Marjorie Evasco Pernia is a Filipina poet who writes in two languages: English and CebuanoBinísayâ, which is her mother tongue. She has received several literary awards from the SEA Write(2010), Ani ng Dangal Award(2011) from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts of the Philippines. She is currently on the list of the Emeritus Faculty of literature at De La Salle University and writing as a resident writer since 2019. She has been published extensively in Asia, Europe, and North America and her works have been translated into various Philippine languages and world languages including Spanish, Italian, German, Korean, Japanese, Estonian, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Kannada language
비니샤야어(Binísayâ) : 필리핀의 중앙 비사야 제도의 보홀섬의 모어는 비니사양 볼-아논(Binísayang Bol-anon)이다. 이 언어는 ‘비사얀어(Visayan)’ 혹은 ‘세부아노어(Cebuano)’—이 명칭은 세부섬의 언어를 뜻하는 것으로, 세부시(市)가 중앙 비사야 제도에서 정치적, 경제적, 문화적 중심지라는 사실과 관련되어 있다—의 방언이다. 세부아노-비사얀(Cebuano-Visayan)은 필리핀에서 타갈로그어(Tagalog) 다음으로 큰 민족 언어학적 집단이다. 마닐라와 세부 같은 권력의 중심지에 대한 이러한 저항은 오늘날 비사야스어(Visayas)를 사용하며 활동 중인 작가들 사이에서 나타난다. 그들은 의식적으로 우리의 토착어를 ‘세부아노어’—일반적으로 사용되는 명칭—로 부르길 거부하면서 그것의 참된 명칭이 ‘비사야어’ 혹은 ‘비니사야어’ 혹은 심지어 더 구체적으로 ‘비사양 볼-아논(Bísayang Bol-ánon)’이라고 주장한다.
This is how I desire god on this island
with you today: basic and blue
as the sea that softens our feet with salt
and brings the living wave to our mouths
playing with sounds of a primary language.
“God is blue,” sang the poet Juan Ramon Jimenez,
drunk with desiring, his hair, eyebrows,
eyelashes turned blue as the kingfisher’s wings.
It is this bird that greets us as we come
round the eastern bend of this island;
tells us the hairbreadth boundary between us
is transient in the air, permeable to the blue
of tropic skies and mountain gentian.
Where we sit on this rock covered with seaweeds,
I suddenly feel the blueness embrace us,
this rock, this island, this changed air,
the distance between us and the Self
we have longed to be. A bolt of burning blue
lights in my brain, gives the answer
we’ve pursued this whole day:
seawaves sing it, the kingfisher flies in it,
this island is rooted in it. Desiring
God is transparent blue – the color
which makes our souls visible
