prairie Schooner

“The Escape” in The Chattahoochee Review

“Bluebush” in Dadiangas Review

“Wild” and “Moto Perpetuo” in Conjunctions

Publication Details

ISBN: 978-1-946604-01-9
Trade Paperback
200 pp, 5.5 x 6.5 in
Publication Date: December 15 2023
Distribution: Asterism Books (US), Inpress Books (UK)