‘To the delight of the lovers…’

The lovely if slim book comes strapped in silver string, its cover a separate folding board that opens much like a carefully packaged gift, with a slot that pulls out to reveal the book proper titled Fishes of Light: Tanrenga in two tongues / Peces de Luz: Janrengas en dos idiomas, from Sipat Publications. The authors of this specially crafted bilingual book of poetry are Marjorie Evasco and Alex Fleites. Designed by Donato Mejia Alvarez, it opens like an accordion, with a scroll of buff paper extending to a dozen pages on each side, thus a total of 24 inseparable pages, which contain a Prologue, 20 chain poems, and an Epilogue.

Evasco writes for the Prologue:

“How does once catch the moment’s glimmer on the ocean of consciousness?

“They thought they could give it a try with a net of words.

“And they chose an old form of dialogue that originated from the land of the rising sun. Chiyo-ni and her friends in their time called it tanrenga, a convivial play of images sprung from each poet’s awareness of the astonishment of things.

“They decided to join Chiyo-ni’s company, to engage in such a conversation.

“Imagine then how it went for many days and nights spanning two whole years.

“Imagine two shores on two different islands apart in time by exactly half a day, so that when one was dreaming awake, the other was adrift in sleep.

“Two languages ferried felt-thoughts from one shore to the other and back again. Three lines in his dream language were sent to her, who responded, with the last two lines of the tanka in her own tongue. And she would take up the thread of three lines, which he answered and completed in turn with the last two. And it went on for two seasons of monsoon rain.

“Almost every day the net made by hand would hold the miraculous catch with which to nourish their conversation in poetry, even as each weathered hurricanes and typhoons of daily life. Crisscrossing the seas, they learned how to pay attention, how to be companions of consciousness….”

Lovely. As concept, idea, and execution as poetic as the Prologue.

Thus, if we scroll open and settle on the pages with the facing poems in English and Spanish numbered 17 and 18, we savor the following:

“17  She smells sunset on his hair / burnt orange sea spray / tangled in salt and pepper curls. // The man who sleeps above the rocks / is charged with the energy of the universe.”

“18  Sun ripens the rivercourse. / Fishermen cast nets / to trap fishes of light. // Women take them in bamboo baskets / to the Market of Marvels.”

The translation in Spanish for Verse No. 18 reads thus: “El sol madura el curso del rio. / Los pescadores hunden las redes / para atrapar peces de luz. // Las mujeres, en los cestas de bambu, / los llevan al Mercado de las Maravillas.”

The two (or twin) tongues are married marvelously indeed!

For the Epilogue, Venezuelan-born Cuban poet Alex Fleites of Havana writes in Spanish, with its translation into English here excerpted:

“She and he are looking through the window.

“Her window looks out into a garden with the pleasing scale of a bonsai: there are bamboos sprouting, essential stones which time and water had smoothened, a smiling Buddha and, intermittently, the shadow of the cat pursuing the shadow.

“His window looks out onto another window, which also looks out onto another, which also…: at the end, after having seen through many lives, the modest altar of Eleggua, the child-god who opens and closes the paths in the Island. 

“… They carefully gaze into the infinte through their windows and wield the language of origins: human speech.

“They launch verses, like arrows, in both directions, some of which meet in the air and quickly take the recognizable shape of a bird, others are intertined and fall into the sea, and there become fishes of light, to the delight of the lovers and the children.

“She and he do not have to talk long: they communicate through the threads of rain. He and she do not exchange mirrors or portraits: they find themselves in the reflection of the mangoes in the river and in the lingering morning star. They have to watch and hear the poetry.”

So do we, while treasuring this chapbook of consciousness poetic, romantic, imagistic, mythic in its merger beyond the mundane. We presume that Marjorie and Alex had met in one of those international poetry festivals in Central America. We know Marj, La Boholana, to have attended at least the ones in Medellin in Colombia and Granada in Nicaragua.

They fell in conversation over coffee or wine or both, they exchanged stories of precedents in poetry, such as the Japanese tradition of the five-line, 31-syllable tanka and the renga, the last a chain of poems. The tanrenga that has been made concrete, tangible, visible, audible, and immortal in this accordion of pages we now cherish is a product of that spark between two poets, of two genders and tongues.

Oh and how they establish an accord beyond water and wind, beyond distance and dark and dreams and dawn.

Verse No. 19 is evidently Fleites’ (in English translation): “Every night the man kills the beast / trying to devour him in the dark. / He wakes up soaked with tears. // He offers his cracked heart, / and the sun breaks through dark sky.”

And Verse No. 20 from Evasco responds, with finality: “The weaver uses / the finest threads of energy / to cover the bed. // Warm under her blanket / the lover dreams till dawn.”

This is such a special book, in content and appearance, in form and function. For this we also have to thank Chua Keng Keng for the Cover & Inside Pages Art; Kristian Jeff Agustin for the Calligraphic Art: Amanda Fleites for the Prologue Translation; Beatriz Alvarez Tardio who served as Editorial Consultant and Rosalind Camara as Production Consultant; and Takanori Suzuki and Ambar Fleites for the Poets’ Photos. Oh so proudly, I must say that the book was printed here in the Philippines.

By the by, the book also comes with a special bookmark with a stringed-up jade fish, tiny gold baubles and a trio of red chili peppers. Quite a gift.

Mi amiga para siempre Marjorie Evasco writes in come-hither enticement in her Prologue: “Reader, if you look carefully here, you might just behold their invisible wings catching iridescent light.”

“(T)heir” refers to the tanka, but could also mean the poets, and their global romance of verse. Yes, yes, as reader I beheld those wings. And yes, I caught the iridescence, too. Oh yes how sexy-lovely poetry can be.