Q&A with Emmanuel Lacadin

You sequence the poem numerically in three sections to divide up the experience of an Amihan morning. What significance does each section play in conveying your personal experience and progression through these types of days?

The poem offers fragmented glimpses of an Amihan morning from my childhood. Each section serves as a snippet of what felt like key events of a mundane Amihan morning – waking up, having breakfast, taking a bath – in preparation for a school day. The poem reads similar to the progression of such mornings, in a mindlessly mindful manner. I wanted to illustrate how the persona’s attention seems to be so used to the routineness of the acts, but ultimately alert to the small details of the experience. By engaging the senses throughout the poem, Amihan Mornings immerses the reader into the experience, allowing them to fill seeming gaps towards a coherent image.

What about the concept of translatability led you towards the subject of "Amihan Mornings," and how did thinking about translation influence your writing, either stylistically, structurally, or conceptually?

In the Philippines, Amihan refers to the northeast monsoon which brings cool, dry air around December to February. However, I felt like using northeast monsoon as a translation does not fully capture our experience of Amihan. As someone trained in the sciences and its communication, I understand how a purely technical presentation (or scientification) of natural phenomena can feel cold, exclusionary, or even impersonal. Especially since Amihan, along with Habagat (another type of monsoon or trade winds), has been known to us as a seafaring, archipelagic nation for centuries, according to historian Ambeth Ocampo.

As such, instead of summarily using the accepted translation of northeast monsoon, I thought of my slightly chilly mornings as an elementary student getting ready for school during the months of Amihan, in a landlocked town.  This framing guided me in crafting this poem as an attempt to translate Amihan, and as a way of reflecting on the concept of translatability.

Do you believe writing can be used as a tool to help us understand and "translate" our experiences authentically, or is there always necessarily some imperfection or miscommunication?

 I think writing, especially poetically, lends itself to translating our experiences by drawing the attention of the reader to details that will otherwise be overlooked by translating literally. To some extent, translatability relies on impression, as much as it does on expression. To me, that is the power of art and literature, to say what cannot be said plainly – in other words, to adaptively translate.
While I believe that there is no such thing as a perfect translation given the specificities and peculiarities of languages and other media as products of their own cultural histories and milieus, I also believe that attempts to translate are important ways to appeal to a sense of sharedness of experiences while also appreciating their uniqueness.