Lost in translation?

The 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the Philippines and Germany kicked off last Saturday, Dec. 14, with “An Appreciation and Jubilee Concert” aptly entitled “Songs without Music, Poems without Words,” at the Ethnologisches Museum der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin.

The event was sponsored by the Embassy of the Republic of the Philippines in Berlin, headed by indefatigable Ambassador Maria Cleofe R. Natividad.

After Natividad’s speech thanking the members of the audience (which included ambassadors from various countries that sent financial and other help to the victims of typhoon Haiyan or Yolanda) for helping our country, I gave a speech formally informing the audience of a forthcoming coffee-table book commemorating the anniversary.

Former German Ambassador to the Philippines Clemens von Goetze, now Director General for Africa, Asia, Latin America, Near and Middle East of the German Federal Foreign Office, then gave a speech promising continuing help for the typhoon victims.

Then came the world premiere of Jeffrey Ching’s “Raven Mantra: Meditation on Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven” and performances of his “Kundiman ni Schumann” and “Wesendonck Sonata.”

“Raven Mantra,” as the world-acclaimed composer himself described it in his remarks afterwards, was “unusual.” What the audience saw or heard were these: a man playing on an unplugged electronic keyboard, a singer (Andión Fernández) periodically singing a high note and a low note, a pianist (Kial Nara) not playing the piano but hitting it (and the air) with a violin bow, and a cellist (Matias de Oliveira Pinto) playing not just the strings above but also below the bridge.

I know that there were only about 300 people in the audience and they would be the only ones that will understand the following paragraph, but since the work will certainly be performed again elsewhere, I venture a mini-critique of the work.

The work translates the poem by Poe into modern music. It goes to the very essence of the poem, which is the way it sounds. If you recite the poem, you will notice that the vowels keep repeating, just like those in a mantra (hence, the title of the piece). In the poem, the poet is reading (in modern critical theory, that would be identical to writing) “a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.” In the piece, the man playing a silent keyboard was writing a poem. Why did we not hear the sounds? Because nobody really listens to poetry. Nobody really hears a poem. Readers want to know the meaning of a poem, rather than experience the poem. The man kept shooing away the raven, as in the poem. The raven, characterized by the high note and the echoing low note, was just there, as an affront to our desire for meaning. Poe, remember, says explicitly in the poem that the raven’s word has “little meaning – little relevancy.” In short, what Ching’s work does is to take Poe and interpret him for a modern audience. In today’s world where there is no silence (or if there are words, they come in different languages that merely confuse rather than illuminate), silence is something that we should repeat, like a mantra.

Anyway, the reason I mention the event is something personal. I knew that almost everyone in the audience would be German (except for the ambassadors from other countries, as well as a sprinkling of Filipinos or Filipino-Germans). I knew that I had to speak in German.

I learned German only because it was required in college. I learned to read it enough to understand some physics and some literary criticism, but I did not learn it enough to speak even two sentences spontaneously with any credibility. I decided to poison the well before I plunged into it. (How about that for a mixed metaphor?) I confessed to the audience that I used Google Translate.

I put my entire English speech into Google Translate, and out came something that certainly looked like German to me. I dutifully pronounced all the Ws as Vs, the Vs as Fs, the Ss as Zs, the Zs as TSs, and the Us with the horizontal colon called an umlaut as something between a kiss and a whistle. I got all the laughs I wanted. As Marily Orosa put it in her Facebook account, “it brought the house down.”

Mark Twain said it best: “A person who has not studied German can form no idea of what a perplexing language it is.”

Seriously speaking, though, the German language is the key to prosperity for at least 500 of our nurses, who will be going to German hospitals by the end of 2014. Even while I was in Germany, 4 Filipino nurses arrived to take up their new posts. An additional 12 nurses are going in January. These nurses underwent a strict process conceived by a huge group of Philippine and German government officials, with some prodding from me (ahem), as well as Ambassador Natividad.

The German language will also be crucial in several other cooperative activities that Filipino and German government and private sector individuals and groups are going to be engaged in this coming year. More on the anniversary next time, when I return from freezing weather.

As the textbooks say, “Auf Wiedersehen,” or as Germans say in real life, “Tschüss!”